The Golden Standard
…of what puzzle games should be. Game manages to make you think throughout its lifespan as each solution is unique. Puzzles are also self-evident and doesn’t devolve into guessing what developers were thinking. Opus Magnum had set a standard for me of what I should expect from a good puzzle.
🔥The Story of Autism🔥
Game follows a small story from an autistic graduate from an Alchemy university. In this world, alchemists are extremely sought after and their numbers are very few. This is caused that in this world number of alchemists are strictly controlled. Only select few can join based on political connections and political loyalty. This is why our hero is completely clueless how to do his craft just before his graduation and nobody in the university had bothered to fail him. Considering how one talented guy can easily revolutionize their entire science of alchemy, alchemists in their world are nothing more than a social class which had monopolized practice that they doesn’t have to compete or even try anymore. There are real life connections to modern art where industry does complete nonsense detached from any objective judgement besides their own and they live on as a function of society, that is, being a money loundering tool for super rich.
Story is like this. It is either painful or you read between the lines. When I said that main protagonist is autistic, I did not said that just for a sake of it. It shows and painfully so in this game. Antanovish has all the trademarks of such a person. Completely socially awkward, obsessive over technicalities, complete lack of understanding of world around him, social aspects for him are alien. You will be forced to read how he gets overly obsessive over a joke or a mundane request. This game does not need a story, but I never seen a story where a main protagonist is a genuine and obvious autist. I had found that to be a novel and quite interesting take.
🕹️Gameplay🕹️
Gameplay is great as you can solve puzzles in four ways. For cost, speed or space. Fourth solution is keeping all four elements down. I only had some minor issues in understanding some concepts later in the game which I had to use trial and error to get hang of. Game also tends to introduce new mechanics in the final chapter when there are few puzzles remaining. You would kinda wish that final missions would be the hardest ones. However, difficulty curve peaks at chapter before that. Then it goes right down until final mission which is the hardest. However, element which I needed to produce was just large and thus it felt more of a tedium rather than a challenge. I just went with just using old good, one molecule at a time method and I ended up at a top with how my solution had ended up.At the end you are shown how well you did according to everyone else. However, graph is showing hell knows what. There is no precise indicator how much sequences or gold you or others spent. How many players completed how well this puzzle. The only variable which you can get from that dreadfully made screen is, at what parameters most people fall at and what is the theoretically best solution for a puzzle at hand. It is very hard to know how much precisely you need to improve or knowing that by improving my solution by 5 gold, my place had risen by 3%.
🌈Elegance🌈
This game seems pretty when shown in gifs. 
This game allows you record your solution to a puzzle in a convenient gif format. It is nice to print out your solutions like this and it plays a pivotal role in making so much Steam community artwork of this game.
However, these are end game product from advanced players. In reality, you will be playing this game and there will be next to none elegance. That is more, you will see your mechanism up close with various levers and parts clipping through each other. Height is very poorly done in this game and there is little beauty in its individual parts. It is a case where the whole is more pretty than sum of its parts. Likewise from gameplay perspective, you will just end up frustrated and automating one atom at a time in some heavily improvized solution. So, below 50 hours of playtime, it is just messy. It gets good after 100 hours, just trust me bro.
🔧Controls🔧
This game is not perfect and the biggest flaw is in its controls. As others had mentioned, it is indeed pretty god awful. There is no way to replicate controls, no way to shift them in time. In a game which is all about controlling various elements through input line, you would think that it should be well done, but it is in fact the weakest element which will result in frustration and tedium. Delay mechanics, reset mechanics. They all could be expressed more clearly in a bar. Some tools for copy, paste would also had helped me a lot. And there are missing commands. A lot of time you would need to do an unique cycle and then your arm should repeat the same action over and over again. However, repeat command would take everything back to the last repeat command. So, it creates such a mess where you have to repeat same command manually by putting 10 same instructions, because game lacks another function where you could mark the start of the repeat instruction. So, there are still areas for this game to improve.One of the finest games
I do consider this to be one of the best Zachtronics games as it is most refined, accessible and enjoyable. Studio loves to border between work/study exercises and an actual puzzle game. They are also formulaic as studio has quite a few games where puzzle consists of moving different elements in a way which would form a new thing. That is a major part of their gaming entries and I believe that Opus Magnum is the best overall game which came out of this developer.
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