OCTOPTICOM

Octopticom makes an entry into the computer-design puzzle space with a simple twist; thinking in colors. Seeing your creation beaming said colors everywhere offers a seratonin hit to rival actually completing the puzzle.

Only negative is the UX being rough around the edges, though it's negligible once you work out the oddities.

Hits all the Zachlike buttons, and deserves more attention. The UI has some lo-fi retro charm but can be clunky, maybe a remaster could blow up bigger.

Elegante em sua simplicidade, este jogo é um bom passa-tempo de lógica, sendo divertido e educacional ao mesmo tempo. O jogo é um bom exemplo de como dá para fazer coisas legais sem gráficos exuberantes e sem exigir máquinas super potentes. Dá vontade de tentar montar um computador fotônico de verdade! O jogo usa o básico do básico de óptica, e te explica tudo que for necessário. Não há entrelaçamento de fótons, nem ainda Lei de Snell e espelhos/lentes curvos. Ainda assim, explora bastante o conceito de filtros, composição de luz e reflexão.

Uma versão avançada deste jogo, envolvendo componentes ópticos mais diversificados, e até incluindo fenômenos quânticos como a própria polaridade - visível e mensurável macroscopicamente - seria o paraíso CDF. Porém, do jeito que está, não deixa nada a desejar. É desafiador e gotosinho.

Recomendo pra galera cabeça, pra quem curte computação e/ou lógica, e pra galera que quer ficar empolgada com óptica.

In short: OCTOPICOM is an entry-level logic game about processing light signals. The game follows the style of Zachtronics, but is much simpler and shallower. Optional optimization challenges are more demanding and account for more than half of my playtime. I found some enjoyment in the game, but since it's marred by bad UI, controls and design decisions I'm having a hard time recommending OCTOPICON at full price. If you like these kinds of games and can stomach a somewhat rocky user experience it's fine to pick up on sale.

In long: As with many light-based games, gameplay revolves around additive colour mixing. You start with a pre-built emitter for white light, some inputs applying colours and outputs. Using mirrors, colour filters and switches you are tasked with transforming the input into the required output. For how many parts crowd your toolbox, your selection of useful components is surprisingly limited. In the end 2 kinds of transistor-like gates (default open with off-switch, default closed with on-switch) and a delay/storage part will do 98% of the heavy lifting in terms of computational logic.
The game is cycle-based, but their number is set for each level (usually 64) and distances don't matter. This means you can only optimize for area/components used - speed or efficiency are not a thing the game measures. More often than not you are also not providing general solutions (say for randomized inputs), but rather solutions for one single carefully crafted input sequence, even though it typically covers edge cases to make levels more interesting.

In terms of level design and difficulty I'm honestly not too impressed. It took me a grand total of 6.5 hours to solve the game's 42 levels. 16 qualify as tutorial, 16 are fairly easy, and just the last 10 have some moderately advanced challenges. As a veteran of the genre many solutions came quite naturally and immediately to me, usually not even requiring a test run. In fact, much of my initial playtime was spent figuring out the sometimes convoluted rules from their terrible descriptions and the sample outputs, but once you grok those, the solutions were usually easy to implement.
The difficulty curve is very gentle and beating a level always gives you access to the next two (a great way to prevent getting stuck on a single level), making this a good entry-level title into the world of computational logic games. Most importantly, it shares the trademark aspect of having some satisfying and elegant solutions. Discovering a way to dramatically simplify a convoluted solution always feels nice. This is why the (optional, only for achievements) optimiziaton goals for the levels turned this game around for me. After beating the game in 6.5 hours I was a lot more negative on it than after spending another 9 hours optimizing all the levels. Sure, suddenly being space-confined often just boiled down to rearranging spread-out components. But when it forced me to really think about mechanics and to find new and simpler approaches, it added some of the spice and enjoyable magic of iterative design I had been missing so far. Two levels even ended up having some interesting non-obvious conceptual challenges.

The presentation is very lackluster, below being merely functional. This is not even "developer art", it's just straight-up "no art". Menu buttons are coloured rectangles. The components are grey on grey to the point where it inhibits visual clarity and leads to errors. It is hard to tell the orientation of the most common components, switches (black rectangles with 3 tiny nubs) and mirrors (half light, half dark grey). At least you can freely zoom in to fix problems.
Sound effects boil down to 7 electronic beeps. The background music consists of 8 royalty-free tracks. They are not strictly bad, but just way too animated for a logic game. I turned off the music maybe 2 minutes into the game because I couldn't think straight.

