This Tuesday brought us a bounty of new releases all lining up on the same day: the stained-glass logic puzzle quest The Artisan of Glimmith, the Nazi-hunting detective sim The Ratline and, after nine years, the Zachtronics automation game Opus Magnum gets its first official DLC in De Re Metallica. Let's take a look at each of them.
Lunarch Studios really established their name in the world of puzzle games with their huge, multiplayer, open-world puzzle title Islands of Insight they launched in early 2024. The reviews and results were decidedly mixed, but it was nothing if not ambitious in a big way, and the company has some serious credentials behind their logic puzzle design.
Their newest game The Artisan of Glimmith keeps some of the pretty, high-definition landscapes (complete with the return of some floating islands) but brings things back to a more focused, single-player kind of game experience that puzzle fans have come to expect. Use various colors of stained glass to construct windows following a growing set of rules to do with shapes, adjacency and more, bringing vibrant color to these enchanted forest castles. The game promises a large number of unique problems that grow to be very in-depth and challenging.
The Ratline takes a darker and decidedly more history-inspired turn: you're an investigator working to hunt down Nazi war criminals from a secret list in the 1970s, "chasing shadows across continents" and making sure to bring the right people to justice. It's not thematic material that's typical for the games we're covering around here, but it does, naturally, come back to logic and deductions: these are the tools you're using to dig through archives, match photo evidence, trace records and generally do the types of things that hardboiled detectives spend their days doing. The list of detective games (and more specifically document-diving detective games) seems to be growing at an ever-increasing rate.
The release of De Re Metallica likely comes as a bit of a surprise to some fans of studio Zachtronics automation/programming catalogue of games: the studio's namesake designer Zach Barth departed the company along with other staff members to create games under the new label Coincidence (who released their first big digital game Kaizen last year.) Combined with the fact that it's been 9 years since the original release of the base game Opus Magnum, you can see how this first DLC pack happening now is relatively unusual.
As I understand it, some super-fans of the original game had been working on some additional story and puzzle content in a free community-mod format, and the designers of the game liked their work enough to reach out and offer them a chance to make it all official. They worked together to forge the new DLC De Re Metallica which contains both a new prequel story chapter as well as new mechanics in the form of glyphs that manipulate your metals in novel ways.
The DLC comes alongside the release of the base game on a new platform: Opus is available now on Nintendo Switch for the first time in a "Complete Addition" which includes the new expansion content.
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