Factory construction games: Intriguing enough to infiltrate your dreams

EEveryone knows about Tetris Effect. Tetris Effect is named after the puzzle game so engaging that players visualize falling blocks and imagine how real-world objects fit together long after the Game Boy is turned off. Ta. Similarly, I have friends in college who played so much Burnout and Grand Theft Auto that they stopped before getting behind the wheel in real life. But few video games are so addictive that they start to erode a person’s subconscious. I would like to nominate a new candidate for this dubious hall of fame. It’s a factory building game aptly called “Satisfactory.”

Satisfactory is part of the emerging genre of factory games. It’s like a souped-up version of survival crafting games like Minecraft. Create things that build widgets that can be used to build other things to achieve distant goals. However, the amount of things needed becomes overwhelming and needs to be automated. So we installed an extraction device, fed the raw materials through a belt conveyor to other machines, and soon the whole mini-factory was up and running, happily producing screws, plates, etc. while working on other projects elsewhere. I’ll be running out to get ready.

All of this requires resources, requires exploration, requires weapons and equipment to protect you from hostile wildlife and dangerous terrain, and requires more factories to produce them. What started as a rinky-dink smelting operation quickly grew to include truck lines, train lines, circuit boards, and oil rigs (not to mention weird alien stuff). As production chains become increasingly sophisticated, the struggle to get resource A (and B from an entirely different source halfway across the map) to processing point C without completely disrupting the entire factory It will be. And that’s just the logistics. We haven’t even begun to talk about efficiency (like distributing input and output load to send out widgets 25% faster) or aesthetics. I can’t make it personally stunning the work of art But you also can’t make it look like an overturned bowl of spaghetti. A solid retro industrial chic is required.

This game has been in early access for a while, but I only started playing it recently after the 1.0 release, partly because it was a bit dangerous for my obsessive personality type. Because I thought it might be. Oh, I was right. When I started rolling out paper notebooks to jot down to-do lists, calculations, and eventually blueprints and maps even when I wasn’t in front of my PC, I realized I was lost. But to be honest, I thought I had my obsession with gratification mostly under control until one morning I woke up in a daze and found myself in an industry of telephone poles and whirring machines. I realized that I was dreaming. My general rule is that if the game starts changing your dreamscape, you’re probably playing too much.

The secret to Satisfactory’s mesmerizing power is its creative freedom, which makes the game feel as much like a corporate strip-mining simulator as it does self-expression. It’s fun to plan things and see how it actually works. Observe and make fine adjustments. Completing small tasks will yield big results, but you’ll also be free to build baroque cathedrals and brutalist monsters as you like along the way. It helps that it looks gorgeous, even when you’re paving a wild paradise filled with boxy industrial machinery that fills the air with smoke and rattles.

Between my industrialized dreams and some of the problems of hand-crafted collapse, my only real choice was clear. Unfortunately, I have to shelve “Satisfactory” for now. Maybe I’ll come back to it more as a hobby, like model trains or playing the bass. Rather than spending hours at a time, you need to tinker with it once in a while. After all, I just unlocked uranium mining. It would be a shame to just leave the factory alone and continue collecting virtual dust…right?