Prime Mover is a new puzzle game about building circuit boards

After two years of work, the small team at Norwegian developer 4Bit Games recently released Prime Mover, an open-ended puzzle game about building circuit boards that fulfill "a wide variety of logic and computer science-inspired problems."

Admittedly, my experience as a computer scientist amounts to tinkering with redstone in Minecraft, but nearest I can tell Prime Mover's puzzles are about inputs, outputs and the rules that connect them. Rather than a single solution, each level has a goal, and you can reach that goal in whatever way you want.

"There are many ways to solve every puzzle," 4Bit Games says, "but some solutions are better than others." You're encouraged to rethink puzzles to come up with cleaner solutions using transformers and processors and all sorts of other doodads. Each circuit you solve brings you closer to the Byte of Burden, which has long eluded Prime Mover's robot protagonist. You can also compare your best circuits to the works of others on competitive leaderboards.

Prime Mover is an open-ended race for efficiency, and in this sense it reminds me a lot of Zachtronics puzzlers like Infinifactory and Opus Magnum, and I don't say that lightly. If you're interested, you can pick it up on Steam for $15.

Austin freelanced for PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree, and has been a full-time writer at PC Gamer's sister publication GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize that his position as a staff writer is just a cover-up for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a focus on news, the occasional feature, and as much Genshin Impact as he can get away with.