Completing Opus Magnum, in terms of getting to the credits roll, is easy. I know that might sound pompous of my own ability to the game, but I'm being very serious, the game is designed for you to make messy brute-forced methods to go through the puzzles if you so desire. The issue is, however, that you're not going to do that. Within the game there's this drive, this scream to optimize, to efficiently solve the problem, to create machinations beyond what is minimally asked of you. This is both a narrative point and a metatextual one, Anataeus is a genius where the fundamentals all come easy to him, but he strives to constantly reach past his limits. He doesn't want to just do what is needed of him he wants to EXCEL. And on top of this there's that leaderboard, that constant reminder that you could work yourself better, lower the cost, contain everything to shorter tapes, etc.. It all feeds into a disgustingly addictive loop.

It's honestly just, my favorite kind of puzzle design. I thought about that a lot, how I really enjoy Opus's intricate meeting between the computer coding aspect and the sad tale of expanding beyond the schoolyard to find that the world is much more complicated and often limiting and frictional. It's simple but very fitting. Most of what I look into with puzzle games is generally something that speaks out at me beyond the A-ha! moments, maybe introduces to me a different way of thinking things through, or encapsulates a lived experience that's interwoven. I think Opus does all of the above to a respect while being infectious to boot. I'm far from done with it either really, because I know doing the whole slew of optional puzzles is going to be cozy comfort for me to just throw on sometimes to wrack my brain for 10-15 minutes. I've also been completely entrenched in Zachtronics now,,, it's only a matter of time till I've played them all. As someone who had Computer Science as a minor degree, mostly not a major because the complexities and conceptual stuff beyond was not my speed, this fills a hole of coding projects that were genuinely fun puzzles to work around.

Think of it this way, imagine if you could code with very clear fundamentals, so clear that the act of debugging was extremely visually and mechanically apparent to you instead of figuring out for hours where your logic error was. And that you don't have to have stack overflow on another tab for all of time. Heaven on earth.

Reviewed on Jun 10, 2022


1 Comment


1 year ago

Wanted to pop in to thank you for this review! This hadn't been on my radar but your words convinced me to pick it up and I absolutely loved it. I'm so excited to check out their other titles now