It’s the gifs which made me fall in love with Opus magnum. Without them it’s reliably good Zach Barth fare—an alchemy-themed option from his assembly line programming puzzle oeuvre where you move different reagents around a board in order to create compounds.
With them it’s a puzzle game which has the capacity to take hours of concentrated, messy tinkering and present it back to you as an elegant, perfectly looping mechanical process.
Here’s how it works. The actual puzzle-solving element of Opus Magnum tasks you with creating a particular compound as a finished product. Compounds look like 2D molecules. For example, face powder is one hex tile of Elemental Earth joined by an alchemical bond to an adjoining hex tile of Neutral Salt.
Getting the Elemental Earth is easy because it’s the basic reagent the level starts you with. Pick that up using one of the mechanical grabber arms and move it. Getting the Neutral Salt requires you to use a grabber arm to pick up a bit of Elemental Earth and pass it over a hex tile called a Glyph of Calcification.
Once you’ve done that you need to drop both the Salt and the Earth in the two adjoining empty hexes which make up a tile called the Glyph of Bonding. This fuses the bits together to create the face powder. After that you pick up the face powder and move it to the product section.
Esta historia es de la edición Holiday 2018 de PC Gamer US Edition.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición Holiday 2018 de PC Gamer US Edition.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
YELLOW CARD
Flawed deckbuilder DUNGEONS AND DEGENERATE GAMBLERS rarely plays a winning hand
GODS AND MONSTERS
AGE OF MYTHOLOGY: RETOLD modernizes a classic RTS with care
SPACED OUT
After a strong first impression, WARHAMMER 40K: SPACE MARINE 2 runs out of steam
SLIDES RULE
Redeeming a hated puzzle mechanic with SLIDER
DINER HARD
Rewriting the rules of horror in ALAN WAKE
"Kay Vess, galactic tomb raider"
Feeling like Lara Croft in STAR WARS OUTLAWS
LETHAL COMPANY
A return to some explosive post-launch patches.
MARVEL: ULTIMATE ALLIANCE
Enter the multiverse of modness.
TRACK GPT
Al's teaching sim racers to improve-what about other games?
FINDING IMMORTALITY
Twenty-five years on, PLANESCAPE: TORMENT is still one of the most talked-about RPGs of all time. This is the story of how it was created as a 'stay-busy' project by a small team at Black Isle Studios