Infinifactory (Zachtronics, 2015)

So, I started on Infinifactory last night.  It’s an entry in a genre of puzzle games that I particularly enjoy, which...  I’m going to call this something akin to programming, actually.  Basically, what any game in this genre does is give you a set of tools, an input of some kind, and task you with using your tools to construct a way to take the inputs and make the outputs it wants.

Usually, though, these games task you with placing things in a 2-dimensional array.  Moving things around is generally a factor of preventing objects from crashing into each other, making sure the right parts go the right places, and so on.  As far as I can tell in Infinifactory, the part where things can’t crash into each other doesn’t appear to be an issue.  Rather, the game actively encourages it, even using one of the (rather brilliantly designed) tutorial graphics to show that it’s something you’re allowed to do.

One of the things that I’ve consistently loved about the titles released by this developer, Zachtronics, is that the in-game scoring is done in a way that promotes creativity in solutions. If your solution completes the task asked of it, you’ll be scored based on three metrics.  There will be a speed score, which looks at how many turns have to go by, a score that looks at how many objects you placed, and a score that looks at how much space is taken up by your solution.  Typically, a solution that excels in one of these might not do so well in the other two, so there’s plenty of reason to revisit puzzles, and a player can decide after finding a working solution initially that they want to find a better solution in one particular way.  In addition, there are no leaderboards; rather, you’re shown a histogram that tells you where most players’ solutions fall, and where the outliers are, so you can always tell if your score is above or below the average, and by how much.

As an aside, I love that this game lets you generate animated images of your contraptions hard at work.  The previous game from the same developer, Spacechem, allowed for videos of solutions to be uploaded to YouTube, but they were typically somewhat hard to make heads or tails of if you didn’t view them full-screen, and certainly if you didn’t know what you were looking at.  His most recent title, TIS-100, is... quite literally playing with assembly programming, and videos are thus rather dry to look at.  This one, though...  It’s pretty easy to tell what you’re looking at.  Boxes!  On conveyor belts!  Being moved around!  It’s great!

OK, yes, boxes on conveyor belts are kind of dry, too.  But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the game.