Needs more opus

Well, the ending is pretty terrible. Opus Magnum's story is generally awkward - the first chapter is stiff and wooden, then the remaining four are just meandering - but nowhere moreso than in the final story scene, in which the villain (who hadn't even been clearly identified, up to this point) claims to have outsmarted you, threatens to kill you, and then offers for you to join him, only to finally discover that he was talking to a mannequin! And the fates of the protagonists are left to your imagination.

Of course, I don't play these games for the story; I play them for the logical coordination challenge. And in that respect, Opus Magnum never really changed my first impression of it -- of being overall simpler and less satisfying than SpaceChem. Like Shenzhen I/O, it feels like Opus Magnum has focused too much on style, and not enough on substance.

And as with Shenzhen, I'm just not interested enough to keep going into the extra post-campaign puzzles.

As an aside, while Zachtronics games tend to have a pretty close connection to real computer programming principles, I couldn't help but get hung up on how Opus Magnum combines runtime instructions - the movement of arms and elements - with resource contention; much of my debugging time was just trying to stop things from colliding. This multiplexing of instructions and resource access doesn't closely resemble a conventional programming language... but it does closely resemble some intentionally-frustrating toy languages like Brainfuck.

Better than: Sethian
Not as good as: Human Resource Machine, or any of the other Zachtronics puzzlers.
I think I really would rather: have replayed SpaceChem instead.

Progress: Finished the main campaign.