It’s then suddenly 6am and your bladder alerts you to the fact that you haven’t been to the toilet for eight hours. You then reload the level (which the game has saved for future tweaking) and adjust things slightly. Perhaps you check YouTube to see how other people did it thanks to an in-game upload system. Then you think about how you could have done things more efficiently. It’s almost impossible to use less reactors, less commands and do things faster than everybody else so, if your design takes less time to finish than the average, you think “Well, I might’ve used more reactors and more commands, but I was faster.” See, in possibly the best twist since the invention of the corkscrew, the drive to make your reactors more streamlined, more efficient, and more pleasant to look at is buoyed by a leaderboard sey-up designed to pull on your pride-strings. So much so that, over the past few days, I’ve been calling in uncomprehending and unprepared passers-by to look upon my mighty works.Īnd then the game tells you that your design is slower than the average, that you’ve used more commands and/or reactors than are needed because (rather than design it to work perfectly from the ground up) you’ve just bolted bits on until it finally pumped something out. There’s also a strange and hypnotic beauty in watching the WALDOs go about their business. When it eventually works out though, there’s an immense sense of pride to be had a real feeling of “I did this, it’s clever and it functions”. If it falls apart as a result of colliding atoms, because one reactor works too slowly and backs up the entire production line, or (if you’re as much of an idiot as I) a reactor never actually calls an atom in – forcing you to tweak it slightly and try again. There’s always a sense of hope when you click the ‘Play’ button and watch your machine go to work. It feels like your brain is dancing on a razor, and that the razor gets a teensy bit sharper on every level.īut SpaceChem is never less than utterly satisfying. New concepts and instructions are rapidly introduced preventing things getting stale – just as you’ve figured out how to utilise one thing, you’re given another. The early levels give you plenty of time to get used to the basic concepts and commands, but later levels take hours to solve. If it sounds complicated, it’s not: the mechanics could easily refer to cooking… call in egg, unbond eggshell, move eggshell to bin, move yolk to bowl. However, your design cannot work just the once it needs to be able to repeat itself over and again to make sure that your solution doesn’t come unstuck after the WALDOs go around once or twice. The tutorial levels have you performing simple tasks that familiarise you with the mechanics and the way the WALDOs work – you have your WALDOs call in an atom, pick it up, move it to the output zone, eject it, and make sure that the design loops itself.īefore long, though, you’re unbonding and rebonding atoms, dealing with randomised atom inputs, using sensors to create multiple paths, and even working with multiple reactors all chained together in a poorly planned attempt at creating the molecules you need. You’re given a goal (usually ‘use these atoms to create these molecules’) and, when you’re satisfied that your instructions will result in a satisfactory conclusion, you click the ‘Play’ button and watch events unfold. ‘move here’, ‘pick this up’, and ‘bond these atoms’. The reactors have input zones (where atoms and molecules come in) and output zones (where ‘finished’ atoms and molecules come out), as well as two WALDOs – tiny robots that follow simple instructions i.e. SpaceChem is really about two intrinsically linked elements: programming and elegance.įor the most part you’re playing around inside reactors. Truthfully though, there’s no real fear of education here (the chemical reactions are aesthetic fluff), although you might end up being able to recite bits of the periodic table. It says a lot for SpaceChem then that, on explaining it’s principles further and showcasing a quick puzzle, they watch intently for five minutes, chime in with their own puzzle-solving suggestions for half an hour, and then wander away – no doubt musing about buying it at some point soon. It says something about my family that when they ask what I’ve been playing lately, I can respond with “I’ve been playing a game involving chemical engineering” and (unlike my family – Ed.) they will wait for further details before writing it off as dry, dull and boring.
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