Good, and supremely fucking weird. And the music BANGS.
Mad Rat Dead is a rhythm game that eschews quite a few of the genre conventions. I’m not a big rhythm game person, but I like it, and had a good time with it. It’s also incredibly fucking weird, like, weird even by my expectations of games from Nippon Ichi Software. If the name rings a bell, good! If it doesn’t, they’re the publishers of Disgaea and a bunch of other smaller stuff.
I can’t find a good splash screen image, so you get this instead.
The plot of Mad Rat Dead is… Hmm. Look, all you really need to know at the start is that you’ve been brought back to life by the Rat God to relive your last day prior to death, and fulfill your wish, which in your case is to kill the human who kept you in a cage all your life. There is more to it than that, but I will say that the game concludes fairly gracefully and satisfyingly. Anything else risks the dreaded spoilers. Onto the gameplay!
There are two types of levels in Mad Rat Dead: standard levels, and boss levels. Both have the same general rules. There is no life or health system. Instead, get hit, you die. Fall into a pit? You die. Touch spikes? You die. When you die, you get the ability to roll back time in increments of about a half a second, and then continue from that point. The main pressure comes from the beat timer. With each beat, it counts down, and if it gets to zero, you fail the level and have to start over. Rolling the timer back doesn’t roll back the beat timer, so the real loss from being killed is losing time.
Note: The game does have a mode where the beat timer isn’t active, and you can take as much time as you want to clear a level. I didn’t play in that mode, because…. well honestly because I derive at least some sense of self worth from playing games on the harder difficulties.
It sure is.
The most unique thing about Mad Rat Dead is that it’s a combo of a platformer and a rhythm game. It doesn’t require you to make specific inputs, unlike most rhythm games. Instead, you have fairly standard platforming controls (jump, dash, charge, ground pound) and movement, but your button inputs have to be to the beat. If they aren’t, they fizzle and don’t do anything. It also eats the next incoming beat, so you can’t just mash your way victory.
I really enjoy this for the most part. It feels really good to string movements together, and build your own combos and patterns. There are some points where the game does one of two things that make pulling a movement off a bit frustrating.
The first one is that it deliberately switches up the beat, slowing it down or speeding it up at certain portions on some levels. While this is obviously intentional, it often threw me off my game. As a general rule of thumb, I enjoyed the levels that were primarily either stationary or had many moving enemies, much more than I enjoyed the levels with either moving platforms or semi-tangible cheese platforms.
The second thing that messes with the “make your own beat” vibe is that the game has sections that feel like they really only have one solution in terms of inputs, and so if you mess up or die, you have to roll back the whole section, and restart. These felt quite jarring compared to the rest of the levels. Even the boss fights allow a fairly large amount of freedom, and having that taken away just felt bad.
Death incoming in 3, 2, 1…
The game’s not super long, but it’s fairly well polished. If you do choose to play Mad Rat Dead, there’s one movement mechanic that isn’t super well explained: the lock-on dash. On many of the levels, you’ll find enemies that can be used as bounce pads/chain jump location. In order to actually do this though, there’s two conditions that have to be met.
The first is that you have to be close enough to the enemy, but the second is that you also need to have not used one of your two double jumps, and your jumps only refresh when you hit an enemy, or touch the ground. The game never explicitly says this, so there was a large portion of time where I couldn’t figure out if I wasn’t close enough an enemy for the lock on reticle to appear, or if I’d just jumped twice.
I think I’d have raged a lot less if the game had ever explained how this works. That or I just didn’t read the prompts in the tutorial level.
So much good music.
As this is a rhythm game, it has music. Let’s talk about that music.
The music is fantastic and is actually the reason I even picked the game up. After listening to the soundtrack 7-8 times on YouTube, I realized I should probably play the actual game, and I’m writing this as I listen to it again. Since I’m a game person and not really a music person, I can’t tell you what genre it is, but I think it probably counts as club/EDM? If you’re into Japanese music or vocaloid, you’ll probably recognize a few of the names including DYES IWASAKI and Camellia.
I enjoyed Mad Rat Dead. It’s a unique rhythm game with solid gameplay, incredibly weird story, acid trip art, and incredibly good music. If that’s the sort of thing you’re looking for, I hope you own either a Switch or PS4, because those are the only two consoles you can play it on. If you’re still on the fence, it also has a demo on Switch, which I’m gonna link here, and a demo on PS4, which you can grab here.
