Fez has got to be one of the most clever games I have played. It is hard to pin down exactly what sort of game this wants to be. It has platforming, yes; but it shows no signs of of wanting to challenge the player with checkpoints, lives or long levels. "Death" in this game serves more to convenience the player than to punish them. "Oh you missed a jump? Go on, try again, you'll get it this time!" it seems to say as it places you right back where you fell from. It has puzzles, but the only mechanical consistency between them is that there are no two which can be solved the same way. "So you decoded the Tetris Block code? Good job! We're not going to be using that from now on though..."

This might come off like I am sarcastically mocking the game, but these are actually the reasons why Fez is so phenomenal. The game has no interest in something as primitive as mechanics, story or level design. It wants to give you a perspective, make you consider problems, information and images in different ways and it achieves this everywhere it tries. No puzzles can be solved in the same way because you must adopt a new line of thinking for each one. The game does not give you a narrative motivation because if you booted it up, you should want to play for the sake of playing. The platforming is forgiving because the game does not care about how well you can press buttons, but how well you can shift your perspective to traverse an area.

Of course, that does not meant the game is always easy to play. There are some problems, such as the awkwardness of moving around the world, the warp gates not really feeling like they help you all that much, the minor visual and mechanical clunkiness you experience and how, although a compelling choice which speaks to the mentality of the creator, the puzzles can be so obscure and abstract that they can become frustrating. However, ultimately, I think I can overlook these grievances given how impressively the game achieves its main objective.

The visuals are fantastic. The 2D pixel graphics are cute and inviting, but seeing the level move from 2D to 3D and back again never gets old. The fact that this mechanic has not been more widely utilised, as the pixel-art style has, speaks to the idea that what Fez has achieved here is not so easily replicated. It is not only visually pleasing, but a technical marvel.

The game concludes with no less of a spectacle. I have not 100% completed this game, but the ending I received was no disappointment. The graphics, colours and vectors it presents boils the interactive medium down to its basic building blocks in order to remind you what actually makes it up. I really think it is a pretty stunning thing to behold, and works so well because of how successfully the game has communicated its "raison d'être" up to this point.

The fact that Fez has no secret achievements is a great way to highlight the game's philosophy. This is exactly the type of game that you would expect that from, but this game has no intentions of hiding anything from you. Its puzzles are not about obfuscation, they are about enlightenment. Every facet of the design of this game is meant to have you think outside the box (some call it a cube). Scanning a QR code was not as prevalent a means to receive information as it is now, over a decade later, but finding some items rely simply on scanning one, it is up to you to know how to do that.

Even if times have changed, Fez holds up, and I would now consider this game a must play. Not only is it a delight in its presentation, but it is a masterpiece in its conception and art in its execution. I strongly recommend this to anyone who wants to see something different.

As far as city builders go, I believe I have only really ever played Cities: Skylines and this game. I do really enjoy them, but I often feel like it is very easy to end up in a doom spiral. Frostpunk, at least for me, is also a lot more difficult than Cities: Skylines, mainly because the number of different resources makes it a lot easier to fall into said doom spiral. I have not played enough of this game to say why this happens, or enough of the other offerings into this genre to truly assess its quality, but one day I do want to come back to this and at least beat every scenario.

As it stands, I have only beaten the first, "A New Home" and come close to beating "Refugees". I really like the way the scenarios offer slight variations which mean you have to adopt an entirely new strategy. In what I have played, I have found that once you find that winning strategy, it almost swings the other way to you having too many resources and making the game far easier, but again, I cannot say if that will always be the case.

I got addicted to this game for a few days, but I think I really oversaturated myself with it, while also expecting the initial scenario to take a bit longer and not have such a final and sudden conclusion right after the storm. I can see there is a lot more to experience here, and from what I have played, I would certainly recommend the game.

I played this game on St. Patrick's Day since the creator, Terry Cavanagh, is a fellow Irishman. I thought if I was going to play a game on the day, it should be an Irish one. I was delighted then, when VVVVVV turned out to be a really great time. I cannot claim that it represents or celebrates Irish culture in any particular way, apart from maybe our long history of high quality exports to other countries; Cavanagh is based in London now, and that is where he developed this game.

