Got the image from this review but it's probably the creator studio's courtesy.
It is one of the games that you discover yourself playing at 5AM, later honestly expressing fears that your spouse/partner is gonna kill you. It has the ability to enshare one's mind, especially the hungry gamer's mind that craves an engineering challenge. Factorio is a base builder, resource management game with tower defense mechanics. It features a single player-controlled character running around, so there are some survival or RPG elements. Nonetheless, it all is rather about automation. And partially about the impact industry makes on the environment, so here are my extra thumbs up for the eco-vibe: đź‘Ťđź‘Ťđź‘Ť
Graphics-wise it is an 2D top-down pixelish old-schooler that reminds me of StarCraft and Diablo II, which is why I can't help but bomb another đź‘Ť
Developed by an indie game studio đź‘Ť
The 1 million dollars question is, why is Factorio so addictive?
To name one reason, it is the sound combination of achievable short-term in-game goals and the long-term, grandiose ones, that make it so. Such a combination lights up the respective brain areas and keeps a player hooked with both dopamine- and serotonin-based pleasure.
Factorio is open-world. There is no map edge, and random world generation adds to replayability. The arbitrary goal is to "build a rocket and escape the world"—and speedrunners are damn good at managing it in ~4 hours—but there are so many things to do in-between that the end goal is only seen as such: arbitrary and irrelevant.
Pacing is another brilliantly implemented technique that makes Factorio shine. I first came across the definition of pacing at the Game Maker's Toolkit (GMTK) YouTube channel; I realized that virtually any game that lacks it is a poor one. Pacing is about regulating the intensity of a game so that action is followed by peaceful exploration, cinematics, storyline elaboration, etc. Some games deterministically set the pace for players. Some others let the player set the pace. Factorio is the latter case. Still other games, like Quake III Arena do not do it at all, and that is why one would normally find themself unable to play it for, say, five hours straight: it is simply bland and boring.
So, when a Factorio player approaches a point at which peaceful base building becomes a tiring chore, they embark on a holy war against local zerg-like fauna – or build a little too many smoky factories and wait for the beetles to come looking for the source of pollution. The Deathworld challenge really turns the game into a tower defense.
As I played, I kept repeating to myself, 'There is no single right way to do things in Factorio'. It gives players creative freedom similarly to Terraria or Minecraft. Do you centralize or decentralize ore processing? Tranport liquids in barrels, liquid tanks, or pipes? Some players have challenged themselves to beat the game without storage chests or conveyors, never provoking a single biter or cutting down a tree.
The game also masterfully plays with scarcity. Basically every resource is consumable. It is obvious in the case with fuels: it burns out, deposits deplete, and there you have a task to establish another mining outpost farther from the main base, or look for sustainable solutions. On the other hand, sustainability has its downsides: large solar arrays occupy lots of map space and must always be backed up by accumulators to keep the factory going at night.
The game's "goal" (if you want it to be) is to launch a rocket into space. But every component of that rocket has to be researched first. Research consumes the rest of the resources. Each tier requires a bunch of more sophisticated materials than the previous one. And the science lab just eats them up! Every resource is consumable, every deposit is going to deplete eventually.
Who doesn't love huge research trees... Image taken from community forum. The community supports 🇺🇦 Red Cross by the way.
So this sums up the game loop: extract, process, craft, automate, upgrade. Decorate. Point out production bottlenecks, fine-tune, scale. Defend. It's too cluttered and tangled, rebuild now. The locals have managed to ruin a couple of mines on the factory outskirts, jump in the tank, squash 'em. I found myself caught—like many other players—in an endless flow of thought concerning the next step in development, as it were, immersed in the game till dawn. Hopping back up at 3PM merely to return to an unfinished in-game project after a random breakfast. It is just another way of saying "addictive". Immersive.
Factorio is complex at first though. My first playthrough was mostly about reading the tutorial, and I ended up with a list of things I would do "right" the next time.
Start with nothing but pristine plains, lakes, and forests; strike the earth for minerals and metals with a primitive pick... The first automatic supply chain is not much to look at but it is one of many more to come. It begins with the feeling of opportunity and transitions into empowerment. Every construction object is built with what I once mined, and I can now place entire arrays of drills in one click. Some items take about half an hour of real time to craft, adding up the total crafting time of their components, which, or course, can be distributed, automated, and optimized.
No wonder Factorio inspired a handful of more or less successful clones among amateur developers and AAA studios alike. Mindustry and Satisfactory, correspondingly, to name a couple.
People build crazy things in Factorio (image from reddit).
Here is another 👍 for its light, non-intrusive soundtrack. I always adored the way composers capture the concepts such as "industrious", "busy", or "endangered" – and turn it into music. Although, the sound of working machinery itself is a minimalist industrial/aggrotech composition, similar to what old German bands (like Die Krupps) used to make. Hypnotizing and satisfying. Hell, I could stare at lone coal mine for minutes and listen to its quiet hum.
Finally, I have a special sentiment for games that imply that environmental pollution has consequences. In Factorio, if all the greasy machinery is packed in one place and not optimized for eco-friendly production, colorful forests nearby quickly become dusty-gray wastelands.
To the subscribers who actually read the post top to bottom, I apologize for casually writing about war. I feel strongly for the people who are engaged in the rehabilitation of victims, treating their physical and psychological wounds. I feel strongly for the victims, robbed, tortured in their helplessness, raped and humiliated, killed accidentally in a crossfire or deliberately, for sick pleasure or "just following orders". Gaming gives me respite from the realization that these horrors are about ten hours of driving away. Even as I write about games, it is my moral obligation to remind myself that the moments of my enclosure cost someone else's blood 🙏
