Opus Magnum
If all that glisters isn’t gold, we can soon sort that out
THE SCREENSHOT above doesn’t look like much. It’s nice and sharp, sure, and if it matters, we can confirm it was produced by an Nvidia GTX 1070 Ti that’s had its core and memory clocks pushed beyond factory settings. A GPU isn’t even listed in the game’s recommended specs on Steam— you could run it on integrated graphics.
So why is it here? Because it’s everything we want at this time of year, now the scant optimism of January has worn off, and the remaining months lurk ahead like the eyes of alligators caught in a flashlight. Opus Magnum is pure. It’s clean. And once it’s got its claws into you, you’ll spend as much time with it as any Assassin’sCreed or COD.
The premise is simple. As head alchemist at a great house in a steampunk world, it’s up to you to make stuff. Chemical stuff, such as hangover cures, airship fuel, lead into gold. To do this, you use a Transmutation Engine, a system of moving arms and eldritch glyphs that take an input element and change it into the required output. There’s no definitive right way to do it, so eventually you’ll lash together something that works, and unlock the next puzzle.
Simple enough, but that machine you made on the last puzzle could be better; it could be smaller, cost less, or make the same end product in fewer steps. You could even remake it so that it’s more aesthetically pleasing—there’s even a special glyph, which costs nothing, you can use to this end.
Turning lead into gold, it turns out, is easy. Try making airship fuel, which requires four elements to be bonded. Surprise! The most you can bond with a single glyph is three. So why not use piston arms that can change length, or a track that an arm can move up and down to manipulate your emerging molecule into just the right position to have another go on the bonding glyph, and have new elements grafted on?
The trouble comes when you try to visualize what’s going to happen in your mind, but it doesn’t play out that way when you test your eventual machine. At first, we blamed the instruction tiles—you place them along tracks at the bottom of the screen, one track for each arm, rather like the timeline of a video-editing application— because the tile for arm rotate looks rather like the one that pivots your creation, and we were muddling them up.
But no, the game is fine, it applies its smattering of rules—really, there aren’t many—completely fairly and consistently. It’s our brains that are wrong, and by the time the end of the first set of levels approached, we’d trained them to think the way we imagine developer Zach Barth does. Barth, under the name Zachtronics, also made SpaceChem and ShenzhenI/O, so veterans of those titles will know exactly what to expect here.
While it doesn’t look much, there’s an austere beauty in the contraptions you build, and the ability to save them out as animated GIFs is a touch of genius. Leaderboards pit you against friends, and a puzzle editor, combined with Steam Workshop support, guarantees a never-ending supply of brainhurting alchemical combinations. This is a great work indeed.
VERDICT 9
Opus Magnum
TRANSMUTATION Compelling puzzling that runs on anything.
TRANSYLVANIAN A few tiles can be confused; gets really, really hard.
RECOMMENDED SPECS 2.0GHz CPU; 4GB RAM; GPU capable of 1080p.
$20, www.zachtronics.com, ESRB: Not rated