*CLONK* haunts my dreams. *CLONK* is failure-made-percussive, the sound of beautiful theory colliding with the hard limits of cruel reality.

When I haven’t properly thought things through, or when my brain has failed to correctly account for the rotations, pivots and extrusion of my carefully-placed mechanical arms and reagents grind together, bringing intricate clockwork to a fatal halt, *CLONK* is my punishment.

Opus Magnum’s puzzles are simple in concept: take reagents from a limited number of stacks, and manipulate them by arm, by track and by transformative glyph until they bond together to form the desired alchemical molecule.

As in Zachtronics previous games, the process is an abstraction of programming, but where SpaceChem and Shenzhen I/O intimidated, the physicality of Opus Magnum’s molecules lends clarity. When your mechanism fails, it’s plain to see where the failure occurred; when you succeed in crafting a working machine, your reward is to watch your solution wind its way through multiple iterations, before being scored across multiple – often conflicting – criteria.

There is no one, true solution.

You build a working machine as best you can, using as many pieces as it takes – even if the result is a bloated monstrosity of tracks and wheels and pistons – and then it’s up to you: either take your success and move on, knowing that it’s good enough and that you’ve evaded *CLONK* this time, or dive back in and rebuild your machine smaller, faster, with fewer pieces, symmetrical in form or action, and watch it cycle endlessly towards clockwork perfection.