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SpaceChem
Zachtronics is back with an ambitious new design-based puzzle game. Take on the role of a Reactor Engineer working for SpaceChem, the leading chemical synthesizer for frontier colonies. Construct elaborate factories to transform raw materials into valuable chemical products!
In short, Steam reviewers most often praise “Complex logic puzzle design” (46 of 86 reviews) and “Demanding cerebral challenges” (11); the most common complaint is “Brutal, overwhelming difficulty” (23). What reviewers agree on ↓
What players say
Steam review score and the most-helpful voices, which may include critical ones. Score via Steam as of 2026-10-22 · quoted reviews as of 2026-05-12.
What reviewers agree on
46 of the 86 reviews raise this.
“I initially just bought it to get the TF2 items, but when I started playing, I immediately loved it. A little complicated at times; requires quite a bit of trial and error in some parts. But an overall fun game I highly…”
11 of the 86 reviews raise this.
“SpaceChem is a chemistry themed programming puzzle game. But instead of writing lines of code you need to build tracks and place instructions along them, which will be executed by a waldo that moves along these tracks…”
6 of the 86 reviews raise this.
5 of the 86 reviews raise this.
3 of the 86 reviews raise this.
23 of the 86 reviews raise this · 19 of them still recommend the game.
7 of the 86 reviews raise this · 4 of them still recommend the game.
3 of the 86 reviews raise this · 2 of them still recommend the game.
Counted across 86 English reviews, sampled to match this game's 92.2% positive rating · as of 2026-05-12
“too complex for me, i got the game for the tf2 items, no offense. 7.75/10”
— a player, Steam review · 1 hrs played“Great puzzle game, many ways to optimize solutions. Zachtronics games are at heart Code Golf.”
— a player, Steam review · 5,589 hrs played“I launched along with my 2 co scientistic people and we did some science and we dropped our balls at the fourth test. because it was so Sciency that we saved the galaxy. Long story short ,this game is very atom, and lines. Long story short, wow "That sounds like a gloriously…”
— a player, Steam review · 0 hrs playedPlayer activity
Monthly average concurrent players. Live data self-collected from the Steam API · history through 2026-06 via SteamCharts.
Achievement stats
Global completion rates across all Steam players — a data view of how far people actually get. Source: Steam official stats · as of 2026-10-25.
Price tracking
US-region pricing (USD), sampled twice daily by our own tracker since 2026-07-11. Steam prices vary by region — always confirm your local price on Steam.
Regional prices at last sample, in local currency — Steam sets each region's price independently.
Cheapest → most expensive, converted to USD at ECB reference rates (2026-10-23). Relative comparison only.
Latest official news
Developer announcements via the Steam news API — links go to the original posts. More across all games on the news hub.
UPDATE: Windowing improvements
Today's update makes a few improvements to the game's windowing behavior, allowing it to be arbitrarily resized and toggled in and out of fullscreen by pressing Alt-Enter. It also fixes a typo (!) in
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UPDATE: Minor bug fixes
Today's update fixes a minor bug where typing a forward slash into a text field would paste the contents of your clipboard instead, in addition to some tweaks to make the "mirror vertically" feature m
UPDATE: 64-bit Mac Support (v1016)
Today's update brings SpaceChem into the future with an upgrade from SDL 1.2 to SDL 2.0 and 64-bit builds for macOS so that the game now runs on macOS Catalina. It looks like it also contains a few fi
UPDATE: More bug fixes (v1015)
Today's update is all bug fixes, brought over from the game's unofficial "community edition": Fixed a Windows-only display bug when using a high-DPI monitor. Fixed an exploit where you could disconnec
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Screenshots
Official Steam store screenshots — click any shot to enlarge.
Facts & details
From the Steam store record, snapshot 2026-05-12.
| Genres | Indie, Simulation |
| Player tags | Puzzle · Difficult · Programming · Indie · Logic · Singleplayer · Automation · Sci-fi · Great Soundtrack · Science · 2D · Space (SteamSpy community voting) |
| Features | Single-player · Steam Achievements · Steam Trading Cards · Steam Cloud · Steam Leaderboards · Family Sharing |
| Languages | English, French, German, Russian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese - Brazil, Spanish - Latin America |
| Achievements | 20 |
| Official site | http://www.zachtronics.com/spacechem |
Minimum system requirements (PC)
OS *: Windows XP SP3 / Vista / 7 / 8 / 10 Processor: 2.0 GHz Processor Memory: 1GB RAM Hard Disk Space: 300MB Graphics: frame buffer support recommended