The UI and controls are generally poor. Tooltips and level tasks are not very clear and sometimes misleading. Expected outputs are not shown by default, but require clicking a strange "G" button. Some crucial features are never tutorialized at all (like merging beams). Optimization challenges are only shown on the final screen of a level and there is also no indicator whether you've completed them outside of said final screen. There are multiple save slots per level but no in-game way to transfer solutions between them (and thus no way to fork and work iteratively).
There are hotkeys for most things but they are not rebindable and some of them are fairly unintuitive. The mouse wheel rotating components goes the "wrong" way for my taste and there is no way to change it. Every component you place is automatically deselected unless you hold Shift to place multiples, which gets old fast (especially considering RMB to clear your selection is so accessible anyway).
But not everything is bad - there is a good undo/redo feature and I also like that you can manually step through cycles. It took some getting used to, but I ended up liking the box-select feature with CTRL. If only the levels were bigger so you could take full advantage of this feature during rapid prototyping (the emitter being in the center of the map but only shining one way doesn't help). Reading through the patchnotes the game was in a much worse state at release and some user feedback has already taken off some of the edge (apparently it used to be that most levels showed no expected solution and you were stuck trying to interpret the badly-worded instructions), but there is still a lot more polish this game could have used.

On the technical side the best I can say about the game is that it has *very* low resource demands and passable settings. You can separately lower the volumes of sound effects and music. Windowed mode lets you drag the window to the right size, which is then remembered. There's also 2 half-baked simulation settings and a colour-blind mode, which just crudely adds letters to every beam or square of colour.
So far this is not great, but I wouldn't mind it as long as the game was perfectly stable. Unfortunately I once had a glitch where it kept showing deleted components, and twice the game crashed on me (no progress lost, it even saved the move that crashed it). Both problems were related to moving groups of objects.

In conclusion this is a decent title if you can temper your expectations. It provides a weekend afternoon of light puzzling if you don't mind fighting the interface a bit, and some more if you get into the optimiziaton challenges. This is neither a very long, nor a very deep game, and it is presented crudely and poorly to boot. Even for a 2-man studio this is quite rough stuff. Still, given that I ended up having fun finding elegant solutions, at the usual sale discount of -50% the game feels adequately priced to me. If you are having doubts you might want to check out the demo (either here on Steam or from the game's itch.io page where you can also buy a DRM-free version).

I'm not as smart as I thought I was.

This is a great game that is similar to zachtronics games. It's an open-ended logic/programming/optimization puzzle game that will really give your brain a workout.

This is a difficult, but rewarding game. It kept my attention for 5 hours straight without me even realizing it. I'm writing this review at 3am, with intentions to wake up tomorrow and play more. 10/10

A very nice programming game. It doesn't have the polish of a zachtronics game, but delivers on a clean original programming puzzle experience. I was a bit skeptical going in, my experience with 'laser and mirror' puzzle games have been underwhelming. I hope there is a followup at some point, as my remaining levels are running low I am already missing this game.

Beware, if you care about it:
There is no story, just puzzles (this is a plus for me)
I did run into one bug
There is no copy and paste or saving sections of your solutions to be dropped into other levels (at least none that I saw).
The length of the game is not huge if you are reasonably adept at programming puzzles
It may take a bit to get your head around this as a programming game

There is a very nice guide available. I found I rarely had to consult it but it was useful when I did; particularly for getting some of the 'optimized' results.

