Butterknife wrote: ↑Sun Oct 22, 2017 12:35 pm
Does this game (and the other games from this developer) have some kind of metagame? Or is it really just a series of puzzles? Does doing well on a puzzle have any meaning outside of a high score?
Oops, I guess no one ever answered this. I don't have Opus Magnum yet (but I'm leaning that way). In the previous games there was indeed an overall story that gave some kind of rational for the series of puzzles you face. Would I call it a metagame? I don't know. You have to complete each puzzle to unlock the next, but I guess the higher level story was just to give a nice continuity to the sequence.
Doing well on a puzzle, like having a quicker execution time or using fewer parts, didn't have any affect on the overall story, but you can compare your solution to everyone else and see if folks were more clever than you (this was usually the case for me). Sometimes this motivated me to go back and tweak my solution, but usually not as I'm one of those people who just was happy everything ran.
My favorite game of the Zachtronics line is Infinifactory. Unlike SpaceChem you had pretty much unlimited space to work in, although not always. And it was three dimensional which appealed to me. And you were producing a product which made what you were doing make sense. My least favorite game was TIS-100 because it was so abstracted and I feel like I was just coming up with the solution they wanted; there were other solutions of course, but it was damn hard to fit them in the limited space.
The reviews for Opus Magnum are "Overwhelmingly Positive" and what I'm liking in the reviews are mentions that unlike SpaceChem you have unlimited work space and overall you are free to create your own solution. I didn't remember to get it when it was on sale during the week after the release of the non-Early Access version, but I'm thinking that I don't really care about spending a couple more bucks.