Ever notice how in shows like Star Trek, ships use machines like replicators to manufacture and renew their own resources from waste products? Ever wonder how the heck those machines would work? Space Chem drops you into employment of the mega corporation that designs those machines.
As an employee, your task is to design reactors which bond, arrange, and even fuse atoms into useful new substances. To accomplish this task, you are given two "waldos", microscopic machines capable of carrying single atoms. You can program the waldos by dropping instructions into their paths. If the reactor successfully outputs the correct substance with no crashes, no matter how complex your solution, and it is able to infinitely loop through the same instructions to output a large amount of the output substance, you win the task. And that's good, because some solutions are going to be complicated. Very, very complicated.
Space Chem is a truly intellectual puzzle game; the effort that goes into solving its tasks rivals that which one would put into calculus homework or programming complex applications, but that's what makes it so satisfying, mind-blowing, and even educational. Sure, it's not completely realistic and Rule Of Fun is employed many times — for example, there's a stage where you must create Plutonium to load into a nuke, but your only input substance is water, and I can assure you that if you had enough energy to fuse Hydrogen and Oxygen into Plutonium, you would not need to build a nuke in the first place — but there's still a lot of chemistry to learn, as atomic numbers and max bond values from the real-life periodic table are very important to the game mechanics.
More than teaching chemistry, Space Chem teaches programming. In building complex systems to solve the game's tasks, you will need to discover and master important programming concepts such as abstraction, encapsulation, subclassing, and data normalization, all in a completely symbolic way which might not even make you realize you are learning how to program.
Space Chem is one of those rare games that takes the risk of being difficult enough to be useful in real life, but without marketing itself as an "edutainment" game. If you enjoy programming or ever wanted to learn it, this game deserves your attention and support. Try the demo!
If your idea of a puzzle game involves matching colors or dropping blocks, stay far away from Space Chem.
Ever notice how in shows like Star Trek, ships use machines like replicators to manufacture and renew their own resources from waste products? Ever wonder how the heck those machines would work? Space Chem drops you into employment of the mega corporation that designs those machines.
As an employee, your task is to design reactors which bond, arrange, and even fuse atoms into useful new substances. To accomplish this task, you are given two "waldos", microscopic machines capable of carrying single atoms. You can program the waldos by dropping instructions into their paths. If the reactor successfully outputs the correct substance with no crashes, no matter how complex your solution, and it is able to infinitely loop through the same instructions to output a large amount of the output substance, you win the task. And that's good, because some solutions are going to be complicated. Very, very complicated.
Space Chem is a truly intellectual puzzle game; the effort that goes into solving its tasks rivals that which one would put into calculus homework or programming complex applications, but that's what makes it so satisfying, mind-blowing, and even educational. Sure, it's not completely realistic and Rule Of Fun is employed many times — for example, there's a stage where you must create Plutonium to load into a nuke, but your only input substance is water, and I can assure you that if you had enough energy to fuse Hydrogen and Oxygen into Plutonium, you would not need to build a nuke in the first place — but there's still a lot of chemistry to learn, as atomic numbers and max bond values from the real-life periodic table are very important to the game mechanics.
More than teaching chemistry, Space Chem teaches programming. In building complex systems to solve the game's tasks, you will need to discover and master important programming concepts such as abstraction, encapsulation, subclassing, and data normalization, all in a completely symbolic way which might not even make you realize you are learning how to program.
Space Chem is one of those rare games that takes the risk of being difficult enough to be useful in real life, but without marketing itself as an "edutainment" game. If you enjoy programming or ever wanted to learn it, this game deserves your attention and support. Try the demo!