[Game: SpaceChem, Zachtronics, 2011]

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Lost in SpaceChem:

Introduction:

Last week was another slightly heavy entry into this series, focusing on the interpretation of pixel art, and pixel art as an artistic movement. So, just like my post on Offspring Fling! from two weeks ago, I will be making this post another lighter recommendation. The game which I would like to recommend, however, is hardly light, and it goes by the name SpaceChem.

No fan of puzzle games should go through life without having experienced SpaceChem. It’s an amazing piece of software, elegant in the simplicity of its design and yet awesome in the potential complexity of its mechanics. And the way that the game’s challenges ramp up not only from the mechanics themselves, but from the consistent space constraints in which the mechanics have to be used, is brilliant.

It is not the genius primary gameplay of SpaceChem, however, which is the focus of this article; instead it’s everything else about SpaceChem that I want to talk about—the stuff that the core gameplay routinely overshadows in discussions of the game, and which folks have sometimes been inclined to dismiss or even criticize: its story, music, boss fights, and visuals.

Yes, this game’s mechanics provide a satisfying abstraction of programming which (in addition to Zach Barth’s freeware releases, and earlier rarities like ChipWits) arguably inaugurated—and certainly popularized—its own unique subgenre of games. But I would contend that it was only able to do that because of its aesthetics and its atmosphere.

The Atmosphere of SpaceChem:

In SpaceChem, the player assumes the role of a scientist hired to work on alchemical reactors on distant planets, where the company’s facilities often suffer catastrophic mechanical malfunctions or are besieged by mysterious creatures. Now, if you’ve only encountered the game through reviews and similar second-hand accounts, then the kind of lip service I’ve just paid to the story is probably about as much as, or maybe more than, you’ve ever heard about it.

It may surprise some of you, then, to learn that the puzzles in SpaceChem are bookended by illustrated pages of prose encompassing nearly 12,000 words. That’s almost an hour of narrative for most readers. It’s not an approach that would work in most genres of games, but it matches with SpaceChem’s especially heady and slow-paced take on the naturally heady and slow-paced puzzle genre. And since it takes most players at least 40 hours to beat the game, one hour of story spread out across the whole thing is reasonably well-balanced.

Anyway, this narrative, written by Hillary Barth, has a distinct and interesting tone—its equal emphasis on ludicrous bureaucracy and on unusual beings in deep space puts it somewhere between Kafka and Arthur C. Clarke in terms of subject matter. The style of it is definitely more spare than either of those authors, but it still ranks above the majority of writing that can be found in games. Through the cyclical process by which the protagonist ends up moving from planet to planet, and through the cast of secondary characters as disposable as Star Trek redshirts, the story provides a sense of being driven into the farthest reaches of space and slowly becoming a vestige of intelligence in total isolation. You see the main character’s bewilderment and mounting loneliness in an increasingly unwelcoming universe. And this protagonist being one of the few defined characters, far from weakening the tale, enforces feelings of alienation and responsibility.

For its part, SpaceChem’s music (by Evan LE NY) does great work to drive home the story’s dual moods of discovery and unease in deeply unfamiliar conditions. Several tracks pair sweeping, low-pitched, slow instrumentation and vocals with sets of high-pitched, faster notes. The former provides spacious grandeur, and the latter layers anxiety on top of it. Moreover, the chimes and mechanical sounds introduced into the tracks at times help give a slightly mysterious edge to an otherwise industrial experience. Meanwhile, the weighty tone of the boss music makes those fights feel impactful and threatening.

That naturally takes me on to the topic of the often-criticized boss encounters, which impose new gameplay constraints and new gameplay options. People have often reported disliking the way that, unlike the rest of the levels, the bosses include time or timing requirements—as well as the way their exact expectations can involve some trial-and-error to learn. I am receptive to that latter claim; it should’ve been more immediately clear what the specific requirements are for each boss. But setting that note aside, otherwise I’ve always personally appreciated the approach and theming of such levels. The temporary availability of branch control switches to manually intervene in actively operating reactors makes it seem that the player-character is being entrusted with the most important tools under the most dire circumstances. The defense missions also offer a welcome change of pace in a fairly long campaign. And the boss fights are the moments where SpaceChem’s story and gameplay are brought closest together.