Ed Note: Game screenshots are taken from the Mad Rat Dead NIS page.
CRIMESIGHT is an asymmetric social deduction game, and it’s fantastic. It might be my favorite giga-brain moment sort of game, and it makes you feel very smart, as long as you don’t scuff up wins that you have in the palm of your hand.
Which I’ve done a few times to be honest.
In order to talk about what I like about CRIMESIGHT, I’m gonna briefly cover how the game works. There are going to be several paragraphs going over the game’s mechanics. If you don’t want to read any more, here’s my summary of why I like the game: it’s full of incredibly clever mindgames and bluffing linked to an interesting balance of resources and information between the two competing sides.
A screenshot of a game of CRIMESIGHT in progress. I think I lost this one.
A game of Crimesight is played over up to 10 rounds, on a single map consisting of multiple rooms and areas, and with 6 pawns. One pawn is the Killer, and one pawn is the Target.
First, a little bit more about pawns. Pawns start the game with nothing, regardless of their roll. Each pawn can carry up to two items, and has two health slots. They can also carry a single weapon. Weapons do not take up an item slot, and cannot be dropped once picked up. Every three rounds, the day ends, and pawns need to eat, or else they will become hungry. Hunger, like any other injury in the game, puts a token into one of the health slots. A pawn with one slot occupied can only move up to two spaces per round, and pawn with two slots occupied can only move 1 space per round, and is also blinded.
Each round, the players in the game may issue a number of commands to pawns, determined by the player’s allegiance, and the number of other players in the game. These commands consist of a movement command, and an action. First, movement. Each pawn can move up to three areas in one round. If they move more than two areas, though, they get fatigued, and will only be able to move twice in the next round. Then the pawn does an action. The action can be to search an area for food, to use an item on a location or another pawn, or to interact with an object. Pawns always move, and then take an action; they cannot do otherwise.
Let’s talk about the two allegiances, Moriarty or Sherlock, and the differences between the two.
The Moriarty player wins if they can have the killer pawn murder the target pawn. In order to do this, three conditions must be met. The killer must have a weapon, the killer must be in the same area as the target, and there can be no witnesses with line of sight. If the Moriarty player fails to pull this off in 10 rounds, the best they can hope for is a draw.
The Moriarty player also has several special advantages. They can see which nodes on the map contain food, weapons, or special items/objects. They start the game knowing the target and killer. In addition, if both Sherlock and Moriarty command the same pawn, Moriarty’s commands always win out, and will overwrite Sherlock’s. Moriarty can also always command pawns to move up to three spaces, even if the pawn is fatigued. Finally, they have access to a single special command, “assail,” which can only be used by the killer. When the assail command is executed, the killer will delay their action until the end of the round, and then move as close as they can to the target, and if their end location meets the criteria for committing murder, they will do so.
There are downsides to the assail command, however. Using it will reveal the killer and target, and if the killer does not reach the target that turn, there is a single final turn, after which if they cannot pull off the murder, Sherlock wins.
The Moriarty player also has one weakness: they cannot issue commands to the pawn designated as the target.
The Sherlock player has none of the advantages listed above. They start the game being able to see that 2-3 of the searchable areas have food in them. They don’t know anything about the rest of the nodes. They also start out not knowing who is the target, and who is the killer. There are only three advantages that the Sherlock player has over Moriarty.
For reference on why I included this photo: I played a game as Sherlock that went to 10 rounds. There was one obvious target, and an obvious villain. But, I thought to myself, what if the “target” wasn’t the villain, and the obvious villain wasn’t either, but Moriarty was instead using them to make us move the actual villain right next to the real target? AND I WAS 100% CORRECT. And this victory screen is from that game. Gigabrain strats.
The first is that the Sherlock players can issue more commands to pawns than Moriarty. The Sherlock player can also command any pawn, including the target. At the end of every day, they get additional information from “deductions,” where the game will tell Sherlock if the Killer is within 3 areas of the target, and based on that, narrow down potential killers and their victims.
The game has a really interesting balance of power and information going on. When the game starts, Moriarty knows everything, but has almost no “resources” (i.e., the killer doesn’t have a weapon, all of the pawns are fairly bunched together to prevent murder attempts, and they’re also all healthy making it easy to run the target away from the killer). On the flip side, the Sherlock player has the board state where they want it, (no wounded pawns, pawns all close to each other so Moriarty can’t move a single witness away from a murder attempt, no gas leaks, dogs, etc) but zero information about who they need to protect from whom.