Despite the short runtime, the game's fast pace allows it to explore its core mechanic completely. The concept of VVVVVV is that instead of a standard jump, your "jump" button causes gravity to flip, causing the player to fall towards the ceiling or the floor on an alternating basis. Combined with a variety of different environmental modifiers, Cavanagh manages to deliver a truly challenging and creative platformer, without it ever becoming too frustrating or tiring. The game is all about execution, with each room having a fairly obvious route, but requiring specific and precise execution of the controls to make it to the other side. Having the game broken into these rooms, much like in Celeste, which was released some years later, allows for the pace to be maintained and for an endlessly satisfying experience for the player.

The game will not be too difficult for anyone to beat, but the inclusion of 20 optional collectibles provides extra challenge for players who want more. These challenges come in many different forms, such as especially difficult platforming sections or taking advantage of the game's systems to reach previously inaccessible areas. Each feels cleverly designed, and I felt as though the game was goading me into figuring out how to reach each one.

With that said, I only ended up getting seventeen out of twenty. This was because of a particular section towards the end of the game, where I could not stop to try and reach the collectibles I needed again and again. I would have started the whole section again, but it just so happened that the crew member located in this area was the last I needed to rescue, and once I had achieved this I was forced into completing the final section of the game. It is kind of a pity, and I would have appreciated a warning and a chance to explore the map to its fullest before I wrapped up the playthrough.

On that point, I believe that the fill-in map should not have been included in this game. It was undeniably useful, and contributed to the short runtime, but the way the rest of the game evokes retro platformers does not really fit with the map for me. Cavanagh himself said this game was a chance for him to indulge his "retro fetish", which makes me think that this addition was more concession than consideration. The general world is not that hard to explore, so removing the map and simply allowing players to wander around, accepting that they will inevitably get lost would, I believe, provide for a better sense of being lost on an alien world. It would heighten the sense of accomplishment when you finally track down each crew member, and make it more difficult to uncover secrets.

This is a small gripe, really. The main focus of the game is the platforming sections, and this setup allowed Cavanagh to have players remain focused on that while giving them the sense of one game, not one divided into a number of individual levels, selected from a menu. It is a valid compromise, and one I think I can live with.

Finally, I want to mention the art direction in this game. They are truly striking, which is not something I expected. Here Cavanagh really did indulge his "retro fetish", but not without adding some more modern elements such as animated backgrounds which, although subtle, add to the impact of the visuals. Almost every time the room changes the walls are a different colour, not only allowing the player to orient themselves, but almost jolting them awake, screaming at them to pay attention. I loved it and although I would love to see it again, it would be hard to execute outside of a creation specifically designed with it in mind, such as this one.

Overall, I would really recommend VVVVVV to anyone who wants to have a short, but extremely unique platforming experience. The game offers great gameplay and striking visuals which combine to create a comprehensive work that is definitely worth the perseverance required to complete it.

I was very excited to play Max Payne, and it definitely did not disappoint. I've been a big fan of Remedy games since I first played Control, so getting to see where it all began, as well as one of the most iconic games ever, was an enticing proposition.

I know that Remedy are currently working on a remake for these games, but I think it will always be worth playing the originals. This is an opinion I hold about most works of art, even if the remakes/remasters do, in fact, result in the creators original vision being fully realised as they had once dreamed. There will always be value in seeing how that same creator realised their vision within the limitations they were bound by at the time. This game exudes a B-movie vibe which will be hard to recapture in the same way, and the gameplay is pretty much timeless.

I did find the controls could be a little bit awkward, where I would accidently trigger bullet time when I didn't mean to, or dive when I meant to stand upright. The gameplay does not evolve that much over the course of the game, but it does not really need to, either. The tight and interesting level design, well paced access to new weapons and strong core mechanics keep the game fun and engaging for the entire runtime. There is no need for superfluous ability percentage increases here, and Remedy knew it. The game is confident in itself and it shows.

The difficulty is well tuned, but I would have still preferred if the game gave you the option to play on any difficulty right from the start. Having to play once just to unlock a difficulty level which you might find to be more challenging makes it feel like a cheap way to inject replayability. That is not to say that I found the game too easy; there are definitely some challenging sections here, but I would have liked to kick it up a notch at times.

There are also some set pieces to give the player a breather from the action, which I always found to be perfectly timed and well executed. They are always in service of the story, never wasted, and often work to give the player some agency in the narrative, which is much appreciated. I did not expect to see much of this when I discovered the story was delivered through a narrated graphic novel.

