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#Spacechem no need for introductions series
You progress through a series of puzzles that are connected with a story that may as well not exist as it is rather disconnected from the actual gameplay. SpaceChem is a “design puzzle” game, according to Zach Barth. Also, even if the Steam client had been online, a significant part of my play time consisted of me closing my laptop and working solutions out with pencil and paper. I can’t give a precise figure because I played the game offline, so the Steam application could not track the time. I put more than 100 hours into SpaceChem, which makes it my second most-played game in my life, after Tetris in various iterations (original Game Boy, NES,, and Puyo Puyo Tetris on Nintendo Switch). I quit playing SpaceChem after solving a few of the curated user-generated puzzles of the ResearchNET section, for reasons which I will mention below.
#Spacechem no need for introductions professional
If anything, professional game journalism would be a tad less useless if reviewers stated how competent they are at a given game, or at least how familiar they are with the genre the game they have been reviewing belongs to. I don’t mention this to brag, but to give the reader some background. With very few exceptions, my solutions are far above average, and commonly in the top quintile if not the top few percentiles in terms of cycles used. I did not consult any outside resources, neither solutions nor hints. I took some time off because I did not make any progress on it for a while. During that time, I took two breaks of about one week each, one after a boss fight I thought was poorly implemented, which temporarily sapped my enthusiasm for SpaceChem (details later), and another when I got stuck at what is arguably the most difficult problem in the game (Omega-Pseudoethyne). I played through the story mode, the Corvi 63 DLC, and the Moustachium bonus levels in the span of about two months. I’d say I took the game as seriously as a part-time job as I found it extremely captivating.
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Just like with a Nintendo-hard game from decades ago, you need a tremendous amount of persistence.Īs a full disclosure, unlike the vast majority of people who have reviewed SpaceChem online, I am part of the very small minority of players who did finish the campaign, and then some. While there are almost no demands on mechanical skills, the game tests you in other ways, namely abstract thinking. SpaceChem feels like a throwback to those days, but only in the abstract. That kind of challenge was largely one of execution, however. Developers could not get a lot of content into a game as memory was limited.
“Nintendo hard”, which was a consequence of memory limitations. Furthermore, back in the days of the Nintendo Entertainment System, games were normally punishingly difficult, i.e.
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In comparison, to advance in a skill-based platforming game - think of Super Mario games - you need to learn how to control your avatar better. Instead, your avatar becomes more powerful. To illustrate this, think of the vast majority of games that offer “RPG elements”, where the stats that define your character grow. Instead, they are a sedative grind, rewarding you for the time spent doing mundane tasks instead of pushing your skill as a player. The main reason I am put off by most video games is that they do not offer much of a challenge. Yet, when Zach Barth mentioned that less than two percent of players were able to finish the story mode of SpaceChem, I was intrigued. What is not true for all of them is that they are punishingly difficult. That is true for all games Zachtronics has released. He pointed out that puzzles in Zachtronics games have multiple solutions, which may also have to take tradeoffs into account, which is similar to engineering problems. He talked about the design philosophy behind their games and briefly covered aspects where he thought SpaceChem went wrong. A few months ago, though, I came across a presentation by Zach Barth, the mastermind behind SpaceChem and the subsequent games released by Zachtronics.
It did not immediately grab my attention, so it spent years unplayed in my Steam library. I bought SpaceChem years ago, but only launched it once.
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