Reviews - Swebban

2011 was a great year for games with an abundance of quality titles, what with huge titles like Arkham City, Battlefield 3, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Portal 2, etc., and slightly less marketed, but still amazing games such as Dark Souls, Bastion, Orcs Must Die, etc. The game that, to my own bewilderment, managed to steal almost all the thunder from any other title, was an indie developed puzzle game named SpaceChem. It offered something few other games do, and in unprecedented quantities; Freedom to explore and solve problems your own way. The premise is fairly simple; Program reactors using simple iconography to synthesise chemicals on a molecular level. The ingenuity lies in how each challenge is presented; You're tasked to create the sollution from scratch, building on everything you've learned up to that point. It's challenging, frustrating, taxing and oh god your brain will hate you. But, once you solve a specific problem and finally manage to pull your assembly line together, you feel like the smartest goddamn person in the world, and not because you've figured out the puzzle designer's abstract sollution to their puzzle. No, because you've just used your own skills and brains to create your own sollution, and this is the most key thing of the entire experience; Player agency over their approach to any given puzzle. And it's done more deftly than most other games I've ever played. If you like puzzles, exploring, programming and/or creating your own sollutions, then you owe yourself a copy of this game.