Opus Magnum
Opus Magnum spins gold from base puzzles.
If I’ve got the Latin right, ‘Opus Magnum’ means ‘Work Great’. And once you get into this puzzle game about building incredible alchemical machines, you’ll feel the buzz of working great over and over. It’s rare to play a game that provides such intense satisfaction, driven by a perfect balance of clearly defined and self-driven challenge. Flexible, intricate, demanding, and fulfilling, this has to be one of the very best puzzle games of the year, if not the decade.
Opus Magnum is the latest in a series of machine-making games to which developer Zach ‘Zachtronics’ Barth has apparently devoted his career. Opus Magnum is probably most similar to his first and best-known, SpaceChem, in which you build chemistry machines. Despite Opus Magnum’s fantastical setting, in which you play an alchemist caught between warring Germanic families, this is probably his most accessible game yet.
In each puzzle you’re tasked to produce a specific alchemical product. It might be beer to bolster an elderly soldier’s courage or a ladder to help stage a robbery, but whatever you’re making, it’s a set configuration of elements—air, water, fire, and earth—and various types of metal. It’s your job to combine them from a predefined set of elements and components, transmuting air into salt, quicksilver into higher and higher grades of metal.
You perform these actions by placing your elements and components on a table divided into hexes. You’ll use arms to pick up and move elements or rotate them in place. There are tracks which transport them across the table. There are glyphs which bond elements together when they pass over them, and some which transform elements into different ones. You command all these mechanical pieces using rules: At the bottom of the screen is a sequencer in which you place simple commands for each component on the board: Pick up, put down, move clockwise or counterclockwise, extend, retract, turn, repeat, wait. Essentially, you’re building machines and then programming them.
The magic to Opus Magnum is that while there are theoretical perfect machines, the space in which you construct your solution is so wide open that you feel like you’re piecing it all together yourself, and the restrictions are entirely common sense. Frustrations usually come from your own lack of skill rather than arbitrary rules, although at a high level the technicalities by which the game times and repeats instructions can be hard to parse.
You complete a puzzle when it can churn out six products to order, and then it’s scored against three criteria: The total cost of all the components you used, the area of the table you used, and how many actions your machine took.
ad infinitum
The ratings are somewhat divergent from one another—a fast machine often costs a lot, for example—so you have to decide for yourself which one you value. It’s a game for tinkerers. Put it this way: I had 12 hours on the clock when I started the second chapter of five; 12 hours of bragging over the early puzzles with my friends, being crushed by their own designs, and trying to come back with something superior. Puzzle games are rarely so competitive, and the pleasure in that is down to how broad your options are.
The fact that Opus Magnum is exquisitely presented, with each arm and component cast in burnished steel and moving with faultless precision just seals its appeal. I could watch my machines’ dances of arms and pistons, patterns of elements slotting perfectly into place, forever. And, naturally, you can generate gifs to share with a click of a button. That simple feeling, of personal pride in a creation, plugs into the very best qualities of not only the puzzle genre but all of creative play. Opus Magnum works great because it motivates you to work great.
Essentially, you’re building machines and programming them