Pretty awful performance, freezes every time I want to place an object or move it from place. Yes my computer is a potato but hey it can run dota, portal 2, paladins, and rocket league, so it's not THAT bad to not be able to run a puzzle programming game. Also the UI is too simple and lacking (feels like a flash game). If you have an old computer like me, go buy a Zachtronics game instead

Edit 29/1/2022: Went from a Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 to a Intel Core i3-10100F, and from 4gb ram ddr2 to 16gb ram ddr4 3200 mhz, and the game seems to work well now (most likely it's the CPU that caused the problem). The thumb down is staying tho because a game like this shouldn't requiere a pc upgrade, and 40 levels isn't that much. With some quality of life upgrades it could be deserving of a thumb up tho

Would recommend. It has the kind of design that is difficult to make in zachlikes, where the puzzles are challenging but it's possible to make a clean and 'perfect' solution by thinking about the components in a different way.
What I didn't like: the 'infinite loop' concept was a bit unintuitive at first; the music is fine, but the different genres and tonations clash and it feels kind of wrong; I found the UI to be a bit unpolished and some of the buttons ("I" and "G") to have unintuitive meanings. These are nitpicks ofc.

This is a good, straightforward puzzle game if you get it for <= $5

It's OK if you are into these kind of games, but:
* !! Moving multiple items sometimes crashes the game !!
* There is no easy way to tell which levels have OPTIMIZATION challenges and whether they are completed or not. They only way to know is to load the level and complete it. This MUST be visible from level select.
* There is no easy way to duplicate a solution from one slot to another
* Some puzzle targets are poorly explained, such as level 30.
* The "Goal" preview is too inconvenient to use. It should be displayed on hovering "G" button, not replace current output with the goal output on press. It should also be usable while the simulation is running.
* The controls are a bit annoying in general. You can't place anything while simulation is running. I think the simulation should simply be stopped in this case. You cannot area select only with the mouse, like you can on say a computer desktop. Pressing delete or backspace while having items selected doesn't delete them.
* Kinda wish for a feature where simulation would stop when reaching a certain input cell, aka breakpoints

Decent puzzle game, which could be good with a lot of polish. UI is VERY clunky, presentation is bland, and the puzzles are interesting but don't seem to build to anything as of yet. This is more of a 3/5 review than a 4.5/5, so if you can't deal with a heavy dose of jank I'd avoid for the time being, but there is some fun to be had.

Nice Zachlike puzzle game with challenging levels, that alone deserves a recommendation from me.

However, the game UI is just unpolished. I don't mind the "minimalistic" undesigned graphics, but I do care about ease of use. The game lacks a number of convenient operations such as copy/paste, solution diff, and moving the light source instead of shifting everything else. Please consider adding these in an update.

I randomly found this game searching for programming games, because I really love Zachtronics and hacking games, and I LOVE IT. I don't understand why this game is so unknown but I'm gonna recommend it to all my friends x)

-The art is very poor hahah and I like it bc I am also an awful artist xd
-The level design is very good and the difficulty escalates smoothly. In order to solve the levels u have to understand how logic operands (and, or, not, xor, etc) work, and even if u don't have previous knowledge, this game manages to subliminally teach you that.

Great game so far (I'm about halfway through). The levels are interesting and are not simply digital logic or programming. One thing that it needs badly is the ability to move/copy/paste groups of objects. This is especially crucial since one of the objectives is to reduce the amount of area used. Several times I found myself so wrapped up in placement that I forgot the objective.

A couple of other nice-to-haves:
1. The beam splitter should give some indication of the direction of outgoing beams. I know that it is either up/right or down/left but they still threw me off sometimes.
2. The dichromatic mirrors should give some indication of the CMY direction of the reflected beam.

Good problem solving game for Senior Citizens.

The good points are:
1. Structured introduction to components;
2. Fast reaction time is not needed;
3. Mouse control is forgiving for those of us with impaired hands;
4. The fonts and layout are not hard on the eyes;
5. Problems are interesting;
6. There is a challenge level to most problems.

Octopticom is a cautious recommendation from me. This is a game best suited for existing fans of the Zachtronics genre who are willing to overlook some flaws and a lack of polish to find some unique types of puzzles to solve. In a broad sense, you solve puzzles by directing a current of light through 1 to three inputs, manipulating it along the way with several tools to reach a desired output. This is, abstractly, how Zachlike games work, but Octopticom has several unique types of puzzles. I'd classify the levels, excluding the tutorials, into three areas: logic gates, color blending, and delays.

Of those types of puzzles, the delays and logic gates work great. The delays had solutions that made me feel clever, and the logic gates were rewarding and taught me about their real-life principles in computing. It was actually this aspect that convinced me to buy the game. The final 10 puzzles or so are some of the game's best, and it felt like a culmination of all I'd learned.

