7/21/2023 0 Comments Opus magnum twitter![]() ![]() So you’re essentially building machines and then programming them, building and testing your way to your solution. ![]() At the bottom of the screen is a sequencer in which you place simple commands for each component on the board: pick up, put down, move clockwise or counterclockwise, extend, retract, turn, repeat, wait. You command all these mechanical pieces using rules. There are glyphs which bond elements together when they pass over them, and some which transform elements into different ones. There are tracks which transport them across the table. You’ll use arms to pick up and move elements or rotate them in place. You perform these actions by placing your elements and components on a table divided into hexes. It’s your job to combine them from a predefined set of elements and components, transmuting air into salt, quicksilver into higher and higher grades of metal. It might be booze to bolster an elderly soldier’s courage or a ladder to help stage a robbery, but whatever you’re making, it’s a set configuration of elements-air, water, fire and earth-and various types of metal. In each puzzle you’re tasked to produce a specific alchemical product. If you bounced off SpaceChem’s cold abstractness (I did) or felt bamboozled by Shenzhen I/O’s arcane complexity (me too), you might find yourself captivated by this one. But despite Opus Magnum’s fantastical setting, in which you play an alchemist caught between warring Germanic families, it’s probably his most accessible yet. He went on to make games about electronics (Shenzhen I/O), computer chips (TIS-1000), and creating factories for aliens in the first-person Infinifactory. Magnum is probably most similar to his first and best-known, SpaceChem, in which you build chemistry machines. Opus Magnum is the latest in a series of similar machine-making games to which developer Zach ’Zachtronics’ Barth has apparently devoted his creative life. Flexible, intricate, demanding and deeply fulfilling, this has to be one of the very best puzzle games of the year, if not the decade. It’s rare to play a game that provides such intense satisfaction, driven by a perfect balance of clearly defined and self-driven challenge. And by gosh, once you get into this puzzle game about building incredible alchemical machines, you’ll feel the buzz of working great over and over. If I’ve got the Latin right, Opus Magnum means “work great”. ![]() It is an extremely useful feature because it meant I could safely test out new ideas without potentially ruining the work I had already done. Thankfully, you aren’t locked into only one strategy, as Opus Magnum lets you save and duplicate machines so you can play around and experiment with different solutions. So Opus Magnum becomes a game of careful optimization toward each of the tips of that triangle, with different goals requiring completely different designs within the same level. Sometimes, going faster means spending more money, while building small often means moving slowly. Steam Workshop.įrequently, those three qualities are in direct conflict with each other. There are three criteria it keeps track of: How long it takes you to assemble the target product six times, how many hex tiles you take up while doing it, and how much all the machine parts you’ve used cost. There’s no mandatory score target you have to hit, and no goal beyond creating a functioning machine, but that doesn’t mean Opus Magnum doesn’t challenge you. Every puzzle gives you an alchemical product to create and near-infinite freedom to build the machine that creates it. That takes some doing, because there’s no “correct” solution to anything. That mix of science and magic reinforces the idea that anything is possible, but it’s going to take work to figure out how. The machines you build move and shift with satisfying, mechanical clunks that help make the 2D art pop as they operate. ![]()
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