Opus Magnum

Probably the most accessible Zachtronics game, whilst still being a great challenge to optimise everything as much as possible. I also really enjoyed the visual style and story in the game.

Beautifully made, so satisfying watching your solution play out, even if it's a slow or inefficient machine

⚙️🔮✨
🤔➡️🛠️➡️🤯
🧪🔥💧💨⚡➕🔄
⏱️📉🎯🤌
💡🙌🧠💥

This game is magical to me. I am bad at it

I accidentally pressed the Button to Resubmit my Machines and It felt like having a Brain Aneurysm. 19/21

Its fun and challenging. Worth the time :)

I love this game so much! Made me feel as if I was very smart! And it's so fulfilling!

Decent and interesting puzzles. Couldn't bring myself to finish since closer to mid/end puzzles became rather bothersome to do. Without any in-game reason to do puzzles elegantly and guides you start just bruteforcing them, which isn't that fun anymore. Still a positive experience overall.

Extremely fun and addictive. The leaderboard histogram really is the key. I'll finish a challenge then go back and try to create a completely different version that minimizes cost, and another that minimizes area, and another that minimizes cycle times. Then I'll see that someone somehow did it in less cycles than me, or cheaper, or in less area, and I'm obsessed to reinvent a solution again to beat it. Also in one attempt where I was trying to minimize area, it felt like I was actually trying to solve my own slide puzzle solution, with my own area constraints forming the puzzle. My only fear is that it will be over too soon.

You program an alchemy machine to produce the wanted output from the available atoms on a hexagonal board. The mechanics are straightforward and grant a lot of freedom to get your creativity going. There is also a little learning curve to it where you learn the alchemy engine and how to optimize it.
I enjoyed it greatly, even going back to all puzzles to create optimal configurations which is it's own 3 challenges for each puzzle again. Really tickles the mind and scratches that good puzzle itch.

fun

great game

like Zachtronics? I hear it's just like all their other games. I haven't played them.

I recently gifted this game to my mom (who does not play video games) and she is currently having a blast wracking her brain against this game's puzzles. Opus Magnum manages to provide a challenge without sacrificing accessibility, and I would recommend it to just about anyone.

A truly satisfying puzzler, with a surprisingly engaging plot and aesthetic. The ruleset is small and easy to understand, but can be combined with almost unlimited complexity. The hex-based tiles, and pivotal(hah) importance of rotations really stretches those spacial-reasoning skills in a lovely way.

It is also Turing complete; how can you go wrong.

Probably one of the best puzzle games I've ever played! It's just really, really satisfying, and, while you're free to build whatever solution you want for each puzzle, the ability to see how you compare to others in terms of speed, space usage, and cost motivates you to continue refining your solutions.

Very fun automato, with a side of solitaire. Fairly trivial to 100% achievements.

Have you wanted to do alchemy, but also play factorio at the same time? Well, this is a game for you. It has pretty good and challenging puzzles, the story is interesting - and as every zachatronics game, there is also a board game built in for when you need a break.

Open-ended puzzles rock, damn

Nothing like any other puzzles game I've seen before. It's impressive how the developer(s?) managed to create a system so flawless, logical and with the perfect dose of complexity to make this game a sort of sandbox experimenting game within an amazing and quite challenging puzzles game.
I would't recommend this game to anyone who doesn't enjoy poking their eyes out over thinking a solution for a puzzle, but if you think you would enjoy that feeling please don't miss this experience.

The game is in a lot of aspects like no any other puzzles games you've seen before, but I'd like to highlight the fact that the system the game presents to you offers so many approaches in order to solve the puzzles, that you will never feel "desolated" or out of options to beat a level you may not know how yo take advantage of your multiple options but you will know that you HAVE those options, and that was at least to me encouraging enough to make me carry on to success.

this very quickly became one of my favorite games - if you like coding and alchemy, i cannot recommend this enough

One of the best logic/ programmatic games I have played. The world doesn't feel bland like the other games in this genre and the story is really good.

probably the all around most accessible and polished of the Zachtronic puzzle genre

It's a very accessible introduction to Zachtronics and programming/automation games in general. There is also an optional campaign of puzzles with a limited play field, for people who end up wanting more challenging puzzles after the main game.

There are only two real complaints I have. First, of the three metrics the game tracks for your solutions - speed, size, and cost - only speed is really that interesting to optimize for, and optimizing for cost in particular is a total slog. Second, the solitaire is not that interesting. Both of these are only minor problems considering they are completely optional parts of the game, which you can simply ignore.

I like the puzzles and the story and the characters.

Reinstalling now and it asked me to review. I remember this game being super fun and visually great, and I never beat like the final level on my old PC so I'm going to play through it again.

