Critical play: Opus Magnum
I wound up pretty crunched for time with the playable demo due today, so I decided to just talk about a puzzle game I’ve been playing recently instead of picking up something new. I was originally thinking of doing Baba is You, but I’m sure a bunch of my classmates are already planning on covering that game, so I went with something else that I’ve been playing on and off lately: Opus Magnum.
Opus Magnum is one of the more popular games developed by Zach Barth, who has a very distinct style of puzzles. In his games, he tends to create open ended systems for the player to build contraptions in, then generate “puzzles” by simply creating an output goal and set of resources to work with. Some have even challenged whether these should be referred to as puzzles, with Mark Brown from the Game Maker’s Toolkit YouTube channel claiming that they represent a new type of “problem solving game.”
So, in each level of Opus Magnum, you are given a set of starting elements and are tasked with building an alchemical machine to transform and combine them into the desired output. In addition to the starting elements, which vary from level to level, players also have several mechanical contraptions such as arms and tracks to move the elements around, which can be programmed to move in sequence. This open-ended style of gameplay gives players the freedom to approach the challenge in a variety of different ways as they build up their own techniques between levels.
Players are even given a choice of how they want to optimize their system, with scores for cost efficiency, space, and speed. Players are shown a histogram of how their contraption compared with other players to incentivize further revisions. With open ended problems, multiple approaches, and optimization, in many ways the game is reminiscent of computer programming.
(It’s no coincidence, then, that one of Zach Barth’s other games is litterally about assembly programming)
