Opus Magnum

this is a fun and beautiful game. The puzzles are well balanced and get more difficult as the game goes on, without frustrating the player to a level where they would want to give up. The challenge lies in making your engines more and more efficient. Hours of my life that I will never get back, but that were well spent.

This is a very cerebral game that feels like a really fun version of computer programming. A+ imho

This game is a terrible showcase of a puzzle game built off of an excellent core engine. There are 6 chapters, and I would roughly describe the experience going through the chapters as follows:

Chapter 1: literally a tutorial
Chapter 2: not literally tutorial, but you finish learning how to play here
Chapters 3-5: With one minor exception, no new ideas are introduced and the player is confronted with a homework assignment list of rote and simple programming exercises. They grow increasingly repulsive to manipulate as the complexity increases, but not more challenging or interesting.
Chapter 6: An excellent new idea is introduced in the post game, but the second half of it again grows into rote, mechanical tedium with no new ideas added. A big theme for this game seems to be "the same process works on every level, it will just take longer to reach completion".

Given that it really is one process that solves every single level, I hesitate to call it a "puzzle" game. It plays more like a unit from a math textbook where you learn the main technique of the unit and then apply it to a bunch of problems to prove mastery. The two ideas that make for some puzzles that require some innovating are infinite products and limited space in chapter 6 , but even these two twists are ruined through increasingly tedious repetition.

Now I know this all sounds very negative. Why do I recommend this game, you might ask? Despite its failings as a puzzle game, Opus Magnum is still worth playing:

* as a programming game/ engineering game/ nerd sniping game
* as long as you have self restraint and set reasonable goals; you can turn a lot of levels from rote work into worthwhile and fun puzzles if you try to optimize them (the game presents multiple metrics you can try to optimize including leaderboards of your friends list). Be wary as sometimes the effect of this is to make the level more tedious and no more fun, so pick and choose carefully.
* to generate those very cool gifs of your solution to each level, and be able to compare them to gifs produced by others and shared online

Although I feel that the immense potential this game had was squandered, it is still worth playing for a lot of people.

it was very good.

Great puzzles, satisfying to watch your creations. Great controls and UI allow you to focus on the task at hand. Highly recommended

One of the best puzzle games I've ever played

slaps

Good puzzler with room for creativity in the solutions that gets the brain flowing. Have come back to this game after a few years and my solutions to the earlier levels are still saved, so it's fascinating to see how differently my brain is working compared to my solutions back then.

they should add a level where you synthesize tylenol for the headache this game gives you

Fantastic game.
Breaks your brain alright... but that's what it is all about.
(Plus seeing all the cool machines do work is pretty.)

great puzzle game with a lot of room for creativity in how you solve problems. Watching the finished contraptions work is so satisfying. I also enjoy the overall presentation from the UI to the art style

orb

Pondering orbs

Good puzzle game. I like that any working solution is fine and you only have to optimize if you really want to (which I do, because it's fun)

Good puzzler. Has a fun story plot line in parallel.

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