As the game continues, the balance of power starts to shift. The balance of resources and board state shift into Moriarty’s favor as pawns split up to search the map for food, pick up weapons, or end up hungry if they fail to find any. However, Sherlock gets more and more information: each time the two clash by commanding a pawn, more info is revealed to Sherlock about can’t be the target. The end of day deductions also potentially cut out large swathes of possible murder/target combos.
I do want to talk about the game’s multiplayer modes a bit though. There can be multiple players on the Sherlock team, or multiple on both teams. So far I’ve played the 1v1, 2v2, and 3v1 modes, and I vastly prefer 1v1 and 3v1.
While the game supports up to four players, there can only ever be one player aligned with Moriarty, in 2v2. The second non-Sherlock player controls Irene.
In the 1v1 modes, the game is fairly straightforward, since each player knows who the other player is. 1v3 is where things get interesting, because as a Sherlock player, you start the game not knowing which of the other 3 players is playing Moriarty. I find this neat because it lends an extra level of trying to read other player’s moves and actions, which isn’t present in the base game, and also lets you play more mind games as Moriarty.
This brings me to 2v2, and why I don’t enjoy it or the Irene roll very much. When playing the Irene roll, you effectively play a weaker version of Sherlock, but on the side of Moriarty. You can only command one pawn, you can’t see the location of items, you do know the victim and target, but you can’t use the assail command. It can be amusing, but it still feels like a fairly weak roll.
On the flip side, it’s not much fun to play against Irene either. Unlike Moriarty, if Irene issues a command to a Pawn at the same time as Sherlock, it’s a toss up on whose action goes through. And even if Irene wins out, it doesn’t give any information to the Sherlock player about who is/isn’t a target.
Outside of that one thing, I don’t really have any issues with the game. The game’s text display can be a bit frustrating, and there isn’t really a good option between “Tell me all the rules each time something happens” and “Tell me nothing,” but that’s pretty much it.
So that’s CRIMESIGHT in a nutshell, an asymmetric social deduction game for up to 4 players. I find it incredibly fun, and setting up either clever kills, or blocking them makes you feel smart. If all of this sounds like your cup of tea, you can buy CRIMESIGHT here on Steam. It’s $20, and it’s worth it.
Stacklands is cool! But short. But also only $5! So I recommend it.
Click this image and get the game!
I like Stacklands. Like many things that I enjoy, I wish there was more of it. But for what it cost, and what I got, I’m satisfied, and I feel confident recommending it. I have a few minor gripes, but in my time playing, I didn’t encounter any major bugs or flaws. So yeah, I recommend it.
Stacklands is also the first time I’ve played something by Sokpop Collective that I’ve really liked. Before Stacklands I’d kind of written them off as an indie arthouse studio, partly because I’m an asshole, and partly because they didn’t seem to make games with gameplay.
I’ve used the word “Engine Builder” more than I usually would in recent writing, at least for writing about video games, but I think it’s pretty accurate for Stacklands. I guess you could call it a progressive management game instead, but that just sounds like your boss decided switch the team to a 4 day work week.
A clean, untouched board. Don’t worry, that won’t last long.
In any case, here’s how Stacklands works: to start, you’re given a single booster pack of cards. After opening it, you’ll get a few different cards, and a villager. The other cards are also important, but if all your villagers die, you lose.
At least to start, most cards require you to place a villager on them to generate a resource. That’s kind of a cop out, but let me give a few examples. The Berry Bush card does nothing on its own, but when a villager is placed on it, the villager will harvest 3 berries from that card before it disappears. The same is true for cards like the iron ore vein, or trees, though they give different resources. However, some cards like the lumberyard and quarry, can’t be exhausted. They can be harvested any number of times (though usually slower then the impermanent cards).
Villager working on a Berry Bush. Gif shamelessly stolen from the Stacklands itch.io Page.
So, how do you get cards ? There are two primary methods. The first is to buy card packs. You buy them with coins, and almost every card has a coin value. You can unlock several types of card back, and even if you die, pack types that you unlock stay purchasable. Each pack gives different subsets of cards, and while some are available in multiple packs, most pack types have at least one or two unique cards. They also have ‘ideas’.
