Spacechem

This game goes beyond a regular puzzle game -- it's not for everyone. I don't say that to sound elitist, but as a fair warning. This game isn't your professor layton, or using physics engine, or push this button to open that door type of puzzle game. This is a game of building engines -- a proper engineering design game. Essentially, you're building a circuit where all you can do is set up commands on a 2d space, and have your objects get pulled along on your automated design. If anything collides, or isn't built correctly, the machine stops. It sounds easy, but you'll quickly see just how clever you'll need to be. Linear thinking only gets you so far, and many puzzles will start to require parallel thought where certain nodes will be required for multiple uses. I love puzzles, and always have as a kid... in most games with puzzles, I'd solve through them in minutes. There are puzzles here that took me days to complete, and required significant planning. Many hours tweaking things, and many, many crushing last second failures. Some of these puzzles feel almost like something that you'd work on in a full time job, but have weeks to complete. So just know what you're getting into. While incredibly frustrating at times, it's also incredibly rewarding when you finally get it. There's also a system that compares your solutions with other players' (number of nodes used, and time required for engine to finish) -- but I stopped caring about that when the puzzles themselves bordered on the insane.

You know, puzzle games of this era are kind of toothless. Sure, every once in a while you stumble upon a hard puzzle, but generally you can finish the game in a few days, sometimes even in one sitting. Spacechem doesn't give you an easy victory. Finishing the game is an actual in-game achievement, and unless you're a big coward and spoil the fun by walkthroughs, then it is really something to be proud of. What I really like is that players can choose their own difficulty, and not in the easy/medium/hard kind of way. See, the puzzle doesn't end when you finish it. Your solution is judged on its complexity and speed, and it is compared to solutions other players came up with. You can make do with a clumsy, slow solution, nobody will judge. But sooner or later you'll come back, eager to improve and dominate the charts. This gives you an additional challenge, as well as replayability. Replayability. In a puzzle game. Holy cow. And don't even get me started on how it feels when you come up with an elegant, WORKING solution. You watch the molecules moving around, turning and bonding, everything clicks in the place... it feels good. Really good. Cons? I don't know much about that. Oh yeah, you won't enjoy the story at all, because it is unlocked as you progress, and the progress in this game is very slow, sluggish even. So by the time you get to the next bit of narrative, both suspense and pace are completely dead. The most it can give you is a context to what is happening in the game. Yes, I just criticized a puzzle game for its narrative. Deal with it. I feel it has to be mentioned: Spacechem isn't a game for everybody, in fact it is quite niche. If you are that kind of person who sometimes spends hours thinking about a math problem that just popped up in their head, then get this game immediately, you'll love it to bits. If not, then I'd recommend trying it out regardless, but you're in for a risky purchase. Maybe wait for a discount?

Don't let the name of the game fool you, you don't need to know chemistry to play this game (although it saves ou time checking the periodic table). The games is more about programming two small robots (waldos), ordering them to pick up and carry atoms around in a reactor to create new elements. It starts out pretty simple, but ramps up in difficulty pretty fast; the later worlds are fiendish. Despite being a puzzle-game, there is a fair amount of replayability as you try to make your solution betters. There's always more than one way to solve a puzzle, and the leaderboards give you a graphical representation of how you fare against other players in terms of efficiency of instructions and/or time: Trying to maximize one usually has a negative impact on the other. The only bad thing about the game, is that it really needs a version system for levels, so you can work on and save different solutions opitmized for various results.

This is the game that lead to Infinifactory and Opus Magnum. Start your journey HERE.

Spacechem is very much more puzzle than game. The start is promising. You get introduced to various chemistry concepts and a set of tools and get given various example scenarios. As the game goes on the rate of new introductions slows and you find a some of your solutions don't quite work. By the later stages the difficulty has ramped up and the tools and teaching hasn't kept up. Whether this is deliberate or not the result is that the puzzles are akin to brain teasers - they feel deliberately designed to be obscure. For me the feeling after finishing a mission was more often frustration than pride, having wasted the last fifteen minutes trying slightly different arrangements of symbols to make the timing work well enough to satisfy the requirements on an already functional solution.