![]() ![]() You're the rosy-cheeked recruit who joins up with a shadowy outer-space engineering concern. SpaceChem's story is a passable tale of sci-fi intrigue. Once you've trimmed your codebase and shaved cycles off your runtime until your design can't possibly get any cleaner, you get to look at the revised efficiency report and bask in the fact that everyone in the world is stupider than you, except for that little sliver of people on the edge of the chart there, but they probably cheated or something. Thus the urge arises to dive back into the reactor grid and push your results closer to the left edge of the bell curve. Now that's something! If only you could be more like them. But look here, a couple of guys figured out how to do the same job with only 12. You rearranged those helium atoms using 16 instructions, bully for you. The report card is a tease, as it charts the elegance of your solution against the results of other people who have played the game. This pernicious document grades your solution by metrics, like the time it took your machine to process the materials and how many instructions you had to place in the waldos' code to do it. SpaceChem stokes the latter temptation by presenting an efficiency report at the end of a level. That's a central tension throughout SpaceChem the drive to proceed into new stages competes with the allure of revisiting past levels to tinker. Then you can move on to the next challenge. The game gives you a few seconds to watch the process and, yes, grab some spectators if you're so inclined. You turn the contraption on, the waldos do their dance – hey, you're making methane. The intermediate steps of constructing a reactor are so engrossing that the final pay-off comes as a surprise. Before long, a twisting network of waldo trails takes shape on the screen, with bright instruction nodes scattered around like glittering traffic lights. And so a gratifying cycle of trial, error and discovery commences. ![]()
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