A stroke of genius

I thought I had finished writing mini reviews of flash games for the time being, but that was until I stumbled across one that is truly brilliant, and truly different. It requires logical thinking on a different level than all other puzzle flash games I've come across so far, and the puzzle complexity has nice incremental steps to them.

The game is called "The Codex of Alchemical Engineering" and it's a work of art.

You play as an alchemist having to distill, synthesize and blend various compounds by the aid of robotic arms and various alchemical glyphs. The game screen makes out your alchemical workbench, and this is where all the action takes place. There's no tutorial, and no real aid of any kind, but reading the "help" pages tells you all you need to know.

As always, the first compound (or puzzle if you like) is the easiest one. You've just got to move five atoms (the game is so good that you just don't care that water is not made up of a single atom, but rather a molecule of Hydrogen and Oxygen) of water from the water source, to the large recepticle glyph in the upper area of the screen. To do this, we must select a "manipulator arm", place it on the screen and program it to move water units from one place to the other.

Programming the robotic manipulator arm is simply done by dragging and dropping the symbols on the left into the dark grey "rod" also on the left. Hovering your cursor over each symbol gives you a short text describing what each symbol (or command) does, and from there it's up to you to put these in the correct order. Trust me when I say that when you get to the stage where you have four or more manipulator arms on the screen at the same time, choreographing their movements become tricky. However, that's not to say you necessarily need four arms to do the job - setting the whole thing up for efficiency, and streamlining your production lines for as few cycles as possible is part of the fun. After setting up your program, or whenever you're happy with your program, and feel ready to give it a go, simply click "run" to see how it behaves.

I know this setup of five robotic arms and two glyphs of binding is not the most efficient, however, I am a person who relish in the chance of making something unnecessarily complex and getting it to work that way. Tweaking the programs for the setup shown above took some time and a a little effort, but in the end all the components worked together in a beautifully choreographed dance of mechanical splendour. And as a person who comes just short of being brought to tears by watching the automated production lines at car factories dance their carefully choreographed mechanical ballet, I find this highly satisfying, and this is only level 4.

Anyone with the patience and the resolve necessary to figure out the first two levels will then undoubtedly get hooked. That's a promise. And while I paint a somewhat glum picture of complexity, programming and mechanical dance numbers, the game isn't all that hard. You just have to see the logic in the various components, how they all work together, and then find a way of devicing a sequence of events to distill the required end product in order to make it to the next level. Besides, since when has challenging one's mental faculties been a bad thing?

It's a truly great game, a masterpiece of online flash games.

And this is not just because it appeals to me because I personally love constructing machines in the most difficult and complex way possible, but also because it is different. It stands out from a crowd of what has become a a plethora of available online flash games, most of which are of questionable quality. This one, however, is a stroke of genius.