Playing A Game Opus Magnum: De Re Metallica PC

Last Call BBS was "the last game from Zachtronics." Zach declared his intent to disband the dev team and strictly "keep the [existing] games running." That team, Zach included, went on to form Coincidence and make multiple new games. Yet somehow Palpatine Zachtronics returned ... for an Opus Magnum DLC. Huh.

I found the relatively-simple backstory behind De Re Metallica buried in a Steam discussion: an Opus Magnum fan campaign led to a collaboration with the original developers. (And I presume the resulting DLC was released "by Zachtronics" due to publishing-rights ownership.) Still, it's unusual for a studio to meaningfully update a nine-year-old game - and far from their most recent one - let alone to do so years after closing down.

Anyway. Despite a lack of re-tutorial-ization, it didn't take me very long to remember how these alchemy-programming puzzles work -- and to its credit, De Re Metallica meaningfully builds on the original game's mechanics in its new campaign.

Unfortunately it also didn't take me long to remember why I was "Meh" about those mechanics back in 2018. As puzzles ramp up in difficulty, they don't become more interesting at a high level, but rather more complicated and error-prone in low-level positioning and timing intricacies.

The constraints of Opus Magnum's tools don't really allow modular approaches to solving them; like I'd posted before, the fusion of "runtime instructions [...] with resource contention" means that it isn't feasible to split problems up into more-manageable components. Each moving part needs to mesh with some other part, and avoid colliding with every other part.

So complex puzzles take a whole lot of tedious fiddling, even before optimization, just to get working at all. Architecting and debugging large machinery takes considerable focus, yet when it's finally functioning as intended ... the result doesn't feel very satisfying.

And the story certainly didn't motivate me to power through that tedium. De Re Metallica's plot is fine enough, but its characters' personalities are flat -- I felt like I knew everything about them from one conversation, and I'm not interested in seeing what they get up to later.

De Re Metallica is more Opus Magnum. If you really liked the original, then you'll like this expansion too. Likewise if you didn't.

Better than: Last Call BBS's programming-puzzle sub-games
Not as good as: Shenzhen I/O
I probably should've expected more of the same: I guess I was just excited to see the "Zachtronics" name again.

Progress: Finished the first chapter.

Rating: Meh