Former Edge editor-in-chief and Hide&Seek design director Margaret Robertson takes a look at what makes
SpaceChem tick in the
latest installment of her "Five Minutes Of..." series on Gamasutra.
"What the game asks you to do with these [gameplay] tools is the impossible. It's a long time since I've played anything so astonishingly dispiriting," writes Robertson, of the difficult indie puzzler.
However, she adds, despite its difficulty and complexity, it's also thrilling: "
SpaceChem gives me the strongest readout on heart-rate spikes and coritsol levels."
Games like
SpaceChem, she argues, which invite players to craft open-ended solutions to puzzles allow people to engage in creativity in ways they might normally avoid.
"Here's what
SpaceChem does that's so important: it gets me to make something without asking me to make something," she writes.
Games, Robertson writes, can make players active creators by "mandating inadvertent creativity."
Robertson's insightful analysis of
SpaceChem is
live now on Gamasutra, the latest in her series of looks into games including
Sword & Poker, Geometry Wars 2, Halo Reach and Minecraft. 
