Opus Magnum is another quality puzzle game from Zachtronics

Hello Giant Bomb, it's your friendly resident Zachtronics game forum poster. Back again to give a small shout out to the new released Opus Magnum.

If you're familiar with previous Zachtronics games, you should already have a fairly good idea of what this one is like. Open ended puzzles without set solutions with histogram score tables. The 'style' here is quite similar to Shenzhen I/O, but instead of the email chain for the story at the start of the puzzle, it's more just conversations, since we're talking about a more fantasy world with alchemy. The gameplay is somewhat closer to SpaceChem, with commands to move atoms around... or if you're super familiar with Zachtronics games, it's basically the finished game that spawned from the 'Codex of Alchemical Engineering' Flash game that he released a very long time ago.

I've played through about 2/3 of the first chapter (of 5) and so far I'm liking it. I did like SpaceChem a lot and Infinifactory even more... I didn't entirely click with Shenzhen; I'd always say I liked my programming simulations a little less literal, which is why I also didn't get around to trying TIS-100. But I'm definitely looking forward to playing around with optimisations and whatever crazy molecules I end up having to make.

The game is available now on Steam, technically in Early Access but much like Infinifactory's early access, it's very close to a fully polished game right now.

I started playing this last night and it's fantastic. At this point i will play absolutely anything Zachtronics puts out. The mix of logic puzzle and automated factory like Spacechem is pure gaming crack for me. I'm curious to see how incredibly difficult it gets at the end since i made it close to finishing Spacechem but got completely overwhelmed and moved on to other things.

This might be my favorite zachlike yet. Loved all of them so far (have yet to play infinifactory), but the polish and reasonableness of the difficulty curve in Opus Magnum are really good. Also, can we talk that they designed an original solitaire abstract board game AS AN ASIDE to the game?! Really solid game.

Just an update. As good as this game is in terms of mechanics and the first half of the puzzles, it kinda runs out of steam in the second half. There isn't much effort to tie in the dialogue to most of the puzzles and the difficulty curve take an astounding hike with a whole new mechanism being introduced on the second half of the last chapter! There's much to love in this game, but the ending made me feel little bit cheated.

If you were to recommend one of these games which would it be? That video intrigued me!

I just finished the game up and thought it turned out pretty great, barring a few nitpicks. For the most part the dialogue did a good job contextualizing each puzzle up until about the last chapter. The puzzles themselves had that great feeling of starting unsure with how to solve it until you broke it down and slowly worked through each part. The main element i missed from Spacechem was the general structure of sending batches of elements into different factories as a multi-step solution. Here, the solution usually involves a couple small steps before you reach the proper output. Feels strange beating a Zachtronics game so quick but i'm not complaining.