The writing in this graphic novel is very entertaining, but more so because of how B-movie it is than because of its outstanding quality. It is definitely the worst of the writing I have seen from Sam Lake so far, and if you are not a fan already, then that could make this either insufferable or so hilarious that it wraps back around to being great. If you have read some of my other reviews, then you will know that I am most definitely a Sam Lake fan, so it was pretty cool to see his first work in all its tarnished glory. There are some banger lines in here, but they lean far further into the nonsense territory than in Remedy's later games where the corny vibe is communicated without the audience scratching their heads. Often the point in Sam Lake's writing is to give off that B-movie vibe, where everything is a little silly, but everyone is in on the joke. Here, I think he had not yet quite perfected the method of walking the line between parody and poor quality.

Even so, I liked it. A good example of what I am talking about is the line "He was trying to buy more sand for his hour glass. I wasn't selling any." That is roughly what you should expect to be hearing for the duration of the game, but trust me when I say that it works. The things that come out of Max Payne's mouth are often so silly that you cannot help but find it kind of endearing.

James McCaffrey also provides probably his worst performance that I have heard from him so far. He sounds incredibly bored the entire time, but given that most of what he was reading was utter nonsense, I cannot really blame him.

Ultimately what we see here is the inception of the character which is finally perfected in Alex Casey in Alan Wake II, and although it would be cool to see a version of Max Payne where the coolness of the gameplay is equalled by the writing, I think part of what has made this character and these games so iconic is the corniness that you expect to find in them. Part of what makes Alex Casey perfect in Alan Wake II is what makes Max Payne imperfect in this game.

But the discussions on the merits of remaking this game are for another day. For now, I can safely say that I would strongly recommend this game, and I very much look forward to playing the sequel sometime soon.

Unfortunately, this one was pretty disappointing for me. The game has been in the back of my mind for a decade, since I first saw it in the documentary Indie Game: The Movie when I was about 12. At the time, it really caught my eye, although admittedly not as much as its "co-star", Fez.

To a certain extent, I still think this game is important; it was one of the earliest major titles of the indie boom of the 2010s, exuding the vibe of the Xbox Live Arcade era to which it was released. Without games like this becoming massively popular on Newgrounds in the early 2010s, drawing the eyes of the major publishers like Microsoft, I do not believe we would have the indie scene that we have today. In some ways that might be better, as now we often refer to games with publishers like Annapurna, as indies, despite them very obviously not being indies, while Baldur's Gate 3, which is actually independently published, is triple-A. It was games like Super Meat Boy that made this change, the blurring of the lines, occur. Unfortunately, despite having a major impact on the industry, I do not believe the game has really earned any more respect than the exact amount it is owed for this impact, however much that might be.

I do not just want to compare this game to Celeste, like so many do, but it is hard not to do that. All I'll say on that front is that if you haven't played either Super Meat Boy or Celeste, I would tell you to play Celeste first. Still, I want to mainly focus on this game as its own thing.

Throughout the experience, I really felt like the game was trying too hard, and failing at what it was trying to do. Over the course of 6 chapters (the 6th only has 6 levels, mind you), you are faced with only a few different mechanics and enemies, but none of these are really that creative, and I felt that they were rarely used to their full potential. I will say that I have only beaten the light world and a couple of the dark missions, so there is the possibility that I'm missing something truly spectacular, but I still don't think that excuses the fact that the main game is so lackluster. None of these missions were that memorable, apart from maybe how frustrating and counter-intuitive they can be.

That was probably my main gripe with the game: it always feels as though it is at odds with itself. There is a massive emphasis on going fast in Super Meat Boy; one of your only abilities is to run, every level is timed, and the leaderboards are 100% based on the times you set. Despite this, the game often forces you to wait for things to happen, such as the timing of temporary platforms being such that you must stand still for a couple of seconds at the start of a level in order to land on the first one. Incredibly, the final level of the game, the boss fight with "Dr. Fetus" (this name, by the way, is a decent example of the poorly aged 2010 edgy/epic randomness humor that was prevalent at the time), is the worst offender for this. The level is set up so that you have no choice but to stand dead still for about 15 seconds before the boundry obstacles begin to move. This is utterly absurd to me, because it is not just a case of me being faster than the devs expected me to be like in earlier levels, but them actually just not letting you move for the first few seconds in the last level of the game.

