SpaceChem

Epic

Nice game. One of my favorite!

The game does not start and there is no explanation or remedy for that XDD

Great puzzle game, challenging and engaging!

kinda tricky and actually makes me think...

I'm wondering why I'm playing this game, is it any different than going to github and submitting a feature?

I go home from my job working as an engineer to play a game where you work as engineer, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Great gameplay, with an inspiring and motivating soundtrack to keep you trudging through real headscratching puzzles. The soundtrack itself is great to play while doing programming or very mentally intensive work.

The fishcake is yummy.

This is a game made for people with massive brains.

This has been an insane challenge but super fair, with minor exceptions*. If you like this sort of thing, this is EXACTLY the sort of thing you'll like.

Thank you, Zachtronics, for making such an amazing game. This is not a Sudoku or Sokoban where there is exactly one perfectly-logical solution to each puzzle. Instead, each player invents their own solutions -- and some can be more efficient than others, in multiple mutually-exclusive ways. As Zach Barth said in old interviews, SpaceChem is an example of "design-based games, which present you with a goal, perfect information, and a set of combinable tools to achieve it... they're essentially asking you to 'invent' a solution to a problem instead of merely 'finding' the solution." This kind of creative puzzle-solving is what I had imagined a STEM PhD program would be like (though it turns out PhDs are not really mostly about this; but that's a whole other story).

And... after a decade and a half, HOLY COW I finally beat it! Without hints**! I know many others have beat it before me, but it's still satisfying to know I've done something SpaceChem's designer Zach Barth has (according to old interviews) never done himself.

WOW has this ever been a long journey. These little molecules and waldos have accompanied me like a white whale through so many life stages. When SpaceChem came out in 2011, I started playing the game and enjoyed it a ton, but I got stuck and took a break. A few years later, I picked it up again as a distraction from grad school, but only reached the 4th or 5th world out of 9 -- before taking another (loooong) break. A decade later, after getting tenure, my treat to myself was to tackle SpaceChem seriously again... and now it's finally done -- with my kids staying up late to cheer as we beat the final boss.

Looking at the Steam-friends leaderboards, I'm also amused to see where my friends apparently quit playing. The quantum-physics PhD tunneled out in the 3rd world; the Twitch data scientist stopped streaming in the 5th; the software engineer and the IT manager suffered packet loss in the 6th. Somehow, I alone persevered to traverse the desolate worlds 7 through 9. Steam says I've spent 60ish hours on the game; I'd guess around 30 hours covered the first 6 worlds and the other 30 hours covered the last 3 worlds. Many of my solutions aren't optimized and beautiful (especially Don't Fear The Reaper; holy crap I made an ugly mess there) -- but they are mine, my own inventions, my hard-fought victories.

Once again, thank you to Zach and Zachtronics.

* The minor exceptions to fairness: (1) Every non-boss level tells you exactly how many molecules you need to make, but the boss-levels don't. It can be orders of magnitude harder to devise a solution that'll use up all molecules equally and produce an unending stream of hits, vs a good-enough solution that's unbalanced but just enough to beat the boss... yet you don't know how many hits each boss will take until you beat it. Most take around 3 hits -- but not all. (2) The game doesn't seem to allow multiple save slots for a level. If I try one solution and it doesn't QUITE work and I want to try another one, I have to get rid of my first solution and start the second... and if the second fails, I can't revert back to the first. I could take a screenshot of an initial solution, then remake it from scratch later if I need to, but aaargh! This is a small but extremely frustrating flaw in the game's interaction design. HOWEVER, I didn't realize until after beating the game that there's a dev-authorized "community edition" beta version which DOES allow multiple save slots per level. Look it up. Argh.

** "I beat it, without hints": Ok, technically, for the very last 2 boss levels I eventually looked up how many hits it takes to defeat each boss. See above -- I think this is unfair imperfect information. Besides, all the earlier bosses die after around 3 hits, but these two didn't die after 3... nor after 4... so I gave in and looked it up, because there's a big difference between "incrementally tweak my initial solution to stretch from 3 hits to 5 or 6 hits" vs "start again from scratch to allow for 10 or 20 or 40 hits." But I didn't look at anyone else's solutions, merely the number of hits required.

