Recent reviews by terminal

The product really is what's advertised, no more and no less. If you really love putting random objects in shelves, perhaps you'll like it. I didn't.

SAVE YOUR GAME REGULARLY! It will only ever autosave on exit, and if you get behind on money you'll lose all your progress. This is an absurd feature which I've never seen in a puzzle game before, having to redo puzzles because you fail some objective, and in my opinion it's completely absurd. If you don't have a save you'll loose anything except for the core of the mission tree.

As for the game itself, it's not a bad game but also not as good as other programming game such as those from Zachtronics. Superficially, the interface is very messy and it's incredibly hard to get a good overview of your program and make adjustments to it. This is party because things don't snap in place so components are naturally placed unevenly and ugly, and partly because all connections are straight lines, all the same color, going beneath the components when they overlap.

The types of problems you're presented rely a lot on the distribution of data packets, i.e. some outputs may require a larger number of red squares than another etc. This isn't random at all, but most of the problems are about balancing these distributions and in that sense it has more in common with other puzzle games than programming puzzle games in particular. To me this is a big negative, but your mileage may vary.

The money aspect of it is the part I like the least. A lot of missions will only get gold ranked once you upgrade your equipment, with no changes to your solution just by virtue of things going slightly faster. There are a lot of early problems where I'm sure it can't be done more effectively, but where you still won't get gold ranked.

I love the concept of the game, but I'm not a big fan of the execution. It mostly comes down to me hoping it'd be more like Factorio and less personnel management.

• The blueprints, one of the main focuses on the game, don't matter much in my experience. I probably didn't optimize it to 100%, but you also don't need to. By default you'll already produce way more than you can transport with any given production facility, so unless you want to put half of your workforce to work transporting chicken nuggets you won't really need to optimize that by a lot. Blueprints only affect the speed, not the resources used, and speed isn't really a problem since you're never really pressed for time. I also find the actual making of blueprints very unintuitive.
  
  
• Lack of control. You're factories have input and output, nothing else. You can't for example say "do A if B" which
  would make resource allocation much more fun in this game, your main resource is workers so I'd like to be able to set conditions on which my workers chose one task over another.
  
  
• No automated transports. Everything requires workers, not just in the early game but for the entire game. If you want to speed up transports of some things you usually just need more workers. There's some stuff you can do with balloons and ships (which can be upgraded for speed), but they're pretty limited in scope. I found transporting things to be a much bigger challenge than optimizing my factories, for reasons stated above.
  
  
• Interface. Your factories show the blueprints they use to produce stuff, but not what they produce. To know what something produces you have to either recognise the blueprint or remember what you placed there. In my opinion this is a problem.

If these things don't bother you however, go ahead and get the game. You'll probably like it if these things aren't a problem to you. Also YMMV, perhaps I've just misunderstood the game and some of these things can be made better if you play it correctly.

I really wish the episodes were sold separately and not just in a package. What's the point of even having it in episodes if I can't buy the parts I'm interested in? Even if the package would be a better deal I'd like to have the option.


So far I've only played episode 1 and it's been really great. The story starts out a little teensy but quickly grows much more interesting, by the end of episode one I'm hooked and really hopeful for what's to come. If I'd compare it to anything I'd say it's a little reminiscent of Twin Peaks (the old TV show). It has the same kind of small town-feel mixed with the supernatural and strange that I think anyone who enjoyed Twin Peaks would enjoy in a video game too. I know I did.

Kul spel. Lite seg start tycker jag när man går runt och letar efter ett ställe att slå upp läger, men ganska kul ändå.