The level design also leaves something to be desired. It seems to me that any time the devs spotted a playtester pull off a cool move, they made a special point to put an obstacle directly in their path, just so that having fun and theory crafting is not possible to the extent that it really should be in a game like this. The levels all just have a general vibe that the layout was constructed first, then the obstacles were placed in order to make the path more annoying for the player, as opposed to the level being constructed with a particular idea in mind. If I had to guess, I would say that this was done in order to construct this artificial sense of difficulty. The game is not actually that hard, it just often feels more like you are trying to persevere past the difficulties, rather than overcome them through mastery over the mechanics.

I also have to mention that the boss fight with the worms is probably one of the worst boss fights I have ever played. Not only is it badly designed, but it is also super easy to cheese. If you just jump between two of the saw blades at the edge of the map, you can basically just wait for the worms to jump into obstacles by themselves, without needing to do anything. This still takes forever though, because the worms seemingly choose their moves by just picking a number between 1 and 3. Unfortunately, this makes it pretty likely that they pull out the "pop up out of the ground and do nothing" move, once again leaving you to just wait on the game to be ready for you to start interacting with it.

When talking about their inspirations for Super Meat Boy, the developers Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes said the game is "a big throwback to a lot of super hardcore NES classics like Ghosts 'n Goblins, Mega Man, and the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros. 2". But is it really? In my opinion, this is an uninspired attempt at a precision platformer with largely imprecise controls, contextualised in overly-edgy humour which is very of its time, which promises to be extremely difficult, but is actually not that hard to beat and is sometimes even possible to completely cheese. So, no. I do not think this is a throwback, and I don't believe anyone will ever be creating a throwback to it.

When I finished this game, I was kind of left wondering who it is for. The gameplay is very simple and forgiving, but its themes and humour are not childish. The answer is, of course, that this game is for everyone and, to be honest, that is pretty refreshing.

While the gameplay is very simple, that does not prevent it from being very enjoyable. It just makes it accessible. The classic goal of "catching 'em all" is a common gameplay trope for a reason. Tried and true, never failing to deliver. Bugsnax puts its own spin on things, providing creatures based on real world food with adorably creative designs and names. They all behave in unique ways, but are never that hard to catch. It makes for a wonderfully relaxing complesionist experience, the model naturally pushing you towards finding every bug in the game.

However, the gameplay model is not the only thing that pushes you towards this. I would say that the game holds your hand a bit too much. Completing every quest will see you collect the vast majority of the bugs for the NPCs in what are essentially fetch quests. To the game's credit the variety of bugs prevents catching them from becoming overly chorish. Completing an NPC's quest chain will also sometimes result in you taking on a boss, in the form of legendary bugs. These boss battles are creative, but they are not hard to figure out, and I would have preferred if these were something you had to seek out and defeat on your own, without having to wait for an NPC to be ready for you.

The boss battles are also marred by the general lack of any risk in the game. Usually, you want to have to weigh up your options; assess what challenge you are best prepared for and see if you can overcome it. This game offers no such challeneges, but to be clear, that is very intentional. The bugsnax are only really used for feeding the NPCs. The game does not explain the risk in this until the very end (even if it can be guessed pretty easily), and even then, it has no effect anyway. Transforming a villager seems to have no impact apart from making them look goofy. It really takes any risk or tension out of everything you do, which is pretty disappointing. It feels like it should be possible to consume the bugs yourself, granting you some unique abilites based on which ones you eat, with some narrative drawback, maybe (think typhon abilities in Prey, and similar).

Despite this, the game holds up. I personally found the mystery elements of the story satisfying enough to make me want to find out how it cocludes, and the way NPCs ask you to catch certain bugs as part of their quests helps to pace the filling out of your journal. The NPCs themselves are different and interesting, with caracturised personalities making them enjoyable and entertaining to interact with, but I never found myself to be too invested in any of their stories, given their arcs are pretty predicatable. Still, discovering new ways to catch new bugs remains interesting and engaging for the duration of the game, without ever becoming overwhelming. I could have probably done with either a couple more tools or maybe leaving some until later in the game, but there are still plenty of ways to combine the ones you have in ways that often require you to think outside the box (but only just outside it).

