Opera Omnia Review

It increasingly seems that the less a game costs, to make or to purchase, the more original and intelligent it is. Opera Omnia is a perfect example; it is a freeware puzzle game developed entirely by one man, Stephen Lavelle, and it displays remarkable brilliance both in its gameplay and in its melding of gameplay with its story.

Opera Omnia sets itself apart immediately by putting the player in the role of an historian, tasking them with proposing probable theses for how given present population distributions could have been produced by certain sets of initial conditions. To do this, the player places migration routes between different cities at different regions in time to explain the changes. To begin with, these tasks are innocuous, but as the game progresses things take a sinister turn as the player’s research is increasingly used to questionable ends by the politician employing the historian.

It has a well-written story.

The way in which the research is presented and the methods by which the conclusions are reached in various levels raise interesting questions about the nature of historical research and about distortion of reality by authority. The linear narrative, presented in conversations between the player character and his superior, poses these questions on its own, but does so with the aid of the gameplay.

By requiring the player to carry out acts of distortion, it exposes them to the specifics of the distortion. Whether those specifics are accurate, this makes them think about the nature of such distortions and how they may be carried out. The gameplay and dialogue work together to convey meaning more effectively than either would have on their own. Opera Omnia is a compelling example of how a game can tell a story in a way that is impossible in other media, and shows that there are other ways to do so than giving player choices that affect a story.

The gameplay, taken apart from the narrative, is enough to make the game worth playing. What makes the game challenging is not the complexity of its scenarios, but that it forces the player to adopt a logical model for solving the problems that is apparently counter-intuitive. The final conditions are fixed, and the initial conditions must be made to conform to some set of bounds, given certain rules governing how the conditions change over time. To be able to deduce the solution of each puzzle the game presents, the player must turn the way they think about time on its head.

The difficulty is well-balanced, with one exception late in the game. In one level, the player must exploit rounding error in order to get the desired result for their thesis. The level makes an interesting point by doing this, but its requirement of specialist knowledge seems unfair. Most anyone who’s written a computer program should be able to make the necessary logical leap, but it may prove frustrating to those without any technical background.

Opera Omnia’s simplistic graphics.

The game uses simple, low-resolution graphics and a minimalist visual and musical style, which complement the story in lending the game a somewhat ominous atmosphere. The interface is the game’s biggest weakness. The mechanics are very simple, but controlling them takes some getting used to, and even then the controls are prone to improperly registering the player’s actions, as they are partially based on mouse gestures. The design of the interface could also have made the function of various game pieces more clear, as it takes some experimentation to figure out which routes do what.

Despite its minor control issues, Opera Omnia is an exceptional game. On top of its unusually interesting story, the basic idea behind its puzzles is deviously clever, and at only two or three hours in length, it doesn’t overstay its welcome or stretch itself too thin. It forced me to think in new ways, and that’s the highest praise I can offer a puzzle game.