Alchemy Magnum Opus

Alchemy Magnum Opus is a game that won’t strike you as being particularly interesting at first. It’s developer created description tells that it’s a game in which you get four basic elements, earth, water, air and fire, and from them, obtain life, humans, technology and a lot more.

This is the kind of puzzle game that you don’t encounter all that often. You have to put your mind to the test by using what you learned in the science and biology classes. Alchemy Magnum Opus kind of teaches you how most things on this planet came to exist, what makes them.

You start off with the four aforementioned elements and combine them to form basic stuff such as steam, mud, lava, wind and eventually make your way up to volcanic, fossils, worms, technology, silicon and a lot more.

It’s a game in which you simply have to drag some small images over each other to form something else. That’s all there is to it but the curiosity and desire to see how much you can uncover hooks you really fast.

Alchemy Magnum Opus can easily be confused with a learning game but that’s not really the case. It does offer a creative way to learn about how some phenomenon appear and there is some degree of science to how you combine different elements. However, multiple combinations are strange, to say the least.

A ‘Worm’ element combined with ‘Air’ will produce a Butterfly which is not all that accurate in terms of evolution. There are a good number of matches that don’t really make sense and there will be times when you will consider adding a forest with rain to create a rain forest. Or a beach with a volcano to get Hawaii.

Curiosity will always get the best of us and Alchemy Magnum Opus makes good use of this truth. The gameplay is absolutely basic but the need to know what else is there, what more can you uncover will keep you clicking and combining four hours.