Really nice and relaxing if you're into algorithmic puzzles. Solutions can be optimized based on different parameters - there are graphs to compare your solution to the best results of other players and a leaderboard to compete with friends. The storyline turned out to be deep and well-written, which is way more than I expected from a casual puzzle game.

i really enjoy puzzle games that allow steady optimisation like OM. it's been really fun working at the levels and trying to trim down the different metrics in different ways. exactly my type of game, a simple puzzle game that lets you show your improvement as you gain skills. i haven't even finished all the puzzles yet despite my playtime x~x

Fun and accessible regardless of background

Really hard, but probably the best puzzles I've ever seen. I suppose that's what Zachtronics is all about tho ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

A fun puzzle game, it combines somewhat basic programming-like components, and turns those simple ideas, into beautifully crafted puzzles. They can be difficult, but that's what you want put of a puzzle game!

One of the most mind bendingly difficult puzzle games I've ever played. If you like factorio's endless spaghetti and strive for optimization this game is for you. Also the mahjong style mini game is addictive.

oh yeah, it's all coming together

its basically a mission based mini-shapez.io

very satisfying to play, but i am completely baffled by the fact that playing through the game completely only awards 1 out of 5 achievements

3 out of 5 achievements are obtained by winning an unrelated badly designed minigame 100 times.

and the last one is awarded by completing 10 very hard challenge content missions.

i love completionism and this just kills my motivation

played in 2022
struggle
rage quit for two years
come back and beat it
12/7

Good, pretty hard late game.

I love this puzzle of a game. It took me about 3 hours to understand more about the mechanics and now feel ready to really dig in. I'd recommend this to anyone with an interest in alchemy and mechanics!

sigmar's garden go brrr

Best Zachtronics game imo

fun game. has an okay story and some cool minigames but the main draw is the unique and fun puzzles. classic zachtronics

Played it for two hours and spent all my time optimising the first two levels, highly recommend.

Ill continue playing this once midterms are over.

holy peak...

One of the greatest puzzle games of all time. I played tons of "The Codex of Alchemical Engineering" and "The Codex of ALchemical Engineering: Magnum Opus Challenge" (the flash game versions of this) back in the day

There are some aspects of the flash game that I prefer: tracks and unlimited instructions on each arm make just solving a lot of puzzles too easy, and the automatic padding of all instruction sequences to be the same length is kind of annoying

That said, tracks and unlimited instructions really shine in harder puzzles, or if you try to go for a lowest cost challenge. Each puzzle has almost unlimited replay value if you try to minimize cost, cycle etc. I managed to solve Refined Bronze with one fixed length arm and 4 tracks, and I thought that was probably optimal, but it's been done with one fixed arm and no track!

Also, the full version of the game uses a hex grid instead of the square grid from the flash game, which is a big improvement

The production alchemy puzzles are my favorite, because the space constraints make them interesting even if you don't go for an optimized solution. It's also fun to try to do them with only one chamber. I wish there were puzzles with some other mandatory restrictions like limited instructions

The journal also includes 45 more puzzles, which are generally harder than the story puzzles. There is even a new element (quintessence), a new version of sigmar's garden including that element, and some tougher production alchemy puzzles. I really like the out of the box production alchemy puzzles, ie the ones where you just have to disassemble and reassemble the same molecule, or the one where there are no bonders or unbonders

The music is really good, and the story is cute, it's obviously just flavor and I like the journal puzzles more, but I'm glad the story was added

A couple control tips: hold "1" to display "ghost atoms" (where all the molucules were the last time you stopped the simulation), hold "3" and click an instruction to fast forward to it (this is insanely useful), ctrl + click + drag to COPY selected instructions or even parts (you can select multiple things with click + drag, and add to a selection using shift + click (+ drag)), pan by right click + drag (you can also shift + scroll to pan the instruction pane), and finally you can change controls so that the keyboard shortcuts place an instruction on the selected track instead of needing to click too

I like this puzzle game. Has a bit of a factorio flavor because the puzzles are a machine that produces the desired output from different inputs with various transformation in between. I like that each puzzle is ranked based on 3 different metrics of well a puzzle is solved, that is speed, cost and area required. I don't think you can do all very well, especially cost and speed. This is an aspect that should had been incentifised more on factorio. It would had been nice though to have a formula that calculates the total score and rank with that one. I don't like the alchemy theme. I think this would had been better themed as some sort of a machine. I also don't like the in-between puzzles. They are irrelevant and annoying and they disrupt the joy of solving the main focus of puzzles which is the whole point of the game. The last one is in my opinion a big disappointment.

One remark for the all the developers out there. Not judging the script because I've not read one single word pretty much from the beginning. Some us play these games for the puzzles and only the puzzles and don't see value in the script. Please add a button to immediately bypass them. It's an annoying UX when I have to go dialogue by dialogue by clicking.

i dont know what im doing...

One of Zachtronics' best games.

i now have an alchemy addiction

Very nice puzzle game
Took me about 15hours for the main story puzzles.
Its fun and satisfying to see the end of each one

this game is definitely worth the money. this game is about using reagent molecules and converting it to solution molecules and is a novel idea. if you like a good puzzle, this is excellent for you. more people need to know about this game.

Great puzzle game with an equally great art-style and interesting story!

The way you create solutions is very freeform and you can spend hours optimizing a stage even after you've completed it!