The following video is a great summary of all the addictive qualities in the game. Best played on mute.
Factorio is a hidden gem of a game that I think more people should know about. The developer is a single person that has worked on it forever and has recently even made it into a multiplayer game. The point of the game is to build a huge assembly line network that does most of the work for you automatically until you can build a spaceship to leave a hostile alien planet you crashed on. The simplistic 2d graphics make the gameplay more cerebral and responsive.
You start the game with nothing, except for an ax and a wood-powered extractor that gets ore out of the dirt that you then smelt. You use that to build better tools and better automation tools, with better power sources. Your first progression is to get electricity by making steam engines and connecting them to electric-powered furnaces and extractors. Then you build insertor devices to put in and take out the ores from the furnace. Ores go into assembly boxes that make different items.
It keeps progressing until you basically make an outdoor factory that you eventually have to defend against aliens or go on the attack with cars, tanks, and guns you build. As you expand the factory, you have to build conveyor belts to combine resources to make potions, which symbolize research points needed to upgrade to different technologies.
At this point, you have to really use your creative juices to create the best logistical network to continually fund your research from basic elements. The game is incredibly hard to stop playing as you continually will want to fix a belt route, upgrade to faster ore insertors, kill aliens, research more items, or even build trains.
Trains are used to transport distant resources to your main factory when the ores become too far away to use a conveyor belt. I've personally built really long belts that would be miles long in real life. This article so far is just a small summary of what you encounter in the game.
At this point, you either hate the premise of the game or are intrigued. It's not really a super complicated game as you can be as efficient or inefficient as you want. If you wanted to play in a less complicated, but more tedious way, you can just carry the resources yourself to insert into the research centers.
I encourage anyone that likes sandbox games, figuring out puzzles, and any of the slew of tycoon games, namely sim city, to play the game. It's available on steam. It's really fun when you play with friends as you can collaborate on how to make things better.
p.s. There is a similar game called satisfactory, but it's a 3d version and it seemed like a more wandering, less thinking version.