10/10

Amazing open ended puzzle game. Compared to other Zachtronics games, I particularly like the interplay between space and actions, since to have an action happen your waldo (the main form of moving around atoms) has to move to the space with the relevant command, and you can only have one command per waldo per tile. This adds an extra dimension that isn't as present in other engineering games.

Similar in nature to Opus Magnum but this game imposes a grid limit which means if your not big brained enough to solve the latest mission, the game ends right there. You have to get your solution to work in the space given to you which is 1 screen and a grid of roughly 20 x 10.

In Opus, you had infinite space to make your solution work so you could always brute force it no matter how thick you are.

Still gets a positive review from me but exactly what I described above happened to me. I am only 60 percent done as I am thick /sadface.

im too dumb for this game

Challenging in the long run, very worth your time for those looking for a puzzle.

Good game but it becomes tedious if you solved 10 puzzles in a row. The game is entertaining but too easy and too predictable. It's a type of game you'll pick up if you are waiting on a bus stop or waiting for your takeout food. Overall, really fun. 7/10

p.s. if you know JavaScript then this would be a good mental exercise for you.

A lot of Zachtronics games are masterfully designed, feel snappy, and just generally feel good to play. Compared to SpaceChem, TIS-100 is a spectacle of graphics and sound. The one word that sums up SpaceChem is 'clunky'. Clunky controls, clunky graphics, clunky audio. I'm sure it challenges one in fun ways, but I just do not enjoy any part of my interaction with this software. Even the menus grate on me.

Legitimately one of the scariest games I have ever played. Please do not attempt without an IQ of over 140 or a degree in an engineering pathway. I think computer engineering and electrical engineering would be most applicable.

way too late I am discovering this but better late than never. Also with the recent hype for factory games and intricate production chains this old puzzle classic seems to be more relevant than ever.

Perfect game if you are crazy and like programming for fun!

I much prefer opus magnum, from the same developers. This game is more crude graphically and does not communicate how to play nearly as well. I feel like the difficulty on this game quickly surpasses Opus magnum, which may or may not be for you. Surely a good head-scratcher and worth to grab it on sale.

Awesome and smart. Until now great progression. Seemingly unlimited late game content as optimisation seems suite limitless. First successful runs net me only in the top 30-70% so there is plenty to improve.

Great game if you like building things and solving puzzles having to do with molecular chemistry.

only went here for fishcake

A true game for engineers at heart (same goes for all zachtronics games), and an odyssey that took me several years of slow progress and many long sleepless nights starting from my high-school years up to university, just tuning away at my horrible un-optimized solutions to see how it'd be possible to beat the level. Because of this i also journeyed through it without any kind of hint.

This puzzle game is all about open-ended puzzles, where you have to craft your own solutions; you get some input molecules, one or more molecules you have to output, and with the help of 2 "waldos" (circles that go around a circuit, triggering commands when they go over them), you have to craft circuits with commands for them so they can achieve the required outputs, you also have to ensure that your reactors can work for a very long time without breaking along the way.

There can be many, many solutions, but getting to any of them in the first place is genuinely hard past the first planet.

This game also keeps histograms of how efficient the solutions of all players were, so there's a bit of an incentive to improve upon your previous solutions.

Suffice to say this was the hardest but especially most satisfying puzzle game i've ever played and completed so far.

80 hours in ... and only now I realized that you change the grab/drop function to grab or drop only.
Was a 10/10 before...but now it is still a 10/10,

Its like if satisfactory was a puzzle game. highly recommend. very underrated. plus, free exclusive tf2 items. pokes my brain really good as a fan of puzzle games.

fun

Zachtronics is insane, I got this one and infiifactory on epic games for free, but its well worth the money at its og price. Challenging, creative, mechanisms easy to understand, its got it all. requires no previous knowledge of anything except your intuition and logic.

One of the best puzzle games, especially for anyone enjoys problem solving, engineering, programming, etc., out there. This is definitely challenging and incredibly rewarding.