Secondly, looping is a bit clunky and there is no great way to control how many times instructions will loop, which can be an issue if you’re doing the same thing over and over in the same set of instruction you have to place them all by hand. I only had a few issues with the game first, I don’t enjoy how, by default, a line of commands will not reset itself before looping, this means you always need to add ‘reset’ commands to your mechanisms when you’re testing stuff up and you don’t want them to act weirdly. There’s also a small mini-game about clearing marbles on a board, which is neat. This is more or less always supported by the story, which is engaging enough to feel welcome here. Sometimes you have to turn your elements into salt, sometimes you don’t have elements and need to use a special wheel to create one. Sometimes you’ll need to triple-link things together. The most basic ones link two atoms together (or unlinks them) but in order to create metals, for instance, you need a special glyph that consumes quicksilver to promote metal to a higher tier. The complexity also comes from the glyphs you need to use to solve certain problems. At the end of each puzzle you’ll be scored on the cost of your equipment, the space taken and the number of actions required to produce your results, which is then shown on neat graphs and friend leaderboards. You can do pretty much everything with these functions, but complexity grows from puzzle to puzzle with the amount of things you have to deal with and how you setup your workspace. This all works by programming your mechanisms with a simple ‘language’ comprised of a small number of actions such as “Rotate mechanism left” “extend” “grab” and “move on the positive direction of a track”. In order to do so, you have a few mechanisms that will allow you to grab, rotate and move the pieces of your product around. You have a few reagents and need to move them around a little to transform them into the desired product. The game starts fairly simple with some basic puzzles. The export to gif feature (which allows you to create animated gifs of your solutions) is also genius. It was a ton of fun and I would 100% recommend it to everyone who enjoys puzzles in the slightest. I didn’t get too much into the whole ‘optimization’ thing this time around, but I did beat the game and some of the optional puzzles. At least the Magnum Opus way of programming is much easier to handle than TIS-100, but I'm not a 100% sold on the programming interface.Opus Magnum is a wonderful puzzle game by Zachtronics about creating alchemical products using reagents and tools that you can program. I also am not sure if I prefer the gameplay to SpaceChem for example - the programming there felt more pure and complete. Pretty dumb solution as there are many better ways to show who is speaking. the ones where you see portraits in the middle of screen and then their dialogue appears one-by-one in the same box no matter who is speaking, just the portrait border gets a highlight. Some of it is pretty badly implemented e.g. Also, I kind of like the looks of the game, but I'm not sure if this alchemist story around it is necessary. I only saw Toblix there, maybe I need to refresh thumbs people on Steam. I think the competition aspect of these games can be pretty cool and something motivating to keep working on improving the solutions in the easier end where it's not yet so much work. I bought it and started playing, but I'm getting the feeling that it's going to end up very similar to SpaceChem and TIS-100 where the latter challenges just become more and more involved until it became almost work. The large possibility space means it's totally possible to solve a puzzle using, say, just one arm, or one arm on a track. In Shenzhen I/O optimising for cost usually meant saving maybe one chip, but here the component costs are very granular. Much of the challenge and fun comes from optimising your solutions, and in this game more than any previous I think the three categories (cost, cycles, area) generate really interesting challenges. The essentially unlimited working space means solving a puzzle only really requires logical thinking and some trial and error. Thankfully so far it's closer to Infinifactory in difficulty curve. The gif generator is perfect for this.īefore release I was worried it would play too similar to SpaceChem, which I liked but found impossible beyond a certain point. I have a handful of friends who go completely crazy for each new Zachtronics game, which makes it great fun competing on leaderboards and discussing solutions around release time. I'm really enjoying this (16 hours played in under two days - oops!). Welcome, Kyle Burke! Your beautiful Alcohol Separation puts mine to shame:
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