Having finished playing games like Fortresscraft and Factorio, but not being in the mood for puzzle games anymore, I had passed on Opus Magnum for a while now.
But it being on sale piqued my interest. So I went ahead and purchased the game, being slightly wary of the 'puzzliness' I may encounter.
Fortunately, the solutions you create can be inefficient monstrosities if you so choose, or you can make a concerted effort to streamline your machines. This takes the pressure off of the more casual mind that may not be interested in burning up brain cells just to make the perfect mechanism.
Enjoying the game very much! Graphics are nicely done also.
Fun story. great puzzles. Getting to the solutions interesting and its very satisfying to see the final result. I also think the UI looks very stylish. Its a pretty game.
Highly recommend, especially like story with your puzzle games.
To those familiar with Zachtronics, this is essentially exactly what is expected - another excellently crafted design based puzzle game, prettier and more polished than the last. It's fairly approachable and not hugely difficult to just complete (at least for the sort of people who get familiar with Zachtronics games), while having a lot of depth and difficulty in competitive optimization. I'll admit a glaring soft spot for both alchemy and the entire concept of alchemical engineering, which added to the appeal. There's also the surprise bonus of Sigmar's Garden, the marble solitaire game none of us knew we needed.
For those unfamiliar with Zachtronics, the genius here is in the entire concept of the design puzzle game with excellent components. It's pretty in motion, sure, but the core gameplay loop of being given a problem to automate, a set of tools and rules, and complete information on how everything works, then breaking it down and building a solution yourself to fit is what drives the game. This is particularly true when something goes wrong, and you get in a loop of frustration and epiphany as you find and solve your own errors.
Beyond that there's also a surprisingly strong narrative side. The key characters are interesting, their interactions fun, their stories interesting. There's a subtle sense of humor about the game, punctuated with occasional wry hilarity. There's a coherent setting humming quietly in the background, and a good one at that.
This is less of a strict "puzzle" game, more of a game about mechanisms and experimentation. Tightly designed, elegantly presented, Opus Magnum is an excellent way to stretch your brain a bit and have fun in the process. One of its greatest strengths is that it sets a goal, gives you the tools, then gets out of the way. You can be creative, efficient, or somewhere in between, so long as you achieve the desired output with your machine. It's by far my favorite "thinking" game at the moment, precisely because it's built to encourage making your own solutions instead of finding the developer's solution. Highly recommended.
For players who enjoyed Magnum Opus, this is a fine mix of nostalgia and improvements:
The new version sheds the Adobe Flash dependency, and adds a story, and some features found in SpaceChem (e.g. in arms in Magnum Opus could not move on tracks).
Overall, most of the campaign puzzles were fun. It's nice to be able to store separate solutions to a single puzzle, optimizing for cost, speed and size.
At the same time, for a programming-based puzzle game, there are some glaringly obvious missing features:
- The game interface does not offer any sort of loop construct (beyond a simple "repeat all previous instructions"), or conditionals. This poor interface/language design makes many levels far more difficult than they need to be (e.g. players may find themselves copying and pasting blocks of instructions dozens of times in order achieve something that could have been done by adding some sort of equivalent of a for-loop, or just allowing the existing "repeat" instruction to start repeating from a chosen point, rather than the very start of a program.
- Also missing are subroutines or functions. Players will need to re-write the same basic short grab-rotate-release program sometimes more than a dozen times in a single level.
- Multi-armed manipulators seem like a great idea, but they're missing commands to grab/release different arms independently, which severely limits their usefulness.
- Late-game puzzles seem to concentrate on cramming complex machines into impractically-small irregularly-shaped areas, which can make them feel more like work than fun.
All-in-all I'd say this is a good game, but it cries out for an expansion/patch to add a new/longer story campaign and improve the programming language. If and when that happens, it could turn this into a great game.
