How about my completely uninformed opinion?  Seriously though, from what I've seen it looks like a solid game.  But it reminds of something I've come to understand about myself.  I hate RPGs.  Unfortunately, I also love them.  I often make fun of Japanese RPGs for all the ridiculous conventions and features they've accumulated.  But western RPGs are no different.  There's just so much goofy crap to slog through before you get to the interesting stuff.  And most of them treat you like the center of the universe despite not deserving it in the slightest.  I've said this before, but Dark Souls has mostly ruined RPGs for me since it tossed out so much of the usual cruft.  Just thinking of games such as Dragon Age or Skyrim fills me with ennui.

I'm going to state something which is nigh heretical on this site: I kind of hate Planescape: Torment.  The combat is utter garbage, and while the story is top-notch, wading through dialog trees gets tedious.  But there's that love/hate thing again.  I finished Torment.  If any of you didn't, ask yourself why not.

Still, I pitched in for Wasteland 2, which wears its old-school credentials proudly.  But it doesn't seem to have much of what I consider time-wasting filler.  That may be one other advantage of being a Kickstarted game.  I suspect Pillars is similar in that regard.

I think you could adapt the Old Man Murray time-to-crate method of game reviews to RPGs.  Call it time-to-fetch-quest.

Spending some time on SpaceChem again. Chatted with geggis online, and he too was dabbling. In the last week I've completed level 6 of 9, and completed optional challenge KOHCTPYKTOP (Engineer of the people) in 11,249 instructions, which is smack in the middle of the lower of two common instruction counts. Each level is made up of 6-8 scenarios where you have to construct a few different chemical products and get them to the appropriate storage container. 

This single scenario required more thought than most games require. A difficult disassembly then reassembly problem with the requirement of generating three different products with not enough hardware, or not enough hardware with sufficient decision making capabilities. This leads to dreaming up an idea, hashing it out in hardware, finding it not working, dreaming up another approach and having to reassemble stuff, reposition stuff, rework stuff, etc. Yoy. I do like the idea of the game still, maybe not so much the execution when I'm in the middle of a scenario that takes ten hours. Trying to finish this all in one sitting would be SpaceChore for sure, but every once in a while it scratches an itch. 

Edit: I wonder how many people here have massive backlogs for this reason: the entirety of a game is too daunting or maybe not compelling enough to finish in one stretch, but the mechanics are too difficult to resume after a sufficient break. I am blocked with SpaceChem and the original Witcher (which I actually really liked), and am having difficulties picking up the narrative again in Dragon Age: Origins. I have had fun playing them all, but can't find the willpower to reach the end. 

SpaceChem is a fiendishly exacting puzzler. I think it either interests you, or it does not. Even if it does have some interest for you the road can be long. The game has been called SpaceChore and that's not without reason. Your reward for finishing a level after ten hours of effort can be summarized as twenty seconds of basking in the afterglow followed by having to face the next, harder problem. But it's a pretty good twenty seconds I must say. 

Steerpike was helpful in posting to youtube a vid of the last scenario I solved on the last level: KOHCTPYKTOP. For the purposes of this discussion, I'd like to number the reactors in the solution. The reactors are the square black shapes where herky-jerky activities are going on. 

     1 

            2 

               3

      4

           5

Reactor 1 is a dis-assembly reactor where I take apart the source material. A lot of the Oxygen goes to the recycler because the element isn't required in the output products. The output from chamber 1 is Si-Si pair and an extra Si atom. We need the Si-Si pair to go to the cage assembler at 2 and the spare Si goes to reactor 5

In Chamber 2,  I put together the Si-Si pairs into a 8-Si cage that will eventually contain either the As or B atoms that come from Reactor 4. Watch the magic! happen in chamber 3 starting at the :33 second mark and the product is shuttled to one of two final destination tanks. Reactor 5 is the site of the last interesting bit where the spare Si atoms from reactor 2 are built into the 3x3 Si block for output to the final tank. This scenario was more logistical than most: some reactors have the capacity to incorporate decision making code, but they don't allow making large numbers of chemical bonds easily. The reactors that do allow large numbers of bonds don't come with the sensor and decision making package, so it can be a struggle to find a path that works because this problem required both a large number of bonds plus routing decisions. 

Here's a quote from an article on Ars-Technica, written in all earnestness, that sounds somewhat similar: 

These particles can decay through a variety of pathways, the most common of which ends in the production of a single muon (an electron's heavier cousin) and a neutrino. (The quark and antiquark in these particles can't annihilate, as the bottom antiquark could only do so with a bottom quark.) But there's a rare decay pathway that involves the heaviest particle that we know about (the top quark) that results in the production of a muon and an antimuon. The Standard Model predicts that these pathways are very rare. For the anti-bottom/strange B meson, we'd expect it to happen four times in every billion decays. For the anti-bottom/down, it's one for every 10 billion decays.

Any questions? You in the back ?

Q) Why are the pipes between reactors longer than my small intestine? 

A) Sometimes the implementation in one reactor is more efficient at generating product than another is consuming that same product. A reactor can't input a molecule until one is available in the input pipe, and it's possible for the step that outputs a molecule in the output pipe to hang if the output pipe is full. So in an act of desperation, make the output pipe so long it doesn't fill up during the execution of the problem.

@geggis I need some help. I am confounded at the moment by a level of particular devilishness and I have no ideas at all. Can I offer you a consultancy fee? 

I also like going back and making improvements. Just looking at that video above I saw a place where the red waldo goes further than necessary when it's just moving carbon and made a change that saved 100 steps. It's particularly satisfying on multi-reactor levels where certain reactors wind up as bottlenecks. 

Anyone here ever play Electric Football from the '70s/'80s? The big physical game platform with the vibrating field and the little plastic guys with the plastic platforms that moved in patterns from the vibrations? I spent hours on that. That was kind of the same thing. Set the players up, keeping in mind the patterns each one typically runs (I had a playbook) then set them loose. I have been thinking it would be fun to reproduce this in s/w. I guess that wouldn't have been a big hit in the UK.