Opus Magnum

This might be the most polished Zachtronics game. I'd rank the logic challenges as similar to Spacechem, but the look, feel, and sound of the mechanical arms moving the elements around is somehow more satisflying and addictive. The cycles, cost, and area histograms are well done and (jinx alert) don't seem to have been hacked. The dev could have done one thing to make the game less frustrating. One [i]could[/i] ask for multiple actions per cycle (why can't an arm rotate while sliding along a track) I'll shrug that off. Here is the biggie: Almost all automation tasks consist of an initialization stage followed by a main loop. Initialize the pipeline before you run it. Opus Magnum provides no way to exclude the initialization actions from your loop. Due to this, I waffled over whether to award 5 stars. Satisfying, but it could have been more satisfying.

You can decide for youself how much effort you want to put into each of the missions. Ussualy I am not a fan, but here it really helps.

Brilliant game! The only thing I found that would've been good to have is some voiceacting, which might help with the characters/story interest a bit more.

Great engaging puzzle game with a pretty good story - Zachtronics at its finest!

The puzzles of Opus Magnum are something I've never quite played before. It asks of you to simply solve the puzzle in whatever way you see fit, and the difficulty of the puzzle isn't so much what the game asks of you, but what you ask of yourself. It tickles the engineering side of my brain. Once I've found a solution, I see potential for improving the design that lead me there, and I gradually iterate until I find a solution I'm happy with for the time being. The game smartly gives you multiple metrics to optimise for. It's not too hard to optimise for one metric, but optimising for two or more, that's where the challenge ramps up. I've still a lot of puzzles left, which I'm looking forward to solve and then refine the solutions for.