The game also contains a number of different levels, each one small but not sparse, styled after various biomes, with the bugs imitating the animals you might expect to find there. It works well, with each biome being notably distinct and unlocking each one allowing the developers to very effectively control your progression through the game. Just note that the game also contains fast travel, but it just doesn't tell you that (or maybe I just missed it). Don't be like me and only realise that 7 hours in. By the time I realised that it was there, I was getting pretty sick of running through each biome again and again, but at the same time, I kind of wish the fast travel wasn't so easy to use. It does feel like a shame to skip travelling through these levels entirely, but I have no suggestion of an alternative in this case.

One final note: I do not really agree with the common assessment of this game that generally goes along the lines of describing it as "psychological horror for kids"; that is going too far, if you ask me. The mystery around bugsnax, combined with the varying levels of caution advised by the NPCs, adds a disturbing air to the creatures, but the game's quests requiring you to feed them to the villagers and having no option to eat them yourself, again removes a large portion of the stakes (portion of the steaks). It is a case of the games narrative not lining up with its mechanics. The in-game discussion and consequences of comsuming the bugs is rarely tackled in a serious way, and the whole vibe aims more towards a group of diverse personalities stranded on an island, and the dangers and events that come with that, rather than how people battle with temptation and consumption. That being said, I don't think that's a bad thing. In fact, I think it's better that the game is not trying to be something it isn't. It adds some depth to the story, but it is not the focus of the game.

Overall, I would recommend Bugsnax, but I could definitely see some people finding it a bit boring. It is incredibly creative, with interesting characters and solid gameplay, but the lack of any real challenge beyond solving some basic puzzles really takes away from the experience. That being said, I do think that Bugsnax nails what it is trying to do perfectly and without the disturbing and unknown nature of the bugs, I think a lot of people would not play this. In the end, there is something to be said for the fact that the game delivers a unique experience and engaging mystery without trying to go beyond its means.

Back when I was in primary school, my school used to be part of the local Christmas fair every year, with students getting the opportunity to set up a stall of some kind. One year, a friend and I set up a stall with a simple concept: pay €2 and try to set the best time on a run of Shaun White Showboarding. My friend's dad transported the console and a widescreen CRT TV to the community hall, the venue for the fair. There, we set up the Wii and the balance board, and started playing ourselves. Beforehand, this seemed to me like it would just be a fun day hanging out with my friend, getting to play on the Wii while at the Christmas fair... but people absolutely loved it. Not only did our stall do well, it made the most money out of any stall there.

This was incredible to me. I don't want to make it sound like it was the 1950s and technology was unheard of, but when you grow up in the Irish countryside during the financial crisis, grownups don't really care about gaming and your classmates, while of course owning a Wii like everyone else in the world did, mainly had their lives revolve around either farming or GAA (look it up if you don't know). I am not kidding when I say that running this stall was one of the key events in my life. It opened my eyes to the fact that anyone can play and enjoy games, they just don't know it.

Of course, not everyone can play and enjoy every game. Today, many games come with an extraordinarily high barrier to entry, as I mentioned in my review of Alan Wake 2. The system requirements are often very high, the cost of entry is enormous (even with services like Game Pass being a thing) and a lot of the time games expect the player to have some sort of prior experience, both to be able to play them and understand what they are trying to do (check out this video for more on that). It is not impossible, but it makes it very difficult for people to get into gaming. The Nintendo Switch is now the console most people gravitate towards when getting into games, which is a brilliant choice. That console is a remarkably creative piece of engineering with some of the best games of the past decade being released on it. But it's not the Wii.

Since the Wii's release in 2006, we have never again come close to that brief glimpse into the utopia that Nintendo summoned from nowhere almost 20 years ago; a world where anyone can play games together whether they have zero experience or have been playing games their whole life. No longer could people roll their eyes at the corporate ads depicting people from all sorts of demographics laughing and playing games together, because they had seen it happen themselves in their own homes. The Nintendo Wii is the most democratic game console we have ever had.

So, what does any of this have to do with Just Dance 3. Well, late last year my housemate and I had some friends over, and we decided to play Just Dance 2014, which we have on the PS4. After some downloading of apps, and syncing with consoles, we played for a bit, before just looking up Rasputin from Just Dance 2 on YouTube and attempting to emulate that ourselves instead. Naturally, this led to a fair bit of lamenting about "the good old days", when Just Dance was good. Back when it was on the Wii. It was at this point my housemate suggested she bring her old Wii to the house, along with the original Just Dance, which I thought sounded like a great idea.

