Opus Magnum is a delightful puzzle and coding game that manages to convince you that you could’ve easily been the next Albert Einstein had you just stuck with your career in science, that is until you look at other people’s solutions and realise you’re nothing more than the next Doctor (not a real doctor) Gillain McKeith. Now there’s a reference. (Also there’ll be a few animated GIFs of my solutions to some of the levels in the game, so be aware, even though you’ll likely come up with your own, better, solutions)

The premise of Opus Magnum (From the Latin “Best Ice Cream”) is a simple one; you are a young and upcoming genius alchemist with ambitions of working for only the finest of noble houses, but it’s not all that its cracked up to be as you’ll find yourself tasked with creating a never ending slew of mundane items. These range from a very sticky glue to the finest of inks for writing a letter. Although, alchemy isn’t quite what you think it to be as you’re not doing titrations or trying to mix reagents together in a variety of flasks and tubes, instead you use great alchemical machines with rotating arms and pistons to combine elements together to create the desired formula and its shape. How hard could it be?

What you get is a complex coding game that involves both an understanding of sequences as well as physical geometry as you command your litany of arms to grab, rotate and spin in time to one another to try and position and create a variety of shapes and combinations of coloured spheres. Unlike a lot of coding games, such as Human Resource Machine, the coding aspect is incredibly simple to wrap one’s head around. With the processes being entirely physical and spatial it’s a lot easier to comprehend what your actions will do and how they’ll interact with one another as it’s not cold hard coding language filled with “Ifs” and “Whens” but instead just simple movement commands. This underlying simplicity allows for every main puzzle to be completeable, even if you have to brute force a solution in a less than efficient manner.

But the thing is, even if you spend 30 minutes to an hour cracking away at a challenge and finally manage to find something that works, even if it’s not elegant or even very good, you still get the satisfaction of completing it and being able to witness this machine you created with so many moving parts that it’s got to be intelligent somewhere in the process. Opus Magnum is a great game for making you feel like you’re doing something incredibly smart, even when you probably aren’t. Just never look at other people’s solutions, ever. From that first shudder of a breakthrough in a challenge you’ve been bumbling through at the start of your day to the last eureka moment of the night, Opus Magnum will constantly provide you, ultimately, with a sense of weird satisfaction that comes from breaking through the latest wall you’ve come across.

This all primarily stems from how simple the game is to actually work. As you place down your mechanical arms, it opens up a new line in your program row and you can place your simple commands one after another in that row. Each command takes the exact same length of time, so maintaining the timing of everything can be a relatively simple process of just counting squares. Then it’s a simple process of just working out how to turn your reagents, constantly spawning alchemical symbols, into the desired product and get it to the export tile. You’ll place simple bonding and conversion tiles along the way so that if two atoms were to sit side by side on a certain array then they join together and now move as one. Explaining everything in words makes the whole process seem infinitely more complex than it actually is and that’s the beauty of Opus Magnum. It’s just a simple and complex game.

So simple that you can work your way through all the challenges, but complex enough to make you feel like you’re a genius. I can’t begin to stress it enough as to how satisfying just tinkering away at some rabbit hole of mechanical madness you’ve begun to spiral down is, as you run test run after test run after test run, slowly working out where every repeated process falls in line and manages to all keep to the rhythm of your slowest process. You see, it’s not quite as simple as make one copy of product, you need to make a system that can then loop, infinitely, and still work and the game itself is incredibly clever as to working out any timing issues that could arise and padding out your command lines. Generally speaking once the last command has been fulfilled the whole thing will begin to repeat again, but maybe you want to try and make things a little more time efficient? If your machine for a problem is split perfectly into two processes then why not try and double up? This is what happened to myself where I then spent another hour tweaking a system so that while the first half of the process acts out, so does the second, then while the second half is being done, the first repeats itself, so when the infinite loop begins to kick in everything is moving all the time. You begin to produce giant meaty blocks of commands that almost exclusively make sense to you and you alone. Heck, you may even spend 20 minutes fiddling away at an attempted solution, only to delete it all and start again.

Opus Magnum is a wonderful puzzle and coding game. Its simple systems allow for even the most challenging of puzzles to be solved in your own way, sure it may not be the best solution, but you wont find yourself having to look up any solutions, as you get lost in coding jargon, it’s all just physical movements and 2 dimensional space, which is a lot easier to get your head around. The only possible gripes that arise come from the tinkering process being a bit tedious at times. If you shift a command near the end of your process around a little bit and want to see how that affects things then you’ll be forced to watch the entire process play out from the beginning. If it didn’t work and you need to change it again, then be prepared to watch it all play out once again. This combined with a lack of numbering on the timeline of the commands can lead to you getting a bit lost as to which command in particular went awry, and having to watch your failing process from scratch repeatedly can become a little tedious.

Otherwise, Opus Magnum is an outstanding game to pick up and just casually work through during your evenings. You’ll rapidly find your desktop littered with gifs of your achievements, from the in game gif creator, and begin to wonder why you gave up the idea of working in science. Was it really because the whole lab scene didn’t live up to your imagination? Was it really getting tired at the sheer bureaucracy of it all? How could that be when plugging away at these magical scientific problems are so magical. Real science isn’t as magical. It’s not as satisfying, and it definitely doesn’t have as many robotic arms.

Also the game doesn’t have any ice creams in it, so the name is very misleading.