I’ve now got 3/4 of the way through this level so many times that it’s all I’m going to be hearing on my mind for the rest of the week…
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Got Desperados III and I love these Commandos style games though Desperados III and Shadow Tactics from 2 years ago have a lot of modern improvements of the formula from the 90s. Though the game itself is still this real time puzzle to solve and I like it a lot 
Then I played some Minit and I enjoy it. You only live for 60 seconds so every run is very short and you have to progress the story by solving puzzles in that time. It takes the roguelike element and makes it to the core game mechanic. A short and simple game but I like the idea a lot. Pretty neat.
Still busy with the Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition’s campaigns. Oh my, there are so many and they all are so much fun! Love that game, it was one of my favorites from my childhood and this definitive edition is amazing. It looks great, it plays well, excellent game and edition!
My wife and I started another puzzle game after our success with Return of the Obra Dinn which was just so unique and amazing that everybody should play it
This time we started Baba is You and this is such a clever game, it works with syntax and we have a great time with it but it is a hard one for sure. Harder than Obra Dinn by a lot 
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I’m now playing Yakuza Like A Dragon and the Final Fantasy 7 remake.
I like turn based games and yakuza is surreal in a way I could not have expected.
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I tried Sayonara Wildhearts… I don’t get it, why does this get such rave reviews? It’s just a simple runner game with catchy music. It looks nice, but the controls fluctuate massively in responsiveness as the level changes making it super aggravating when you fail because the character has suddenly gained inertia mid level. It’s 90% visuals and sound, which is all fine but nothing to write home about.
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I enjoyed it but it is so much more a visual album than a game.
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For perhaps the 5th time in my life I’ve purchased Resident Evil 4.
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Purchased Resident Evil 4 again, remembered how much I hate the controls (I don’t mind the “push button, glued in place” element, I suppose, but I do mind the joystick for aiming and moving being the same stick… that’s super annoying). That stated, this is one of three games I have ever 100%'d, so it still felt kinda nice to go back and revisit, even the elements I hated (camera control? Who needs camera control?).
Finished Starcon Nexus, and it was okay. Not great, but okay… far too much wandering around trying to find things you found once before without any clear way of finding that… but considering I think it was a small development team, it wasn’t bad. Finished it, at least.
Started up Pillars of Eternity on my new shiny Macbook Pro, since it can actually run it (or seems able, at least). I remember playing a little of this game when it came out, but then stopping, and I don’t recall specifically why. Either way, kinda excited to try it out when I have breaks from writing…
Other than that, played a few more missions of Gears of War Tactics and Ghost of Tsushima. Feeling restless in life, and that’s resulting in a lot of media-hopping. Oh, and I think we’re going to play Borderlands 3 with my Infinity-the-game group today (at least, that’s the plan… we’ll see if people cancel).
This makes it sound like I have way more free time than I actually have. It’s also a function of lack of sleep.
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A guy gave me Opus Magnum, and I’m having a fun time with it. Seems much looser, easier, and more forgiving than other Zachtronics games, which is just right for me now. You can optimise to your heart’s content, but so far it hasn’t been hard to come up with workable answers.
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the puzzles after the campaign become more difficult. I’ve struggled with a few of those
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But at least I’ll finish the campaign? That’ll be a first for a Zachtronic.
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I think you will. I haven’t played that many Zachtronic games. this one is definitely accessible and pretty and the campaign is short enough and then come the really juicy puzzles. some of which are so constrained there can be very few solutions but others allow for more elegant styles of optimizations regarding space or code or simply cool constructions.
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I’ve played maybe half of the Zachtronics games and Opus Magnum is the only one I finished the campaign for. There aren’t many puzzles that are difficult to beat until a handful of large complex structures later on, I’d say most of the difficulty comes from trying to stay relatively efficient in terms of the three goals. If you’re struggling then just forgetting about them and trying to make a larger, slower machine usually makes them fairly straightforward.
Excellent game overall, and I enjoyed the narrative theme more than any Zachtronics game apart from Shenzen I/O.
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I kept away from Opus Magnum because I never finished SpaceChem though I liked the idea.
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If you enjoyed the puzzles in SpaceChem but fell off along the way I’d recommend it. It’s a better puzzler that’s less interested in forcing you to do everything under arbitrary constraints, allowing you to apply your own restrictions if you want to go for a higher score. The theming and mechanics are more engaging, feels like a SpaceChem made with the advantage of being made later in the series with a bunch of small improvements. Worth picking up if it goes on sale any time soon.
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Thanks, I keep an eye out for it
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I’d still like to finish SpaceChem at some point, but I think going back to the advanced puzzles with no memory of all the understanding I’d built up in previous puzzles wouldn’t get me very far.
I don’t think the restraints can be called “arbitrary” though, they seem pretty fundamental and baked in. In contrast, having (what feels like) no restraints in Opus Magnum is liberating, but also makes me feel like everything can be trivially brute forced so where’s the puzzle? But, as I said, that’s fine with me right now, and I am encouraged if it means I get to read the whole story.
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I replayed some of it (after never finishing it the first time) and basically just had to start over. Still fun.
I never really got on with Opus Magnum. I’d probably like it better with the sound effects turned off.
you’ll find some harder ones after the campaign. yes, everything in the campaign can more or less be brute forced–but do you want that?
later you’ll find puzzles with space constraints for example or ones that are just so complicated to get the timing of the different aspects right…
I always try to go for either using as few components as possible or having it complete within as few cycles as possible. the more I write about it the more I want to go back and do a puzzle (I was going to write “a few puzzles” but the more advanced ones easily take me multiple attempts of an hour each)
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Of course, I go to silly lengths to make everything as cheap as possible, mainly. But not to the point of exhaustive optimisation once I’ve got something working.
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My favorite challenge is to go for as few instructions as possible. Because I can obviously program a single extendable arm with a few rails to produce just about anything with very few components…
Here’s an example from the later puzzles that took me about an hour to solve in the second attempt (I started the first last time I played 2 months ago and there was a lot of ground work there already, namely the knowledge that the obvious solution wouldn’t work)
Spoilers for: Explosive Victrite
This is really the best I can do with this. It was quite difficult to synchronize the different arms so I wouldn’t need to program out all 6 cycles needed to get the outer atoms of the hex. edit: Staring at this I just realized that Arm 3 doesn’t need to be extendable.
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