Fast forward to now, and I have just finished getting five stars on every level in Just Dance 3. Whenever we have friends over, Just Dance is usually put on the agenda. Again and again, I have seen what I saw all those years ago at that Christmas fair stall. My favourite instance of this was my own brother, initially reluctant to play, stating that "we have to get Just Dance for the Wii at home", after we had played for just a couple of hours.

Out of the first three games, this is the best one. The gameplay formula is perfected, as is the tech. Long gone are the unfair "shake" moves from the original game, replaced with golden moves which give you a chance to make up points if you can nail a crucial pose. The game includes "Dance Crew" levels, choreographed for four people, alongside the traditional Solo and Duet modes. The ambiguous pictograms from Just Dance 2, which often confused people more than they instructed them, are much improved in this edition, while still requiring you to pay attention to the dancers themselves in order to get the highest points possible. Paying attention to the dancers is very important here, because you need to do a pretty good job at matching the entirety of their moves if you want to beat your opponents, thanks to the excellent tracking.

This tracking has absolutely no right to be as good as it is. When I started playing, I was under the impression that so long as the movements of my right hand matched that of the dancer on screen, I would do pretty well, but the main thing I have learned on the road to five stars is that if you want that perfect score, you better start moving your entire body. You better start actually dancing. Let me remind you that the Wii remote does not have a gyroscope in it. And yet, somehow, an IR sensor bar, placed at whatever level your TV might happen to be at, at whatever angle your room might require you to stand at, combined with an accelerometer and IR sensor in one hand, allows the remote to calculate where it is well enough for the console to judge how well you are dancing. I have seen some people online mention how they thought the tracking on the Wii edition of this game was not great, and while there are definitely a few golden moves which even I think are broken, trust me when I say that you just need to move your feet more, or pay more attention to the transitions between moves, or simply be more on time.

It is remarkable that this accuracy is possible, but this is exactly what makes the Wii so great. Plug in all of the colour coded cables to your TV (RIP AV connections) and the IR sensor bar and you're good to go. This is one of the key things Microsoft was missing in the Kinect (apart from the bad tracking); the plug-and-play concept of the Wii that not only makes it easy to play, but to set up. That is usually the first thing people will experience with your system; if it is an easy process, people will already be looking forward to playing games. No one wants to be adjusting cameras to 15 degrees of the angle of the blah blah blah. Just let them play the damn game.

The dances themselves in the game are mostly really great fun. There are all sorts of genres here, although naturally late 2000s pop is the prevailing source, especially after so many of the classics have been depleted thanks to the two previous entries in the series. Still, the game manages to offer roughly 50 dances, when you count the unique songs that can be unlocked with the stars you get from completing levels. This is the core gameplay loop of Just Dance 3: Play levels, get between 1 and 5 stars based on your performance, these stars are added to your total, unlock new songs, variations and mash-ups as you accumulate more stars. It feels consistently rewarding, and the "Hope you like gold..." message was pretty cool when I finally mastered the game.

I am not going to lie, some of the choreographies are definitely a bit emasculating and others are probably a bit racist, but you need to accept that if you want to play this game. The great thing about Just Dance 3 is that it truly fulfils the mandate of its title. No matter what, whether you are aiming for perfect scores on every title, or dancing with your friends, despite the moves being choreographed, the route to success or just having fun is the same: just dance. I genuinely mean that; trying too hard actually does not work, once again highlighting how good the tracking is.

If it is still somehow unclear, I would very strongly recommend this game to everyone. Get the Wii out of the attic (I know you still have one), pick up this game from wherever you can (this is the best selling third-party Wii game, there are nearly 10 million copies out there), and get playing. I did not think I liked dancing before I played this game, but it reminds you why moving your body to music has been part of human culture since it began. By managing to create a game which simultaneously allows you to learn to dance without restricting your movement, have fun while being competitive and offer a perfectly low skill floor, but a brilliantly attainable skill ceiling, this game can, and should, be played by everyone.

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.

