Oh man, SpaceChem and I go way back... I first picked up this game in 2015. I enjoyed the first few puzzles, until I ran headfirst into a difficulty spike on the third world. Quickly tiring of my inability to make progress, I moved on to other things, but it always kept nagging me in the back of my mind. I knew it was within my abilities, and I even tried to pick it up a couple times in the months afterward, but I was never really able to sink my teeth into it.

Five years and an engineering degree later, I decided to revisit my old nemesis. I restarted the game and quickly progressed to the same wall I had hit in the past... and to my surprise, managed to blast through it. And the level after that. And all the way through to the end of the game. And the weirdest thing is I don't really think I'm any better at it now than I was five years ago. I think the difference is perspective.

SpaceChem is absolutely a hard game. But I don't think it's hard because you need to be a genius to solve the puzzles. Instead it's hard because it demands lots of time and effort and is uncompromising in its expectations. Unlike other puzzle games, where there's often a eureka moment where you make a vital connection and the rest of the solution falls into place, every inch of progress in stitching your molecules together is hard won. You have to experiment, try different approaches, fail, tweak your designs, and sometimes tear it all down and start over with something completely new to get everything to work.

It wasn't until I had worked on real world engineering problems that I truly appreciated what SpaceChem was asking of me. Once I did though, I came to love its challenges. The feeling of looking at a puzzle for the first time and wondering how the hell you're gonna even begin to solve it, then putting the last piece of your crazy contraption into place a few hours later and have the whole thing come together and just *work*... It's incredible. That feeling is what you buy the game for.