Unfortunately, there were some aggravating parts of the game. The color-based puzzles, perhaps a third of the game, didn't work for me at all. Their mechanics were very poorly conveyed to the player, and I struggled to understand them for a long time.

[outdated--see edit below] Worse, the game lacks a lot of quality of life features, especially the ability to increment your puzzle step by step. It makes testing very tedious. I had a couples bugs where all my progress on a level was deleted, but nothing took too long to rebuild.


If you'd asked me halfway through the game, I wouldn't have recommended it, but I'm glad I stuck with it. Players considering this game would be wise to consider its flaws. Inexperienced puzzle players, unless they have a background in computing and already understand logic gates, would be better of looking at any Zachtronics game first. Still, there's a good game here, and I look forward to the developer's next title.

Edit: A few months after this review, the developer has put out a patch that addresses a lot of the features I'm talking about, including bug fixes, UI changes, better instructions for all levels, and step and pause functions. Since this addresses almost every problem that I had with the game, I can recommend it much easier to a general audience. Give this game a shot!

While not as thoroughly polished or intricate as other open-ended puzzle games, OCTOPTICOM absolutely nails the concept and gameplay on a fundamental level. At the time of writing I've been playing this game for 150 hours.

From a technical standpoint, the game has a significant number of bugs and crashes and unintuitive moments that have yet to be ironed out. I'd be lying if I said I don't notice them or they don't bother me. The whole game is rather rough around the edges, and there are a number of things that I'd like to see done better.

But the puzzle solving struck me as something special. As an avid player of Zachtronics' games, this scratches the exact same itch in exactly the same way. In many respects, it seems very much like a Flash-era Zachtronics game, like Codex or Konstruktor: simple solid game, needs a little love and polish for the modern era. The only thing standing between Updev and a Zach game is about a decade of experience in the genre, which sounds like a lot until you look at how underpopulated the genre is.

This is arguably the best Zachlike gameplay outside of Zachtronics games themselves.

I came here to scratch the post-Exapunks zachlike itch and was left extremely satisfied. The game starts off quite slow and easy (but ramps up to proper difficulty soon enough) and UX is a bit rough around the edges, but at no point was I feeling frustrated at the game. The puzzles are solid, closer to the end requiring extensive planning of the approach to them. If you're a fan of Zachtronics, you'll like this one.

Octopticom gets a definitive thumbs up from me and I can recommend it without the slightest doubt to all logical puzzle fans. It very much reminded me of Spacechem and other "programming" puzzlers but I found it much easier to get into.

The game is basically about directing a source beam of white light through one or more input modules, which will color the beam according to the color sequence inherent in the input module, and then directing that colored beam into one or more output modules. This sounds blend and it is. However, each level has certain rules according to which you have to modify the colored beam from the input sequence so that it fits the required output sequence. And that's where all the puzzleing fun of this game lies.

You have certain components to modify the beam: Blocks, mirrors, splitters, filters, dichroic mirrors, switches (that let a beam pass depending on the existence of an active control beam), accumulators (carrying an input from one step of the sequence over to the next step), and complementors.

There are 42 levels with increasing difficulty. The first levels are just about learning the basics of applying the components to get a certain output sequence result. Then you have to program logical operators like AND, OR, XOR, NOT. Examples for other levels are writing a white color into the output after a sequence of green-red-green, copy only the cells above the main diagonal of the input sequence to the output sequence, etc. There are some real head scratchers!

On top of that most levels come with an optimization challenge. If you want to beat such challenge you have to position all components in a limited rectangular area which indeed can be quite challenging. It may lead to you having to rethink the entire approach of solving a level.

The only negatives I could find is the controls and the description of the output rules. While the controls do work, I found them to be a bit too limited for debugging purposes. Yet the developer has alreday made some changes upon my suggestions and, all in all, the game is very well playable. As to the rules, they are a little confusing at times and difficult to make sense of. However, my Steam guide to this game is almost complete and there you can find more elaborate explanations on what the desired output should look like.

Finally, the price for this game is not really cheap but considering the gaming value you get it is far from expensive. It took me around 20 hours to completely finish the game including all challenges. And those 20 hours were fun so it's well worth 8.19€!