40
votes
Zachtronics returns from retirement to release an add-on for Opus Magnum
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- Title
- Save 25% on Opus Magnum: De Re Metallica on Steam
- Published
- Mar 17 2026
- Word count
- 140 words
I really like most of Zachtronics' puzzle games. They inspired a lot of other developers including the original Minecraft and I was sad when they called it quits.
But now after several years they've returned to release more content for Opus Magnum. I think it is easily their most approachable game and so far I've been really enjoying the new content.
I suppose Zachtronics never really left. Zach just opened a new studio (Coincidence) that appears to make the same kind of games (Kaizen). I'm still a bit confused about why he did that. I didn't even realize that he was still making games until recently.
Anyway, off to purchase this now :)
I remember there were some problems with the publisher. I think they needed to publish N games with them before they could leave, just like records labels used to work.
Same guy making the same games? ...just a Coincidence.
Just finished the last mission. Spoiler:
Amusingly the story ends with a house leader stealing the idea that ends up destroying his wealth.
I can't help but think this a jab at a particular game publisher. :)
Opus Magnum is such an interesting, fun game. I sunk some hours into it, but like all Zachtronics games, I eventually got deep enough into it that every time I played it, it made me feel like a complete dumbass so I dropped it.
That's not any knock on zachtronics games, I have the same problem with all games that have a slow level of gradually increasing complexity to a point where it gets nuts. Factorio is one of my favorite games of all times but loading one of my old save files fills me with an innate sense of dread.
I wonder if there's a word for that yet?
Haha, there is nothing like a Zachtronics game to make you feel really smart for completing a puzzle and then instantly really dumb with that player comparison chart at the end. Personally I don't go down the rabbit hole too far, if I can finish the games with any kind of victory I'll take it!
Sort of tangential, but there's a great talk by Guy Steele (co-creator of the Scheme programming language who went on to do a lot of work on Java) called Growing a Language, and his point is that a good programming language starts small but makes it easy to add things as complexity grows. (It starts slowly, but watch the whole thing and you'll understand why. It's a really good presentation.)
I think that ability to add things is what is missing from a lot of the Zachtronics games and the zach-like genre as a whole. Instead of solving a small problem and then being able to use that solution in the more complex ones, you end up having to repeat the small solution and add the larger solution at the same time, which makes it a lot harder to keep all the complexity in your head.
This is something I really like from the incremental game genre. The whole point of the game is to get faster and faster, unlock new mechanics, and at some point develop something that trivializes the earlier set of mechanics in favor of the new novelty. So you always have something that needs attending, but the old boring stuff is streamlined away.
That's one thing I enjoy about the game "Turing Complete". As you build circuits and components, you can then use those later to assemble more and more complex systems.
Exactly, that's a great example.
I have the same feeling. Also, there’s a point in most of their games where I know of a solution but I don’t feel like doing it because it feels like work.
SpaceChem in particular had this problem. The early puzzles are great fun but for later ones you have to integrate too many factories etc and I just lose interest.