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Comment by thethirdone | Hacker News Reader

I would recommend Opus Magnum over TIS-100 even for people on this site. Its the result of the Zachatronics formula having time to grow after SpaceChem.

The main reason I personally prefer Opus Magnum is that solving the levels is easy, but optimizing is challenging and rewarding. TIS-100 on the other hand has a higher difficulty to initially solve the puzzles and optimization becomes a little bit of a guessing game. Also having only 3 saved solutions per level makes it hard to optimize without losing past solutions.

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Personally, I found Opus Magnum far too easy. In TIS-100, the constraints are brutal, and I often made multiple attempts before I was successful. In Opus Magnum, I finished every puzzle on my first try. You have almost no constraints. While optimizing is still a challenge, it felt much less rewarding to me. I feel no compulsion to return to OM after finishing the main campaign, but I return to TIS-100 every few months or so to mess around with the harder puzzles.

The 3 saved puzzles is a bit annoying, but you can always backup the puzzle files since they're just text.

> In Opus Magnum, I finished every puzzle on my first try.

I never was close to failing to finish a puzzle in OM. It was just a matter of how poor my solution performed whatever metric I chose to optimize first. The puzzles at the end of the campaign had me "give up" and settle for an ugly slow solution though.

> I feel no compulsion to return to OM after finishing the main campaign

If you haven't tried the Journal puzzles in OM, I would recommend you give them a shot. Many of them are in confined spaces rather than an infinite plane. I have yet to find a puzzle as hard as the ones in the TIS-NET directory, but they are a step up from the rest of the OM puzzles in terms of difficulty.

That was by design in Opus Magnum. The game is still brutally hard by sticking to the (self-imposed) constraints, but it wants to open up to a much broader audience. Celeste follows the same designed approach to difficulty.

I find the OM approach to be much more fun when you have friends to compete with - "Making a solution is easy" opens it up to a lot more people, but "Making a GOOD solution is hard" makes it great for competitive play.

(Or even without friends, like me, I just refused to proceed to the next level until I was in the global top 1% for the current level :P)

SpaceChem is like this too. Even I could beat almost all the levels. And then I watch this tournament on YouTube and remember that some people are Flippin geniuses.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0PcDuxlam1bDnEfuT15R... (skip to "Week 1 Results" and watch the rest of thr Playlist. It's fascinating stuff. Seriously. Watch.)

I haven't played completely through SpaceChem so I don't actually know how hard it gets.

I lost my save for the game and the UI is frustrating enough I don't want to slog through the early levels when I haven't optimized the newer Zachatronics games to my satisfaction.

What I love about Opus Magnum is how cool the solutions look. Optimized assembly code can be satisfying to write, but it'll never have the visual appeal of a tightly-designed alchemical machine.

I second that. I do like tis-100 as much or more, but the visuals in opus magnum are mesmerizing.

And they totally know this, going so far as to offer an 'export to gif' option at the end of the puzzle.

A matter of taste, probably. I love every other game by Zachtronics except Opus Magnum. With TIS-100 the clear favorite.

Somehow the highly geometrical puzzles don't give me a feeling of achievement. They're not very interesting but do become quite difficult towards the end. But of course many other people just love them.

I find myself somewhat bothered by the totally bogus chemistry in the opus magnum, and spacechem. If they could get the chemistry aleast sound believable it would be more fun.

It’s not chemistry. It’s alchemy.

Video game cartoon alchemy, but still: not video game cartoon chemistry. There is a difference.

Yes I thought spacechem was about chemistry not alchemy.

That works for Opus Magnum, but SpaceChem has a very clear sci-fi presentation to it, so it's confusing.

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