

As you progress so too does the story, conveyed through audio logs, meetings with your alien overlords, and some quality environmental storytelling.
#Infinifactory whale full
The amount of combinations possible also means that there is no one solution for any puzzle, but a vast array of elegant or brutish layouts to experiment with.ĭiscovering the full potential of your blocks through the campaign will take well over a dozen hours, spread across upwards of thirty puzzles that gradually ramp up in complexity. And consistency is important as well, because every puzzle requires you to produce not one but ten of the requested object. The combination of these elements allows you to create meticulously-timed networks of shifting lines and presses that can produce satellites, starships, and even fully-furnished rooms. Added to this though are sensor-controlled pushers and blockers, destructive grinders and lasers, and even programmable counters once you get far enough in. Your basic work blocks are things like conveyors and rotators and welders that get the job done. The beauty of this setup is that you have simple tools that can be spun into factories of infinite complexity. As I mentioned before, this can be anything from linking three boxes together to constructing a missile to breaking down a whale into packaged meat. Your job is to use your infinite supply of factory blocks provided to combine, separate, and re-scramble the input into the appropriate output. Every puzzle takes place in an exotic location with hatches that produce objects, and a platform that demands a finished product made from those objects. Instead of probing your tender orifices, however, they just task you with building factories for them. You play an unnamed human who gets abducted Fire in the Sky style by aliens. I’m getting ahead of myself here, but it’s hard for me to contain my admiration for everything Infinifactory accomplishes. It’s the kind of puzzle game that presents you with a seemingly insurmountable task, and through only the basic systems presented it helps you experience that delicious eureka moment when everything clicks. And you’re sure to fail now and then as the game asks more and more of you, from moving boxes from one wall to another all the way to breaking down starships and building cannons out of the pieces. This is the crux of what makes Infinifactory so amazing, that even failure is an engrossing and enlightening experience.


Instead of falling to frustration, my brain kept churning through solutions until it struck upon one, and it stuck with me for the entire day until I could spend hours more that night constructing it. For the full 60 minutes I was engrossed in testing layouts and aligning conveyors and wiring sensors, only to discover at the end that my design was flawed and simply wouldn’t work. I spent one of those precious hours last week building a factory in Infinifactory.

Then there’s one that’s just about snapping together and painting gunpla models.Sometimes I spend my lunch break at work playing games. Another has you fitting conveyor belts and other industrial machinery together and programming the control units, while another appears to be about producing lumps of organic meat for some creepy cosmic space aliens. Some of the games look like standard solitaire clones (although you can bet there’ll be a twist to figure out). The premise is that a bartender has loaded up this machine with access to a bunch of cool puzzle games for you to try out, and each one looks like a journey down a Zachlikes-themed memory lane. In this case, it’s the Z5 Powerlance, a kind of higher-tech version of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum or Apple IIe. Similar to other Zachtronics games like Shenzen I/O and Exapunks, Last Call BBS presents itself as the interface for a bespoke computer environment.
#Infinifactory whale cracked
Last Call BBS is a game about playing cracked games on a retro computer console called the Z5 Powerlance and finding some strange gems in the process. Puzzle game developer Zachtronics is currently working on its swan song, and it looks like the studio intends to go out with a bang.