Ideas are the game’s recipes. You only have to unlock them once in order to be able to use them in future runs. In order to use them, you place the required items on top of each other. A countdown starts, and when it finishes, you get the item from the recipe. One minor annoyance I have is that while you can use a recipe without discovering it, the game doesn’t reveal those recipes if you find them by luck or clever experimentation. You still have to get the idea card.
I like farms and carrots. Can you tell?
Villagers can die in a couple different ways. It’s possible that you don’t have enough food to feed them all at the end of a round, and so they starve to death. It’s also possible that an enemy just murders them. Enemies can spawn from exploring certain locations, or buying certain card packs. They can also be spawned by a mysterious portal, which show up on specific numbered rounds. There is one more way to spawn an enemy, but that one’s a bit secret, so I’m not gonna spoil it here.
There are also some other mechanics that I haven’t really covered here, including exploring, villager promotions, and storage limits, but I also don’t have anything useful to say about them in the context of this review.
I do have two gripes with Stacklands, one of which is legitimate, and the other I think might be a design choice, but it’s a design choice that I find really annoying! The second strikes me as something that might have been intended to function like that.
First, the legitimate gripe! When you mouse over a card pack to buy it, you’re given a slowly scrolling list of text in the bottom left corner that lists what you can get in the card pack, and I hate this. I hate having to wait for the scrolling to see what I could get, and I really wish I could either click on the card pack to see a list, or have the text box expand or something. I really wish I could see everything at once.
Second, the “I just don’t like this design choice” gripe. There are a variety of cards that produce cards either when you put a villager to work on them, or when you place various resources on them. It’s never really clear to me where the produced cards will end up. Let’s use the farm as an example. You can plant a crop on top of the farm card. When the farm card finishes ticking down, a new card is created. But when a farm produces, the new card(s) appear someplace next to the farm. Since I was growing carrots by the truckload, I then had to 1. Replant the carrots and 2. Keep moving carrots around to keep everything organized.
Like. A LOT of Farms.
Stacklands as a game isn’t long enough for this to become super tedious, and I feel like this is a specific design choice to make growing certain crop types more mentally taxing, but I did find it annoying.
Stacklands is $5 on itch.io, and $5 on Steam. Gametrodon editorial policy, dictates that “The people that make games should be the people that make money.” So buy it off itch.io rather than Steam. Look, you’re probs gonna buy off Steam anyway, so I’m going to make you google it.
Weird West claims to be an immersive-sim, but the only thing immersive about the game is the story and worldbuilding. Everything else is janky and awful.
When I first started writing this article, I’d played 8 or so hours of Weird West. At this point, having written most of it, and just editing the writeup, I’ve played about 18. Normally I don’t write about games until I finish them, but in its current state and price point, I just can’t recommend Weird West. I would really like to though, because the story and world building is top notch. Now, it’s possible I’ll play a lot more Weird West, and change my mind. Based on various story mechanics, I would estimate I’ve played through 50-60% of the game’s main path story.
And it is a good story! I’m putting this entire paragraph here, because I cannot praise the writing and world building of this game enough to do it justice in this writeup. The Weird West setting feels on par with something like the Fallen London setting, from well… Fallen London, but also Sunless Sea.
Unfortunately, Weird West’s writing is shackled to some truly awful gameplay, gameplay which I am going to tear into in a moment.
Weird West describes itself as an immersive sim, a genre I’m not super familiar with, but includes games such as Prey and System Shock. I decided to go read the Wikipedia page for the genre, and it describes it as a genre “that emphasizes player choice. Its core, defining trait is the use of simulated systems that respond to a variety of player actions which, combined with a comparatively broad array of player abilities, allow the game to support varied and creative solutions to problems, as well as emergent gameplay beyond what has been explicitly designed by the developer.“
I disagree heavily with Weird West calling itself an immersive sim. It does not meet this definition, because ‘Emergent Gameplay’ doesn’t feel present whatso-fucking-ever.
Almost all interactions with NPC’s are pre-scripted, and there’s no ability to for example, recruit anyone into your party. Even when you’re given optional side quests or routes, they show up in the quest tracker the same as everything else. They’re specifically present because the designer put them there.
Today, I woke up and chose violence. Because I can’t choose anything else.
Now it’s possible by emergent gameplay they mean “You can kill everyone and still go through the game!” This isn’t good enough in my book. It’s 2022. Killing a quest-vital NPC, and then finding their diary that contains the information you needed from them isn’t impressive. At best, I’d call it “robust.” You’ve made a game that handle the player being a psychopathic murderer well. I don’t know why I’d want to do that. Even if I wanted to, this brings me to the next point: the combat in Weird West is fucking awful.
