Unfactorable
For a while, Prime Mover seemed too easy. Wire this to that, put this piece over here... its first 13 puzzles were very straightforward. It turns out, that was the tutorial.
After those puzzles, the game takes the gloves off and becomes really, dastardly frustrating. You see, the problem with Prime Mover is that it isn't just a game about logical problem solving, like Silicon Zeroes; nor is it just a game about solving problems with limited resources, like TIS-100.
It's a game about solving problems with broken resources. We're well past "there's no multiply, so you need to keep adding" territory here -- I'm talking about circuitry components that work contrary to how you need them to work: routing switches that switch themselves, triggers that need to be placed directly next to the component they actuate.
The puzzle I got up to, Nil Cleaner, would be easy if I could use the positive/negative/zero component to route its input in three directions based on those values. But the fourth, empty side of this component can't be wired! So when its inputs might be positive, negative, or zero, using this component necessarily means that its input line will also be an output line, and thus it'll require some bullshit like this to handle.
Puzzles aside, Prime Mover's UI is also fairly unfriendly: if you want to connect a component to some wiring, you need to clear the wiring from a spot first, then drop the component, then re-apply the wiring. And although you "can" effectively move existing designs around by copying the field, deleting everything, then pasting down somewhere else; obviously this isn't as convenient as drag-and-drop would have been.
There's also some kind of story being hinted at in between-chapter cutscenes. But the subtitles are artifacted, unreadable gibberish. I guess they become clarified after making more progress in the puzzle campaign -- in the meantime, the story is just tantalizingly confusing.
Prime Mover isn't a bad puzzle game, but its internal logic is outwardly hostile; its challenge comes from how its tools make a simple-looking puzzle into a surprisingly byzantine problem. And while I can kind-of respect that in concept, actually doing it isn't very fun.
Better than: Great Permutator
Not as good as: Silicon Zeroes
Maybe comparable with: Prelogate, but I don't have the patience to suffer through another game like that.
Progress: Finished 16 puzzles.