Opus Magnum
Opus Magnum requires you to build different alchemical machines (it got my nomination for the “Most fun with a machine” Steam Award in 2018). Solving a puzzle isn’t difficult (except maybe in some of Fontenelle’s Alchemical Observations), but if you’re like me, you’ll see that your first machine falls short in one or more of the three criteria (cost, speed, compactness) and you won’t proceed until you’ve built a better machine.
So if what you seek is a puzzle game that won’t give you a headache or take too much of your time, Opus Magnum can be that. And if what you seek is a puzzle game that’ll torture your neurons for hours as you strive to optimize your solution—or to find another solution—Opus Magnum can be that, too.
– Real player with 144.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Puzzle Automation Games.
Clever programming puzzler, with a wonderful visual presentation!
An Opus for your brain
In Opus Magnum you must create a product from ingredients and machinery. You’re an alchemist, and the products resemble molecules. You have to make sure that the atoms are in the correct spot, with the correct bindings between them. To do that, you have infinite space, money (for machines) and time. When you finish the product, these values are recorded, and compared to the other players in a graph, and if any of your Steam friends have played the game, their scores are presented as well. If you want a bigger challenge, you can try to perfect one, or all the scores. I myself mostly went for the cheapest solution, however the fastest provides the biggest challenge. When you can see scores after the puzzle is complete, and you see best score, it stimulates to all least equal that score!
– Real player with 76.0 hrs in game
TIS-100
TL;DR: 4/5 - Give it a try, especially if you like optimising and fiddling with code.
I’ve played a fair bit now and, to me, this is one of the best puzzlers I’ve ever played.
A few words about the gameplay in case you wonder: The game consists of 48 levels, each a programming task. Looking at the first screenshot here on Steam should show you the level SEQUENCE COUNTER. In the upper left corner you have your task. The 12 squares that take almost all of the screen are “nodes”, independent CPUs that you can program freely with up to 15 instructions each. The arrows between them are “ports” that allow you to move data between nodes. There are also input and output ports at the top and at the bottom of the screen, respectively. Your program has to stand four tests, three with predefined inputs and one with random values. You can see the given inputs and expected outputs on the left in the screenshot.
– Real player with 656.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Puzzle Simulation Games.
This is my second review on Steam and I felt that this game deserved it. I’ve just completed this game with 100% achievements and I’ve spent more hours on this game than obtaining 100% achievements for Dark Souls 1 & 2, but quite a number of it was probably spent falling asleep. The only thing these games have in common is that you’d be on the verge of giving up but you know they are solvable problems because many before you have done so. I studied electrical engineering and I do a fair bit of coding in my work so the workings of assembly wasn’t entirely foreign to me, and I knew the basics of debugging and using pseudo-code to formulate solutions. I’ve a few tips below:
– Real player with 172.9 hrs in game
EXAPUNKS
The best “Zach-like” game yet. Even if it is by Zach.
Another excellent puzzle game from Zachtronics. If you’ve never played a game like this before, this is an open-ended puzzle game. By “open-ended” I mean there is a problem you are trying to solve, and you are given tools (in this case a programming language for what appears to be tiny robots) to solve it as you choose. You build a solution to the presented problem. You win if the solution works but how you get to a working solution is up to you. There are limits to your freedom both by the language and what the “little robots” can accomplish at one time. The puzzle here revolves around writing little program fragments that unfold through parallelization into pretty impressive results. It is a complete programming language (although a very simple one) and even has a little test-bed where you can make your own creation without a specific goal.
– Real player with 107.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Puzzle Hacking Games.
The first Zachtronic game I found myself being able to complete and with extremely minimal help, more so due to that some puzzles are difficult to understand rather than writing the code itself. Even though the game does get hard, it does an excellent job of preparing you for the difficulty ahead. Even without any programming knowledge, you’ll be able to overcome the challenges this game poses. You can always see the exact end state the game wants you to leave the board in at any time, which serves as an excellent guide in what you’re meant to do.
– Real player with 87.6 hrs in game
7 Billion Humans
This game starts off with a nifty little premise, not terribly unlike that of a genie that has granted all your wishes.
Food for all, energy for all, and a robot workforce to do everyone’s work for them.
And like any story involving a genie granting world changing wishes, there was a catch.
…
Unemployment hit the unprecedented level of 100%.
What did you expect with a robot workforce doing everyone’s work for them?
If this involved a real genie, someone would be wishing for an undo wish. If this were an election year there’d probably be riots. Genies and elections don’t appear to be the solution here, we’re stuck with this problem and need to find a different answer.
– Real player with 365.1 hrs in game
I have not finished, but this game is great.
I played through all of human resource machine, and optimized a lot of the solutions for size and time.
I have written software for over 30 years, mostly paid to do it. And I still found this fun. My software doesn’t result in people walking into shredders when it fails to work, which is a pretty good feature…in a game ;)
I love the added challenge of having to move my workers around the “map” and having to have one set of instructions for all workers. The multiprocessing aspect is great. I have written quite a few deadlocks so far, not on purpose, but it’s a really nice way to visually see deadlocks when multiple people are keeping each other from moving ( yes I know that two people trying to move towards each other will swap.)
– Real player with 52.3 hrs in game
Human Resource Machine
That was a blast! It was quite refreshing to play a less-than-hardcore programming puzzler for once.
