11/9/2023 0 Comments Opus magnum solutionsOpus Magnum never demands an efficient solutionīecause solutions are assembled from parts that can be built independently and compartmentalized from one another, you can start from either end of the problem, or you can complete different sections independently and integrate them at the end. It never hides something in its levels meant to elude your attention until you find it halfway through, invalidating your tentative solution. It doesn’t want you to get in your own way, and it doesn’t want its problems to feel like mean-spirited tricks. There’s a meanness to making the player their own villain-it's hard to execute well, and not for everyone. It’s a game entirely about the player getting in their own way, which to me distills the quality puzzle games sometimes have that gets them called fiendish, twisted, or cruel. The difficulty comes from how you control the tile by writing a simple program, and the bits of memory that your program lives in are also the space that the tile moves through.Įssentially, you have to build a maze that also expresses a path to solving itself. PuzzleScript is designed for tile-based puzzles and Sokoban variants, and PrograMaze presents the simplest possible problem in this space: move a blue tile to the orange goal. Different parts of the solution interfere with one another, gradually constraining how the puzzle can be solved so that only one solution is valid at the end-think of how every square in Sudoku has to exist in agreement with every other square.Ī tiny but incredibly effective example of this interdependence is PrograMaze, a mindbending PuzzleScript game. Even the solitaire puzzle that accompanies Opus Magnum, Sigmar’s Garden, is like this, as are countless other puzzle games. It’s climbing a mountain, not leaping across a gorge.Ī lot of puzzle games let the player make mistakes that only become apparent later, sometimes requiring the entire solution to be scrapped. Finishing a level isn’t a matter of finding a solution but triangulating your way towards one. The difference is that those parts are completely independent-once you’ve solved a subset of the problem, you know that solution works and it just has to be joined to the rest. Like a lot of puzzles, they break down into smaller problems.
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