With rare exceptions, such challenges were phased out of all later Zachtronics games. And I think that’s a shame, not only because I feel it’s a formula with a lot of potential, but also because I hold that decision partially responsible for why I’ve rarely stayed as invested in the stories of their later releases. I’ve finished the main campaign of every Zachtronics puzzle game, and often extra content besides—yet months or years later I’m hard-pressed to recall what exactly happens in the narratives of Opus Magnum, SHENZHEN I/O, or EXAPUNKS.

But I digress.

Back on topic, the atmosphere I’m describing is completed by SpaceChem’s art. So, what you see in the image above is a reasonable encapsulation of most of the visual elements which accompany the player throughout SpaceChem.

This aesthetic simplicity is sometimes maligned (though less than the bosses). Yet the simple commands and clear, vibrant lines navigating their grid do a great job of melding associations of programming, circuit diagramming, and chemical equation-writing. This combination, while far afield from anything remotely resembling actual chemistry, strikes an aesthetic balance between actual science and science fiction.

Now, the artwork for the production and boss levels is not going to win an award any time soon (and that’s not only because of the game’s age)—but it remains appropriately cold and alien, without losing the vibrant clarity found within the reactors.

I’ve seen it claimed that there is a harsh division in SpaceChem between its presentation and its mechanics, but obviously I don’t think that’s the case. In fact, in some ways I feel the choices made for the story, sounds, and looks of this game, though sometimes unpolished or even amateurish in execution, match Zachtronics-style puzzles better than many of the settings and styles they would pair with them in later releases. Let me explain:

Solving a puzzle in SpaceChem is unusually personal, since there’s no one set solution; you have to design a solution that is unique to you. The more you learn about the quirks and intricacies of its mechanics, the more flexible the game becomes and the more your solutions will align with how you’ve personally thought through the problem. The appearance of the reactors all being basically identical when you start a new level increases this effect. You’re given a canvas and a new prompt and it’s up to you to paint on it. And the process of bringing a single successful creation onto one of the last few canvases in the game could take more than an hour of concerted effort. That’s a lot of time spent alone with your critical thinking. I can’t help noticing, then, that the themes I’ve identified here in SpaceChem’s narrative and aesthetics—themes of an increasingly isolated, yet tenacious human intellect on the final frontier—suit the player’s mechanical experience rather nicely.

Conclusion:

SpaceChem’s primary cultural identity being ‘a game,’ rather than ‘an educational tool’ or even some kind of ‘symbolic programming language,’ rests on the way its presentation (in terms of narrative, music, artwork, and campaign structure) situates it in a particular space of play and fiction. Adding that notion to the notion SpaceChem is, in my estimation, an exceptionally good game—makes me feel that it could prove very useful to folks investigating what exactly defines a game in the modern sense, or what it means when one considers a game as a work of art.

Some of Zachtronics’ later releases, namely TIS-100, SHENZHEN I/O, and EXAPUNKS, push the limits of this categorization even further by going so far as to center their gameplay on text-based, rather than mechanism- or symbol-based, programming and problem-solving. Their later games even sport varying levels of aesthetic polish, with TIS-100 being arguably the most fascinating in this regard due to being the most pared-down.

But it all starts with SpaceChem.

SpaceChem is an important game, given both the specific way it facilitated Zachtronics’ ability to make their subsequent dozen releases and the broad way it helped to innovate and popularize system design, system management, and optimization gameplay. SpaceChem is a challenging game, with just about 5% of its players reaching the end of its primary story campaign. And to these two claims to fame I would personally add that SpaceChem is an aesthetically praiseworthy game. Its aesthetics are simple, bare, and in some cases rough—but ultimately its story, soundtrack, structure, and artstyle sum into a cohesive sci-fi atmosphere. Without that atmosphere, for all we know, maybe few would have cared to rise to its challenge, and maybe it wouldn’t have ended up being so important.