Rather than sticking its fingers up your nostrils and dragging you where it wants you to go, SpaceChem tries an unorthodox approach: not doing that. After all, if you don't have a steel-strong grasp on the rules of, say, the Chocobo breeding mini-game, is life still worth living? We've all seen it before: You plough through untold heaps of diagrams and explanatory videos, all so the developers can be sure you won't misunderstand any facet of their delicate vision. Given that first impression, the trap for Barth would be to browbeat players with tutorials out of fear that they wouldn't get it by themselves. Even I hesitated when I first saw this game, and Eurogamer was paying me to play it. Creator Zach Barth must have known that his game could intimidate players. The atom says, "Officer, someone has stolen my electron."Īs the universe of possibilities expands, the problems become more daunting, yet SpaceChem is always more accessible than it looks. You acquire new instructions, such as a sensor mechanism that sends a waldo in different directions depending on what type of atoms are in the mix. Soon, multiple reactors must be chained into a pipeline, conducting high-level alchemy that can't be accomplished with a single set of waldos. In short order, the business of molecular chemistry gets complex, as it's wont to do. Waldos are dumb and obedient, like a Labrador Retriever, except they manipulate quantum mechanics instead of licking their own crotch.Īt the outset, your waldos do little more than grab atoms from the inputs on the left side of the reactor and dump them on the output side – maybe adding or breaking a couple of chemical bonds along the way. As they chug along, they execute simple instructions that you place along their route.įor instance, a waldo that passes over a "grab" instruction will pick up whatever atom is on that space in the grid, dutifully toting the chemical in its pincers until it reaches a space you've labelled "drop".
The waldos move along tracks that you lay out on the reactor's gridded workspace. There are two in each reactor, a red one and a blue one. (I always end up getting atoms in my hair.) So SpaceChem provides you with microscopic helpers called "waldos". Splicing atoms with your fingers is a messy enterprise. Your reactor might be connected to an atmospheric pump that provides you with a 3:1 ratio of hydrogen and nitrogen atoms, and the goal is to cobble these together into – yup, you guessed it – ammonia fuel.Ī hydrogen atom runs into a police station. The root problem of each stage in SpaceChem is to design a "reactor" that will refine raw atoms and/or molecules into a new compound. It sounds dry, but man, is it a kick to watch those atoms go. You build tiny chemical reactors that scoop up atoms and rearrange them into new compounds to advance the interests of your industrial overlords. Overcome a challenge in either of these games, and you get the urge to call someone into the room, point at the screen and proclaim, "Look what I made!" In the case of Meat Boy, the player-created masterpieces were video replays of your death-cheating exploits SpaceChem provides a more cerebral counterpart. There's not too much common ground there, except on this essential level: they both nail the "Look what I made!" factor. One is a game of atomic engineering, the other is about a skinless kid and his hot girlfriend. Compete with the best players, trying to spend as few cycles as possible to get the end result.SpaceChem and Super Meat Boy. It shows your personal achievements and compares it to other players. You need to get the connection indicated on the output.Īfter solving the puzzle, you will be presented with statistics that indicate the number of cycles spent, reactors used and instructions. You can program them for the following actions: capture, release, rotation, production of connection / separation of chemical bonds, nuclear fusion / fission. The manipulators move in the direction you specify. Defensive action is where you fight off monsters who are trying to destroy the SpaceChem station.Įach reactor has two entrances and two waldo manipulators. In the production facility, it is necessary to connect the reactors with pipes, supplying them with chemical elements. The research stage involves interaction with the reactor. These stages are divided into the following categories: research, production and defensive. Each of them requires programming two reactor manipulators. The campaign consists of episodes, which in turn are divided into several stages. You are doing research by conducting chemical reactions, nuclear fission, or fusion. Spacechem - puzzle game in which you play the role of a space station engineer.
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