[LEARAX]

Personally, I found Opus Magnum far too easy. In TIS-100, the constraints are brutal, and I often made multiple attempts before I was successful. In Opus Magnum, I finished every puzzle on my first try. You have almost no constraints. While optimizing is still a challenge, it felt much less rewarding to me. I feel no compulsion to return to OM after finishing the main campaign, but I return to TIS-100 every few months or so to mess around with the harder puzzles.

The 3 saved puzzles is a bit annoying, but you can always backup the puzzle files since they're just text.

[yvdriess]

That was by design in Opus Magnum. The game is still brutally hard by sticking to the (self-imposed) constraints, but it wants to open up to a much broader audience. Celeste follows the same designed approach to difficulty.

Related RPS article: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/02/27/what-works-and-w...

[thethirdone]

> In Opus Magnum, I finished every puzzle on my first try.

I never was close to failing to finish a puzzle in OM. It was just a matter of how poor my solution performed whatever metric I chose to optimize first. The puzzles at the end of the campaign had me "give up" and settle for an ugly slow solution though.

> I feel no compulsion to return to OM after finishing the main campaign

If you haven't tried the Journal puzzles in OM, I would recommend you give them a shot. Many of them are in confined spaces rather than an infinite plane. I have yet to find a puzzle as hard as the ones in the TIS-NET directory, but they are a step up from the rest of the OM puzzles in terms of difficulty.

[Shish2k]

I find the OM approach to be much more fun when you have friends to compete with - "Making a solution is easy" opens it up to a lot more people, but "Making a GOOD solution is hard" makes it great for competitive play.

(Or even without friends, like me, I just refused to proceed to the next level until I was in the global top 1% for the current level :P)