You new job is at an old-timey skyscraper. Since computers haven’t been invented yet, the engineers solve problems by running letters and numbers around on tiled floors. Given an inbox full of stuff, your task is to write a small set of instructions that give the bosses exactly what they want, in the precise order they want it.
What the game doesn’t explicitly tell you is that you’re writing some of the simplest useful algorithms in assembly code, such as multiplication, sorting, and alphabetizing, using logic that’s very similar to what you’d use if you were doing it for real. And it’s all presented in a clean, responsive interface and Tomorrow Corporation’s signature creepy cartoon artstyle. It does a wonderful job of presenting the art of writing algorithms as a series of simple, elegant puzzles.
– Real player with 37.1 hrs in game
A small puzzle game based on the basic math understanding and the very basic programming commands which you’ll be using to solve the riddles. Plays quite nice, but gets a bit over-the-head tedious in the long run, thanks to the late game process, where you need to put in motion 50-100 strokes of code (and maybe several hundreds of iterations) to get the work done, thanks to the lack of program commands. But that is only true about the latest stages. At the start, the game is really nice, and it is still quite nice till the end despite the amount of the codework you have to do with so little tools as you get there.
– Real player with 28.0 hrs in game
Block Machine
Block Machine is a difficult yet poorly explained programming puzzle that combines the joy of doing homework for computer science class with the eerie satisfaction of toying around with Redstone in Minecraft.
In Block Machine, you build machines from blocks (who would have guessed!) to solve a variety of programming tasks. Block Machine’s programming model is unique: Blocks are both code and data, and all computation happens in parallel. Von Neumann would have loved this.
15+ Different Block Types to Explore
How many different ways can you find to use the basic arrow blocks? Or maybe you fancy the charged battery blocks? Wrap your head around the different capabilities and use them to build the smallest and fastest Block Machine.
25+ Challenging levels, ranging from HARD to REALLY HARD
Solve difficult programming puzzles in this Turing tarpit. Can you beat the global highscore in any of the three categories?
A Sandbox mode to mess around to your heart’s content
Build that 1000 block machine your dreamt about last night. Or don’t. It’s a sandbox!
Charge!
There is a lot of game here for a very low price. 5 hours in and I have barely managed half the levels. The mechanics are good. Charges move consistently, so often a solution is to create a lucky path rather than using control elements. The challenges are quite varied tasking you in different ways. At times it is frustrating and at times rewarding. The graphics are rather crude and simple, music is meh and the interface is acceptable. No bugs or crashes. Runs fine on Linux. My main problem with these types of games, is I find them too short, but this isn’t an issue here. The developers put in a lot of content. The sub-circuits are well made and fit naturally in the game. Overall, it’s a challenging game that should keep you entertained for quite some time for a pittance.
– Real player with 50.8 hrs in game
Comet 64
I’ve been playing Comet 64 since the closed beta and this game was already wonderful!
It looks just like I have dreamed for a long time, because I’m not a big fan of visual programming. In my opinion visual programming is divorced from reality, and in Comet 64 I finally have to write code by hands, which adds immersivity.
In visual programming I mean games like Human Resource Machine , 7 Billion Humans and some others.
– Real player with 21.6 hrs in game
Alright, high-level: if you’re here, you probably know about Zachtronics and Tomorrow Corporation’s games in the programming genre. This game is good. If you like those, you’ll like this.
The system constraints are novel and challenging.
The puzzles are a good escalation of difficulty and concepts.
The vibe is 100% in line with TIS-100 and MOLEK-SYNTEZ with the retro 80s graphics, including the option to customize the colors to match your favorite system from yesteryear.
The editting UI needs some love though. This can easily be fixed in a couple of patches, but currently it’s struggling compared to the polish I’ve gotten spoiled with from the more recent Zachtronics titles.
– Real player with 19.1 hrs in game
DreamScript
Solve puzzles by reprogramming your environment!
DreamScript provides completely new and immersive way to learn programming concepts.
You will be able to take control of the game logic and change the rules of the game.
Increase your speed and scale, modify object properties, create bugs, spawn stuff - use your creativity!
DreamScript is an easy and fun way to start your journey to become a programmer.
Game is designed for puzzle game fans and anyone interested about programming.
Robo Instructus
I’m a noob/amateur at programming. I have had quite an experience with Python programming especially after following guides/tutorials and reading some books. The programming language syntax in this game is easy to pick up, and it reminds me a lot about Python because Python is also a language with easy to pick up/remember syntax.
This is a pretty fun programming based puzzle game so far, with some unique mechanics about the game such as whenever the robot is instructed to go forward, it will move towards the tile but veering towards its right side. Which makes sense because TRIANGLES.
– Real player with 90.0 hrs in game
This is a hard game, on par with TIS-100, Human Resources Machine 2, and Shenzhen I/O. However, it is hard in a different way from those other games: it poses difficult problems that demand clever algorithms rather than limiting the number of instructions that you can use (TIS-100 and Shenzhen I/O) or having to deal with parallel processing (all three). So you may like this game even if you found the other three frustrating. On the other hand, if you found those games to be at the right level of difficulty, you may find this game too easy. As always, your mileage may vary.
– Real player with 54.4 hrs in game