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MOLEK-SYNTEZ is a new Zachtronics game about making drugs in a cold Romanian apartment

Small pharma

It is so likeZach to release a Zachlike (just a Zach to his friends) about creating drugs in a small Romanian apartment. Molek-Syntez is now squatting on early access, trying to hook you in with the good stuff as you program your molecular synthesiser. Your goal is to turn chemicals into medicines and other substances with "various pharmacological effects".

Welcome to your new life as a Romanian drugs synth king. You synthesize known drugs by placing the precursor into the grid and then programming the sequencer to rearrange things to match the output. Bonds are broke and elements pushed and pulled into lovely new chemicals.

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Like a lot of Zachtronics’ output, the journey is as important as the end-game. Your solutions aren’t just there to fulfil the desires of the Romanian party scene, but your own sense of fun and aesthetics as well. You can craft elaborate strings of instructions and gif them to share with the world, showing off your delicate chemical ballet. There are leaderboards, if you care about such things, and you can even set the game to challenge you to break into the top percentile of players. It also has its own Solitaire game that you can cheat at.

It seems very appropriate that Molek-Syntez has echoes of several Zachtronics games. It's almost as if we were building it all together all this time, automating the game design that would eventually create this out of Opus Magnum, TIS-100, and SpaceChem. I'd like to see how it was made, as I have a sneaking suspicion it was just a single button pressed on a Steam account with all the other Zachtronics games installed.

It's out now on Steam.

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