What really sets this game apart from other puzzle titles I've played is its difficulty: it's totally brutal, but somehow I didn't mind. I would spend hours, sometimes entire work days (on and off) on a single puzzle, trying to piece together a feasible path through various stages.
Pictured is the level I essentially have stopped playing the game on, though I plan to dabble with it on and off. Here, I am trying to make the blue path alternate given its input, then travel to the proper side of the screen and give the correct compound. (I'm only half-finished here) One of the things that makes SpaceChem so difficult is the size of the grid. Often, you will need to make complex paths in only a small 4x4 grid, then you'll test and find out modifications need to be made that destroy your entire framework. Then, you have to make your path recursive so that it will complete the necessary number of cycles, which is sometimes as hard as making the path in the first place. And THEN some stages require you to make multiple paths work and then connect to one another. I have restarted many missions without making any progress, but somehow never actually got frustrated. See, for all the tedium involved in solving the game's puzzles, I feel so satisfied when a complete circuit works that it makes up for all the agony getting there. You could say SpaceChem is the Demon's Souls of puzzle games.
This game isn't for everyone. If you don't have any knowledge of programming or computer science, I would stay very far away. If you do, try this game out, going in as blindly as possible. The concept is ingenious; simple on the surface but with unfathomable flexibility and surprising replay value for efficiency nuts. There is some nice music too, for what it's worth, though I stopped playing that early on because of the length of time I'd spend on each level. I doubt I will ever finish SpaceChem, but I feel totally satisfied with it after only the taste I've had.
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I played quite a bit of SpaceChem, but found it disappointing. In my view, a good puzzle game introduces a few elements and ramps up the difficulty by forcing you to combine them in increasingly novel ways. DROD is a great example of this sort of game.
ReplyDeleteBy contrast, SpaceChem is structured frustratingly. The game is constantly introducing new elements, instead of playing around with the existing one. Each "stage" of the game basically introduces a new game element, then gives you 6 or 7 progressively harder puzzles focusing on that element. The levels almost never get harder by forcing you to think creatively - instead you just have to keep track of larger and larger messes of wires.
In fairness, there are a handful of levels where you need to break down a problem in a creative way to make progress. But they are few and far between. Most of the tough levels are just hours of tedious circuit navigation and timing. I wish the game introduced fewer ways to make circuits and spent more time teasing out novel consequences of each game element, instead.