Opus Magnum

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!

Sigma's Garden.

The joy is not in solving the puzzle once and moving on to the next (though that is quite satisfying), but in going back and re-solving a puzzle in different ways. Tracking area, cost, and cycles (time) for each encourages this. But there's no real reason to limit yourself to trying to optimize for one of these. You can simply build the mechanism you find most beautiful and satisfying to watch.

Easy to grasp, hard to master, very fun for those with engineer-brain.

You're given a set of optimization problems, you have to optimize contraptions for space/area, cycles count and obviously cost. Most of the problems can be brute forced as quantities are infinite/unbounded.

The real game is about how good you're with optimization but you gotta ask yourself, why spend time on a video game when you could use your optimization skills on industry/corporate jobs?

Satisfying visuals and audio design, freedom of experimentation make this an excellent puzzle game.

( Negative review isn't for the thought above, it's for a particular technical issue that gave me a headache - resolution/UI scaling is broken, at default resolution, the UI is very large and cuts a lot of game space, changing the resolution to something more makes it very small and blurry. Zachtronics has closed and I don't see in near future if this will be fixed. Unfortunate. )

TLDR after the first tutorial you WILL be hooked. Don't attempt to gleam what the game is about from the trailer. Get the game. My only bad comment is that I didn't get this game earlier as I didn't fully understand what it was about from the screenshots and videos.

A complex puzzler. Its only looking for a specific audience, but it does what it does well.

Definitely my favorite Zachtronics game (although the mecha builder in Last Call BBS got very close) and possibly one of the best puzzle games ever made up there with the likes of Portal.

Nice puzzle game.

neat

very good

ogus gambunm

Great puzzles. fun story. good visual programming to see sequencing and steps. Extremely satisfying when getting a solution to work after struggling to find the right pivot/movement/placement.

Very nice puzzle. Quite hard.

Somehow simultaneously relaxing and challenging, this is the ultimate puzzle game. You can spend a few minutes at a time or hours on end building and refining mechanisms, and it's so gratifying to see each creation click perfectly upon completion. I got a little bored during the tutorial, but push through - it gets better and better as you play!

good

Nice little mechanic

enjoyable puzzles, good framing/atmosphere. I didn't enjoy the optimization of each solution as much as other zachtronic games, but solving each puzzle was still sufficiently challenging.

Peak.

I go to work and I automate. I come home and play videogames where I automate. This is my life now.

A relatively simple puzzle idea, but enough variety in the mechanics and design to keep the puzzles interesting and engaging, and certainly challenging. Sometimes I'll beat a puzzle but will keep returning to it again to try and optimize the solution, or try out different approaches. Story is simple but with some cheeky dialogue. For people who enjoy programming and geometry-oriented puzzles, I recommend.

This is a masterclass puzzle game. There's a shallow layer of story and narrative, enough to give context to what you are doing. I appreciate that it's there, but the meat of this game is the engineering of solutions. And that part can be pretty dry. It's not dissimilar to staring at an IDE while you troubleshoot a coding problem. There are no guiderails to follow or rewards to chase. The only win condition is to make the thing. And every time you do, you are presented with metrics that describe how cheap, quick, and compact (or; at times; how expensive, slow, and sprawling) the thing was. And the only point of reference you'll have is how your solution compares to the "leaderboards", or rather, the records achieved by the overall community.

This is, IMO, Opus Magnum's core blessing and curse. It's a curse because the gamer brain is wired to view these things as a typical "leaderboard", where you'll get an instant representation of your self-worth (and in a puzzle game, that usually translates to your intelligence). Almost always this will not reflect favorably upon you, at least not at first. If you're not careful, you can interpret all of this as negative feedback that will cloud your motivation to move forward.

The important thing to keep in mind is that these stats are a personal best, and NOT reflective of the journey any given user had to take to actually reach that best. And I guarantee you, outside of a couple savants that I'm sure exist, nobody hit those records on their first try without loops of (sometimes embarrassing) iteration inbetween, all of which are invisible to you. The other thing is that each metric is tracked separately. You might get the impression that it's possible for a single solution to maximize cost, cycles, and area all at once, when in reality that is usually impossible. The nature of engineering / coding problems is that tradeoffs are a necessity. In most cases, a solution can either be blazingly output-efficient (at the expense of size and cost) or sharply resource-efficient (at the cost of speed).

And that is the where Opus Magnum shines. It goes all-in on that impossible and subjective pursuit of "efficiency". Calling this a puzzle game is sort of a disservice, to itself and prospective players. In a typical puzzle game, solving the puzzle is the reward, and the thing that makes you feel smart. In Opus Magnum, you can solve the problem but still be upset about how you did it. Not because of what Opus Magnum expects from you, but because of what you expect from yourself.

Very rarely is there an exact solution that will be objectively the best in all categories. Most times it is up to you to decide what is worthy of pursuit and what you will derive value and sense of reward from.

In my case, this game scratches the very specific corner of my brain that enjoys refining a snippet of code to be as compact as possible without sacrificing any core functionality. And instead of a dry terminal filled with hundreds of lines of machine language, there's a beautiful visual representation of your work - with components moving in a symphony that was orchestrated by your brain. Your product is a tangible reflection of how your brain works. At times that can be sobering, but other times it's beautiful and revelatory.

This is a game that meets you halfway. It brings tools and problems that are downright excellent, but expects you to give context and meaning to that experience. While that can be alienating, it deserves recognition for the restraint it shows in the sake of executing its vision. Most games cave to the pressure of littering themselves with arbitrary prizes to chase, but this one trusts you to find them for yourself.