Opus Magnum's Alchemical Gifs

It’s the gifs which made me fall in love with Opus magnum. Without them it’s reliably good Zach Barth fare—an alchemy-themed option from his assembly line programming puzzle oeuvre where you move different reagents around a board in order to create compounds.

- Philippa Warr

With them it’s a puzzle game which has the capacity to take hours of concentrated, messy tinkering and present it back to you as an elegant, perfectly looping mechanical process.

Here’s how it works. The actual puzzle-solving element of Opus Magnum tasks you with creating a particular compound as a finished product. Compounds look like 2D molecules. For example, face powder is one hex tile of Elemental Earth joined by an alchemical bond to an adjoining hex tile of Neutral Salt.

Getting the Elemental Earth is easy because it’s the basic reagent the level starts you with. Pick that up using one of the mechanical grabber arms and move it. Getting the Neutral Salt requires you to use a grabber arm to pick up a bit of Elemental Earth and pass it over a hex tile called a Glyph of Calcification.

Once you’ve done that you need to drop both the Salt and the Earth in the two adjoining empty hexes which make up a tile called the Glyph of Bonding. This fuses the bits together to create the face powder. After that you pick up the face powder and move it to the product section.