Action Replay, Replay

I talked last week about the joy that I derive from action replays in games, and the ability that more and more puzzle games are giving you these days to produce .gifs of your solutions.

This week I had my first encounter with a satisfying little puzzle game that goes this really well, Opus Magnum, made by Zachtronics in 2017 -and therefore one of the more modern games that I've actually played, given that I have a big Steam backlog and a potato for a computer-. I'd seen mentions of Zachtronics games before, mostly in the context of them being a very small company that makes games for people that are smarter than I am. They made games like Space Chem and Infinifactory and Shenzhen I/O, games that are mostly about making complicated machines do complicated things.

Apparently not so daunted by this as to run off screaming, I loaded up Opus Magnum, and by two or three puzzles in I had three realisations:

One. I am terrible at this sort of game.

Two. I love this sort of game.

Three. It has .gif output.

Thus, to demonstrate why I am bad at this sort of puzzle, let me present some gifs.

The first is the final solution that I managed to come up for for one of the puzzles in Chapter III, where I was tasked to make a rope. My solution has three very basic moving parts. One rotor produces the ingredients and delivers them to a second arm which creates the basic structure, and a third arm on a track delivers the new segment to the rope. I think it's a simple, elegant solution, but as you'll note, this machine has a cost of 115, uses 264 cycles to run, and takes up an area of 54.

When you finish a machine, you're given some handy histograms to see how your machine compares to everybody else's. You'll see while my area is about as small as the most common solutions, there are people out there that have managed cheaper and much faster machines. I know that there are people all over the internet that can do all sorts of incredible things in video games, and I'm quite okay with never being one of them, but getting the histogram to the face each time I finish a level that I feel like I've done well in is quite a hit to the ego.

I haven't worried about optimising my machines very much. I'd love to say that this it just because it's my first play-through and that I'll probably go back and improve them later on. But the truth is that I probably won't. Because when I try to complicate things with clever mechanisms, things like this happen:

You'll notice that this gif isn't as nice and shiny as the last one, because I had to make it manually myself, as Opus Magnum doesn't give you outputs for machines that don't solve the problem. You'll also notice that in my attempt to make a machine with a smaller footprint but a slightly more complicated mechanism I have made too many many bonds. I have managed to -as they say in the business- goof it up. Even better, it almost looks right, so it wasn't immediately apparent to me that I hadn't solved the problem.

Basically, my issue is that I can more or less program one tool to do one series of complicated tasks, or many tools to do one simple thing each, as long as all those things either happen in sequence or happen all at once. But if multiple tools need to do complicated things at once, or to stagger their effect somehow, I just can't get the steps right in my head, and it doesn't seem to matter what I try, that sort of information just won't stay there. I can struggle through on trial and error, but not in a way that means I learn anything.

This isn't just limited to games, the same goes for real life, most notably sports. I can more or less run because it has a simple repeating cycle. I can play snooker or badminton because you basically just have to use the one arm at a time. I cannot play netball because I have to pay attention to not falling over, where I am on the court, where the other players are, and where my hands need to be so that I don't get hit in the face.I can't dance for the life of me, because you're supposed to move both arms and legs -and even, God forbid, hips- independently but at the same time.

I've come to terms with this. I play the sports I can and make attempts at games, even if I know that I probably won't be great at them and that I'll probably never be able to see the later levels unless I'm prepared to swallow my pride and resort to walkthroughs on GameFaqs or wherever it is the kids get hooked up with the pro gamer moves these days. That's fine with me. Except I'd really like to know how this one ends...

Just to add salt to the wound, it turns out that the puzzle I chose to demonstrate to you happens to appear in the Opus Magnum trailer. At 0:50 in this video, there's an example of a solution to the rope problem that I just can't begin to comprehend creating. It has five arms of three different types. Three tracks. It pumps out atoms so fast, and it does the final three steps simultaneously. Just...how?

Some people's Brains are incredible and can do incredible things.