Opus Magnum represents an interesting maturation in the Zachtronics catalogue. The most visually evident aspect of this maturation is that of aesthetic. Gone is the cold pragmatism of most former (and future) Zachlikes, and in its place is an inviting opulence. The green honeycomb background, the shiny metallic parts, and the revitalized alchemical imagery bring forth an evocative veneer that almost succeeds in hiding the fact that you are actually coding in disguise. The GIF maker is an ingenious rework from Infinifactory, resulting in easily sharable clips of people proud of their creations. And it’s hard not to be slightly proud of your contraptions, as they chug and rotate around following a mesmerizing periodic pattern.

This shift to a strongly appealing aesthetic fits inside a bigger push towards more accessibility. Zachtronics’ veterans will almost immediately note the sharp decline in the actual puzzle-solving challenge here. Compared to the multistaged grandeur of late-game Infinifactory or the spartan ruthlessness of TIS-100, Opus Magnum is fairly easy throughout its runtime. Part of this is a direct consequence of flirting with the infinite (or more like machine precision, which is practically infinite). The player has an astonishing amount of solving power at their disposal, unhindered by any form of space or instruction constraints. It becomes more a matter of when, rather than if, one can solve a puzzle. I was certainly disappointed by this realization. One of the core appeals of these games for me is being thrown into the wilderness and being asked to come out alive with the tools provided. This disappointment has subsided over the years for two reasons. The first is acknowledging the benefits of such openness with puzzle design and tool power. Seeing folks who have never played a Zachtronics game before brimming with satisfaction at their solution. Seeing them sharing their design in a beautiful and convenient manner. All this pokes directly at the heart of what makes the act of problem-solving so damn fun! There are four other games before this where I can baptize myself with fire if I so desire…

Regardless, the second reason is a bit more selfish. One that is another consequence of infinite solving power - incredible optimization depth. Now, here’s a confession. I have over 500 hours in this game. I will spend a thousand more over the coming years. I have performed relatively well in high-level tournaments and have a couple of optimization world records. Still, I would only consider myself somewhat competent at this game. So as a warning, this part is gonna get a bit technical and poke at some of the deeper design decisions and dilemmas that one faces as one falls down this rabbit hole.

Much like other Zachtronics games, the gameplay loop essentially boils down to taking provided inputs in the form of atoms, moving them using mechanical arms and tracks, transforming them using glyphs, and finally dropping them as output. The solution goal here is consistency. Your contraption should, ideally, be able to loop infinitely often. After solving the puzzle, the follow-up question is minimizing one of the three provided metrics. Here’s where all that depth in the design process shows up. In Opus Magnum’s case, there’s the cost of the parts (Cost), the speed of the solution (Cycles), and the amount of space a solution takes (Area). Minimizing one of these metrics usually impacts the other two noticeably, but each offers a substantially different way of solving the puzzle. There’s another tier of optimization that exists beyond this primary level, where you try reducing a second metric at your lowest primary metric score.

Primary Cost minimization requires solving the puzzle with the bare minimum number of arms and glyphs. After some experience with the game, the actual process of recognizing the absolutely required glyphs becomes noticeably easy and the number of arms required is almost always one. Some glyphs have bizarre shapes, thus mandating the use of longer arms or tracks, but ultimately it does become “trivial” to realize what minimum cost is. There does exist a silver lining though. Some puzzle inputs and outputs occupy a lot of space, giving enough flexibility to maybe not require extra tracks or glyphs. This realm of “dubious cost”, as the community calls it, is rich with theory and provides some of the hardest optimization challenges in the game. In terms of secondary optimization, you can pick one of Cycles or Area to minimize. Cycles minimization at low cost mostly boils down to smart programming choices, while Area minimization at low cost amounts to smarter rotations and glyph placement.

Primary Area minimization is closely related to Primary Cost minimization since both try to solve the puzzle with as few pieces as possible. Area just requires better packing of the inputs, outputs, glyphs, and arms. Here the solution process boils down to two major steps. The first is figuring out a good packing of everything you need. The second is programming the arms and ensuring you don’t swing the product you are making too much. More nuanced concepts of the game emerge here, such as input suppression (placing an atom on a partially moved input prevents the next input from spawning). Secondary optimization as Cost or Cycles doesn’t radically change the types of solutions one explores for this metric. This two-step process and a consistent level of challenge across all puzzles make me like this metric more than Cost.

