Satisfactory. It’s so fun automatizing stuff for 4 hours that could have been done manually in 30 minutes. I like looking at all of my work in the game and thinking “how, this is impressive”.
If you like building I guess Minecraft is an epic choice. I have sunk hundreds of hours into the game, easily
I think everyone should play factorio for at least a few hours. It will be some of the most interesting 17 months of their lives.
Is it a time lapse game? Where you play for like an hour, then suddenly the sun is down?
I would personally recommend Satisfactory over Factorio. I think it’s a more casual experience while still scratching that factory building itch.
Factorio is a casual game. You see a person with a massive base that makes a gazillion science packs a minute, don’t get intimidated. They have no clue what they’re doing either, and probably already forgot how a third of their factory is put together. They have just been in the game for longer.
I don’t mean less casual in that sense. I actually had 3 main points in mind that make satisfactory more casual.
First are the aliens. The evolution and pollution doesn’t stop which means in a way you are fighting against time. If you don’t keep up with it the aliens will attack and destroy your base. I know they can be turned off but the game is designed with their attacks in mind and you’re skipping entire production lines if you turn them off.
The second reason is factory building. I think the extra dimension in Satisfactory makes factory building much easier. If you run out of space horizontally, build up. In Factorio you better plan out how big your factory is going to be because if you run out of space you’re probably going to start spaghettifying your factory or you need to start tearing down parts of your factory to make more space. In my current satisfactory factory I just built a whole new level ontop of my old factory because I couldn’t be bothered to clean it up.
And the last point goes together with the previous point. You have so many things you need to produce. The entire belt production thing for example. If you want express belts you need to build the fast belts which needs the basic belts. If you want express splitters you’re going to have to build the fast splitter, which needs the basic splitter which requires basic belts. Meanwhile in Satisfactory if you want a faster belt you just need the new material for the belt. Factorio production pipelines are like a deep well while Satisfactory production lines are more like a wide puddle (that only towards the very end can go deep, like ficsonium fuel rods). Satisfactory has overall a wider variety of things to produce (if we exclude the tiered items in Factorio), but they’re much less dependent on each other. For example if your industrial beam production isn’t at peak performance that not going to stop you from getting the higher tier belts because they need aluminum which are built from a completely different raw material. Solve aluminum production and you get new belts. Compare that to Factorio where, lets say you want to start using express belts but you’ve been kinda winging your belt production. Well first you need to fix your fast belt production, which then means you need to fix your basic belt production which means you need to fix your iron production which means you have to scale up your iron mining.
The factory can grow over your head but Satisfactory still has easier production pipelines, easier factory planning and you can take however long you want to figure out how to build your factory. To me all of those things indicate that Satisfactory is a more casual experience.
So many tedious recommendations when the answer is obviously heaven’s vault.
It’s dogshit in almost every way. Even moving around the world feels like pouring salt into your eyes. I hate almost every single thing, the protagonist, the pace, the awful vehicle sections to travel. But it’s something you should play, or perhaps experience.
It’s an archeological translation game and there are multiple moments of “Ok so maybe that actually means font of life not mother goddess, but that would mean this means artificial god which would mean that the extinction event was actually transcendence and holy shit…”
I would add Outer Wilds to the list.
You can really only play it once in a lifetime but I think it’s the best video game experiences available.
Honorable mention for Tunic and Cocoon for the same reason
Steel battalion with the full controller setup
