Saturday Morning Gaming: The Last Zachtronics Game

Zachtronics games are the games that make you feel dumb. We’ve talked about the a couple of times before.

Molek-Syntez is the game where you are given a handful of molecules and you turn them into different molecules by adding or removing hydrogen atoms. The starter problem is that they give you an unlimited amount of water molecules and ask you to make some hydrogen peroxide. Easy, right? Two water molecules, put them right next to each other, remove one hydrogen from each, wait a sec, new bond, and TAH-DAH! Hydrogen peroxide!

Opus Magnum was the game where you were given the task of creating alchemical molecules. So, like, if you were to refine gold and they only gave you lead and mercury, you’d have to add mercury to lead and turn it from lead into tin, then turn the tin into iron, iron into copper, copper into silver, silver into gold.

Something like this:

Eventually, they asked you to make *CRAZY* molecules:

The joy of trying to figure out if there was some form of symmetry somewhere in there was a delight and the puzzles went from “easy” to “ragequit”.

The games were brilliant and just made you feel dumb.

Well, Zach has found himself a real job. He’s going to become a teacher. As such, Zachtronics has announced that this is the *LAST* Zachtronics game:

Boot up your Z5 Powerlance and dial into Last Call BBS, the last game from Zachtronics! The Barkeep’s loaded up a full set of puzzle games for you to download and play, all fully cracked and ready to enjoy!https://t.co/mDr9zWLVd0

Coming July 5th to PC Game Pass and Steam!

— Zachtronics (@zachtronics) June 15, 2022

In this game, you’re given your buddy’s old Z5 Powerlance computer and he tells you that he even re-set-up his old BBS. The Z5 is pretty much empty, except for solitaire, so you’ll have to log into the BBS and download any games you want to play.

So you start up the modem, connect, and pick which of the 8 games you want to download and play. Oh, it’s going to take 2-3 minutes to download any given game so you’ll want to play solitaire while you’re waiting for your game to arrive (don’t worry! Any game you’ll want to download has already been cracked!)

(When it’s done downloading, you get a little chime.)

And now you’re off to play one of your newly downloaded games.

There’s a game that has you play with making computer chips:

The puzzle game where you have to figure out where to put the blocks in a dungeon to make the dungeon correctly is a favorite of mine:

See, here? The bottom row has six blocks. But it has two goblins. So that must mean that every single free space in there is a block.

Anyway, there’s a game in there (well, it’s not really a *GAME*) where you get a model (one that you couldn’t get here in the states in 1992!) and you can paint and build it.

There’s a game that I don’t know how to describe (and it’s one of the games that doesn’t come with instructions) that has you mutate cells.

This game is positively creepy. I played until I got to the “create hair” level and then said “Let’s play something else.”

There are more games than that, even.

The game within the game within the game, for people of a certain age, is to remember when they did this for real.

The games within the game are fun and, at this point, I absolutely adore the dungeon game and the Kabufuda solitaire game is fun as well. (The other games make me feel dumb.)

And, yes, this is the last Zachtronics game. Maybe, after I play this one, I should go back to Magnum Opus and see if I can’t make that one that made me ragequit last time…

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is the boot screen of the Z5 Powerlance. All screenshots taken by the author.)