Primary Cycles minimization is intense. You construct massive beasts of machines to reduce two important numbers - Latency (the amount of time it takes to make the first output), and Throughput (the average amount of time between two outputs). Surprisingly enough, tricks to minimize Throughput are different from those that minimize Latency, and sometimes they contradict each other. This results in the richest variety of solutions of any metric, by a substantial amount. Secondary optimization in Cost or Area also heavily influence the design process, and some of the harder Cycles records in the game are massive collaborations across numerous top players.

There’s also a fourth primary metric, Instructions. This only shows up in a special class of puzzles called Production puzzles, where you have to solve the puzzle in a constrained space. Production puzzles are a somewhat controversial addition to the game, as they end up as a response to the game’s lack of difficulty. Unfortunately, the space constraints mean that the actual potential for design is noticeably limited. A swing too hard in the opposite direction, in a way.

These primary metrics are among the better-balanced ones in the Zachtronics’ catalogue, but there’s still some criticism to be had. Area and Cost, for instance, mirror each other a little too much. They both turn the game into a fascinating challenge in constraints, but the constraints are somewhat similar. Cycles minimization can often result in massively exploiting the game’s output system. On the one hand, Opus Magnum (usually) asks for 6 outputs to ensure completion of a puzzle. This surprisingly low requirement means that one can essentially “hack” their way into solving the puzzle before the machine crashes one moment later. On the other hand, the actual detection of the output is janky for an entire class of levels (infinite polymers), resulting in wonderfully bizarre solutions there. I’m certainly a fan of these eccentricities, but they do end up going against the spirit of infinitely running engines. Finally, Instructions is relatively uninteresting as a metric. The sheer power of Opus’ tools has resulted in every single campaign level being solved in at most 4 instructions, and Production puzzles are too few and far between to meaningfully challenge this metric.

Now moving back to infinite space and power. One of the other consequences is that of custom metrics, a surprisingly new phenomenon in Zachlikes. The Opus Magnum community is a desperate hungry lot, and we craft numerous rich metrics to explore on our own. The first example is the SUM metric, which is just the sum of the Cost, Cycles, and Area score of a solution. This bizarre metric forces some surprising compromises at a design level, and coincidentally results in some of the most aesthetically-pleasing solutions. Other custom metrics are Height and Width, which look at how much space a solution occupies vertically and horizontally, respectively. The secondary goal in these metrics is that of Cycles optimization. One of the most bizarre custom metrics is that of Overlap. Turns out there’s a glitch in the game that allows multiple glyphs to be placed on top of each other. This allows for astonishingly fast solutions, and optimization here splits the very notion of a single cycle into fragments (i.e. subcycles) that can be influenced. As I said, we’re a desperate hungry lot.

If there’s one major criticism I’d throw at the game, it would be that of the UI. There are four options for screen resolution, resulting in weird compromises in how the game looks on the screen. None of these choices is particularly ideal, and I’ve had to shift between resolutions based on the puzzle itself. Another issue with the UI is the actual programming part. Unlike previous Zachtronics games, which intertwine the process of design and programming, Opus asks you to place objects on a grid and separately code their instructions on a large tape. You have to drag-and-drop instructions onto this tape, which can be sped up using fixed keyboard shortcuts for the instructions. This is bizarrely limiting, as drag-and-drops are slow for how big the tapes for even simple solutions can get, and fixed keyboard shortcuts can be inconvenient to get used to. The worst part is arguably when you want to insert an instruction in the middle of a full tape - you have to drag-or-drop exactly in the middle. There’s no keyboard shortcut for that! This means fixing parts of your solution becomes taxing over time, especially in the case of Cost or Area solutions, which have incredibly long instruction tapes. Cycles solutions don’t escape from this as well. It’s cumbersome to copy large chunks of instructions to reuse, requiring you to drag your mouse over multiple screens while holding the Shift key. Finally, the actual speed of running the solutions is surprisingly slow. Even the Alt-click speedup isn’t sufficient at points. Granted, one can use speedhacks to alleviate this, but this makes Cost and Area solutions painful to deal with overtime. I think a better checkpoint system for instruction locations across a tape would have made navigation and code reuse much more efficient. Ironic really, that a game all about efficiency does have some notable inefficiencies when it comes to actually playing the game. This only really grates on folks who spend far too much time on this game, so maybe it’s on us?

Regardless, Opus Magnum is a pretty cool game. It’s probably the most accessible and aesthetically-pleasing Zachtronics game. Getting into higher-level play has been one of the most satisfying parts of my gaming life in the past three years. Go play it y’all!