Sure, I could half-heartedly slap together a big and ugly answer to most levels without too much challenge, but that wouldn’t earn me the satisfaction that a finely tuned piece of machinery generates.Īfter completing a level, you are presented with leaderboards based on the three criteria of speed, size, and cost. Through all the testing and refining and retesting, the main thing pushing me to find better solutions was my own genuine desire to do so – a desire created by the very natural way Opus Magnum promotes a sense of competition. Anything You Can Build I Can Build Better It generally didn’t take too much massaging to get a machine to behave how I wanted when it began acting up, but I still found myself wishing these interactions were better explained. Sometimes pieces will repeat their commands while others are still going, but other times empty placeholders will be automatically added to keep each piece in sync. There are some handy keyboard shortcuts that speed up the programming once you get the hang of them, but the command timeline didn’t always behave how I expected it to. Placing and positioning each machine piece is only half of building a working assembly line, with the other half taking the form of programming those pieces to take set actions in perfect harmony with one another – moving, then letting go of an ingredient just as another arm gets ready to grab, and then move it somewhere else.

Despite the relatively straightforward goal of each level, Opus Magnum has a lot of different moving parts I had to learn to control.

Opus magnum refined gold