While I don’t know what specific elements of Opus Magnum’s story you found off-putting, I can certainly speculate. The main character Anataeus is cocky and arrogant. The initial jobs he’s assigned are unsatisfying. The supposed grand house he works for is actually full of weak, venal people.

I think to help explain where we were coming from on this, I need to pull back a bit. Zach speaks about putting “stories for engineers” in his games, since that’s mostly who his audience is. While I’m not an engineer myself, I’ve spent my career in and around giant tech companies and a large university that produces workers for them. One of the themes Zach and I end up returning to a lot is, when you’re good at something (for example, computer programming in the real world, or alchemy in the world of Opus Magnum), how do you use that power? Do you accept the bargain that large institutional powers offer, furthering their causes for money while giving up a certain freedom? Or do you try and fight against it? In practice, it quickly becomes complicated, and if you are like me you have spent your professional life trying to navigate these waters.

At the beginning of Opus Magnum, we see that Anataeus has breezed through his supposedly prestigious school without much effort, something he ascribes to his great natural ability, and is appointed a very high position as soon as he graduates. It’s like he’s gone from a top degree at MIT to running a big group at Google. But something’s off almost immediately. He’s asked to do piddling work that insults his abilities, work that only makes the already easy lives of the rich and privileged even easier. And when this clearly fragile society starts to crumble, his first instinct is simply to prop up his benefactors so things can go back to the way they were. It’s only when the collapse becomes undeniable that he begins to see the possibility of another way.

Having these characters and situations does make them a bit grating. Someone on Steam described the character dialogue as “pissy,” which makes me laugh, because I think there’s some truth to it. This may be another reason the whole setting feels off-putting: everyone’s overly arch and dry and sarcastic. This was partially inspired by the depiction of Louis XVI’s insular, gossipy court at Versailles in the French film Ridicule (1996). In this world, the ruling class have become so disconnected from reality that they prize witty remarks over genuine communication. The way to rise in the king’s favor was to make a zinger so good that he heard about it. Even later on in Opus Magnum, when the characters from this decadent environment don’t need to speak that way anymore, their habits are too strong.

There is one more thing I can think of that might be off-putting about the plot, and that is the ending. Without spoilers, I’ll only say that if it were entirely up to me I’d have probably gone for something more subtle, which is my natural inclination. But Zach wanted to be direct, and I thought it worked just as well, so we went for that.

Is any of this best understood as “subtext”? I’m not sure. I’m definitely not the type of writer to deliberately hide a subtext that totally changes the apparent meaning as some kind of riddle for readers to try to figure out. I don’t like the idea that a story is something you get, and once it is gotten, the work is now fully explained, open like a cracked safe. Whether it’s added deliberately by the author or as something read into the work by others, to me subtext is best when it deepens, enriches, and complicates what’s on the surface. All of that is to say, I didn’t intentionally hide a subtext in Opus Magnum that points toward something completely different from what it appears to be. At the same time, the influences and ideas I described above are what might account for the feelings you’re getting from the story. I hope that’s the kind of answer you were looking for!