Welcome to the age of alchemy and automation, you’ve been hired as the alchemist to a nobelman, and been given access to their transmutation engine, which you can configure and automate however you need to achieve your goals. Starting with a set of inputs and programmable arms, and create a set of outputs to complete each puzzle.
On the scale of Zachtronics or Zach-like games, Opus Magnum is one of the easier ones to complete, though there is a wide amount of optimisation options to add additional challenges. You have unlimited space to work with, and unlimited instruction tape, which opens up a lot of options to solve puzzles.
This is the first Zachtronics game I’ve reviewed, so I should explain the entire genre of Zach-likes. These are puzzle games where instead of building puzzles based on figuring out the one specific trick to solve it, you’re given a start point, an end point, and a number of tools to go from one to the other, leading to a significantly more creative style of puzzle solving to traditional puzzles. The genre was if not invented, then at least popularised by Zachtronics, the developers of Opus Magnum and other games like it. All the stages come with an implicit extra challenge: Optimisation.
In Opus Magnum, the 3 optimisation metrics are size, the amount of space that is used on the transmutation engine; time, the amount of cycles it takes between starting the machine and submitting the final output; and cost, which is a measure of how many arms, components, and belts you’ve used. If you have steam friends who have played this game too, you’ll be able to compare your scores with them after completing a puzzle. Do bare in mind though, you won’t be able to optimise for all three at once. In the first puzzle for instance, the cheapest and smallest solutions involves only one arm, but takes a long time to complete, and the fastest solution requires something like 10 arms and 14 rails, which is just silly.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/558990 £15.49
Humble Bundle: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/opus-magnum £15.49
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