Anyway Opus Magnum is IMO well-named and truly Zachtronics' magnum opus and if you haven't played the base game, you have to check it out!

Now excuse me while I try the DLC

@rygorous I split the Zachtronics oeuvre into "games about machines and games about programs" and Opus Magnum is the best of their games about machines and the best overall.

I give the nod to EXAPUNKS for the games about programs. It's the only one with a solid enough programming model to not feel like a dumb stunt but a weird enough one to not feel like I'm doing work.

@mcmartin Don't care about this story in TIS at all. But it has by far the most interesting (and interestingly abusable) programming model of his games. (Mostly due to a single instruction that I won't get into.) It also has the most interesting puzzles.

Exapunks OTOH is pretty much a one trick pony, and I don't find it a very interesting trick.

@TomF @rygorous For me, the issue with both TIS and Shenzhen was eternally being one instruction slot short somewhere and repeatedly having to redesign the entire solution at that point, a thing that got tedious and which never happens in EXA or Opus.

I also kind of liked the bizarre networking model, though I feel like I got up to less mischief with it than I'd have hoped.

If hard limits on micro-optimizations is the *goal*, yeah, the calculus gets reversed.

@mcmartin @TomF That's definitely the prime issue with both but with Exa I _still_ kept running out of instruction slots for optimized solutions because the answer to cycle-optimized solutions is _always_ unrolling as much as you possibly can.

So at that point you end up with something that still has the exact same type of tedious frustrating limits but makes you type a lot more code to get there.