Opus magnum

Now in early access, this game is like an arcane version of Spacechem and by the same people (Zachtronics).

Notch was waxing lyrical about it on twitter, although he might feel guilty that he essentially stole the idea for minecraft from the same company (and is now a billionaire, kek).

Other urls found in this thread:

zachtronics.com/the-codex-of-alchemical-engineering/
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

shills are up early today?

Totally solid game but I definitely preferred his other four major releases. I have a suspicion we'll be seeing another release from them in the not-too-distant future, since TIS-100 and Infinifactory were released pretty close to each other. Zach gave a talk earlier this year and briefly mentioned a game they were working on, and it didn't sound like Opus Magnum to me.

I'm no shill. It looks interesting but might be a bit too samey compared to Spacechem. I'd appreciate an user's feedback on the game if they've tried it and Spacechem

Have you tried Shenzhen I/O? I'm curious how that game plays but can't find many reviews for it

I've completed them both, I thought SpaceChem was better.

SpaceChem is harder, for one thing, which might be one reason Opus Magnum was made to be easier, I'm sure Zachtronics is getting tired of less than 1% of players completing their games. The pace of these games to me always plays out like this: the first puzzles take about 10 minutes apiece to complete, eventually the intermediate puzzles take up to an hour to complete, and the endgame puzzles could take several hours or even several days to complete. Opus Magnum is like that, but without the last part, and barely with the middle part. I thought maybe the difficult puzzles were hiding in the Journal of Alchemical Engineering, but I had all five of the ones currently available there completed in one sitting, same afternoon I finished Chapter V. Who knows, maybe other players will submit more interesting puzzles for the bonus campaign.

If I had to pin down what bugs me about the game mechanically, it would probably be these two things:
1) execution is ENTIRELY automated, there is no conditional execution at all. That's fucking weird, too, because I would have thought conditional execution was a staple of these games, and the sensors are one of the earliest things you unlock in SpaceChem and Infinifactory.
2) parts automatically synchronize for you, no matter what. I have never once made a machine in this game and then had it break when it started moving past the first product, I don't think it's possible.

Oh yeah, Shenzhen is fucking great. I beat it when it was still in EA so I haven't tried the Avalon City bonus campaign yet, though. I'd probably recommend playing TIS-100 first, they're very similar.

It's really good but it's basically TIS-100 combined with the factory planning of spacechem.
The difficulty also ramps up much faster than spacechem/infinifactory so unless you're good at programing you might run into a wall pretty early.

Which of these games should I start with? Spacechem?

Yep, start with SpaceChem, even if you end up not finishing it. It has a pretty gradual difficulty curve and it's overall a good introduction to this type of game.

One of my favourite things in their games is being able to export gifs.

Zachtronics are one of the few devs that use early access properly for testing on different hardware and fixing bugs. Not sitting in limbo with a half complete game for 4 years hoping everyone forgets.

Spacechem if you want assembling things, Shenzhen I/O if you want pseudo assembly/hardware design, Infinifactory if you something a bit easier.