![]() The best description for what you’re doing is a sort of visual programming, really. You have an input, a required output and a bunch of tools with which you can manipulate the input to get there. ![]() And while that is the best description, it’s not a sufficient one. ![]() The relatively small amount of programming I did in university was a source of immense frustration for me, I could never quite get in the right frame of mind to do things efficiently or well, and there seemed to be this vast database of stuff that I wouldn’t know about, that would make everything so much easier. The superb sense of context is the main tool for easing you into the trials ahead. While this is obviously not what happens in laboratories, there’s a substantial illusion that it totally might be what they do. You actually need to use stuff like atomic weights (for proper fusion) and the maximum number of bonds an atom can make, all the molecules in play are real ones and correctly represented. There’s a periodic table that you can just open up and browse to look extra-nerdy, too (and get that weight/bonding information off). Everything is presented in a realistic seeming way and, added to the visual nature of what you’re sticking together, I found it much easier to get in the requisite groove. Like a streamlined lizard, there are no more frills than are necessary. It doesn’t hold your hand, just tells you what everything does and retreats to the observation deck to see what you’re going to do. There’s no painstaking tutorial, no handy hints, no simplifying of the concept. The reactor screen is bold and clear, and is perfect for communicating the information they want to get across – everything is on one screen, there’s no visual clutter and it’s obvious what waldo is doing what, and when. The production screen has some pretty enough backgrounds but is essentially a grid upon which you place reactors and pipes. What story there is, is told through single screens of text with maybe an illustration but SpaceChem does a good job of imbuing this potentially sterile task with a dash of personality and humour. Your tasks are diverse enough that you don’t ever get bored, too. Roughly, they split into research tasks, where you use a single reactor-space to build a single type of molecule, and production tasks where you’re allowed to chain together up to six of the bastards to create a whole bunch of molecules. The production tasks are more free, in the sense that there’s a lot of possible intermediate steps between what you have and what you need. They take a lot longer though, so it’s nice that the research missions break them up. On top of that you have boss battles where you have to create certain things within a time limit before the eldritch horror destroys your base.Īn often noted feature of Spacechem is the difficulty. ![]() ![]() Every person, every single one, who plays this game will hit a wall, a point past which they cannot proceed. There will be some ridiculous mission where the input makes absolutely no sense and the output is ridiculous and you’ve got to do it all on a space the size of a postage stamp. The thing is, they’re all possible, and constantly being forced to confront the limitations in your playstyle really appeals to me. I’ve hit several walls during the playing of this game: all crumble with time and enough thought, and it’s thrilling to come up with some new process that the game hasn’t told you. It’s not a game you can just solve intuitively, not after the first couple of planets. Though some people will be better than others, someone who’s determined to burrow deep into SpaceChem’s carapace is going to need to plan. In my case, I’ve had to make notes on my conditions and diagrams on how it’ll all fit together and ratio work on the proportions of chemicals going in and out and I love that, too. ![]()
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