2026-2 - Opus Magnum - ★★★★☆

https://store.steampowered.com/app/558990/Opus_Magnum/

★★★★☆
Playtime: 29 hours (10-15 of which were in 2018)

I got about 80% through this back in the day before dropping it for other things. I loaded it up recently to demonstrate to a factory-game-liking-friend (hi) what Zachtronics games are like, and got drawn back in to finishing the main campaign. I found myself flagging again near the end when things start to get more complicated, but toughed it out until the limited-space bonus campaign slapped me across the face and I thought, "I'm good." The story completely fell by the wayside due to this, but that's just how things turn out sometimes.

For the actual puzzles, I started back from the beginning and made new solutions. I managed to redo all the stages I completed last time with "better" solutions, only occasionally consulting the answers from 2018 me. What I noticed comparing them was that I used to rely a lot on using only a single rotator arm for puzzles, which is inefficient when it comes to number of cycles but arguably simpler from a procedure standpoint; fewer moving parts were probably easier for my unmedicated brain to handle at the time.

At some point cycle efficiency is all about having more arms doing more things stacked upon each other. That's where I start to get overwhelmed and mentally shut down. In a method perhaps true to handling things in life, I had to start mentally breaking down each product into constituent parts which I could assemble separately and then combine off to the side, completely ruining my scores in the "Area" metric. But I did get it done!