Combat in Weird West is real time, and it’s primarily influenced by your abilities and your weapons. There are five weapon types, which from what I can tell are pistol, rifle, melee, shotgun, and one I haven’t encountered yet. There are also a variety of explosives. Your abilities require mana to use. The game doesn’t call it mana and it’s purple, but it’s mana.
Okay, so that’s enough about how combat works from a high level. Let’s talk about why it’s awful. While combat wants to be real time, the actual way the game controls is incredibly clunky on both mouse and keyboard, and controller. On mouse and keyboard, you use WASD to move, so you can only move in 8 directions, and you use your mouse to change camera direction. Except when you actually pull out your weapon to shoot, you can’t rotate the camera anymore, because now you can only control the direction your character is facing. So if you end up in a enclosed or complex space, the controls completely fall apart, and reorienting the camera to see the bear coming to maul you requires you to put your gun down, which you usually don’t want to do, since you’re trying to reload.
And it also just feels like shit. In addition, ability slots aren’t customizable, they’re hard bound to the weapon, so in order to use a base skill, you need to not have any weapons drawn, and holstering a weapon changes the menu the second you start the holster. I think I accidentally used the “slow down time” power at least a dozen times while trying to use the ability on my rifle, because I wanted to readjust the camera angle for a shot, which meant I HAD to holster my rifle.
In addition to this, Weird West has verticality. The game has a auto-aim feature for determining what you are aiming at, and locking on appropriately, except it doesn’t actually work well. There were several situations where it simply refused to let me aim at a sentry overlooking a clearing, and forced me to aim at a horse standing between us, simply because the line drawn between me and the target intersected the horse. To be clear: The horse was not between us on the horizontal plane. It was below us.
Artist Rendition
I ended up having to kill two horses before I was able to shoot sentry. Of course, it didn’t really matter that much, because the AI in Weird West is both janky and dumb as hell. Every enemy has apparently attended the “video game enemy school of guarding” which teaches that the only true way to stand guard is to wait around, and just because Tim walked away, and then you walked over and found him shot in the head, doesn’t mean there’s any reason to stay worried for more than 30 seconds. Now, to be fair, it’s not just the enemies that are stupid and buggy. I had a posse member who would cheerfully walk straight ahead, regardless of what was going on, whenever I entered a map instead of following me around. I’ve also seen other villagers just get stuck in doorways, repeatedly opening and closing the door.
Okay. So we’ve talk about why the game doesn’t feel like an emergent sim, since the only “emergent” portions of the game are related to combat, and the combat fucking sucks, because of the controls. Let’s go back to those controls for a moment, because they really suck. I covered combat earlier, but all the menus use that weird “large reticle to mouse over things” setup that Destiny seems to have popularized, and is somehow awful on both MKB and controller. Don’t make me “Hold down a key” to dismantle something, and tap the key to drop it.
Also, while we’re on the subject, here are some more minor gripes I have with the game. The menu to forge ingots/unforge ingots is shit, and unintuitive. The quest tracker only tracks 5 quests at a time, and doesn’t let you choose which five. Almost all random encounters are unavoidable combat, and the combat starts instantly, with no way to avoid them. The inventory is far too small for the amount of shit we’re expected to carry, and equipped items are still IN the inventory, meaning you can accidentally sell/breakdown equipped items, and have them eat an inventory slot. The game is also often buggy, with corpses spazzing out and launching themselves through walls, which is much less amusing when they have a key that’s the only way to open a jail cell with someone you’re trying to keep alive on the other side. Saves don’t go back far enough.
What does each of the options do? Why is it that disassembling ore makes you lose nuggets? Why is the UI set up so you can misclick immediately after clicking an option, and effectively just destroy resources?
So what does Weird West do well? Well, the story and writing are top notch, and are the only reason I’m still playing the game. While I suspect that I’m likely to be let down by the big reveal at the end, the smaller stories and individual side stories do feel meaningful, and I like the mechanics that allow characters you’ve saved (or otherwise helped) to show up to help you out.
The highest praise that I can give the writers is that I’m interested enough in it that I’m still planning to keep playing the damn game despite everything I’ve said above. After all, I already spent my $40, I plan to get what I can out of it.
I think a perfect summary of Weird West can be encapsulated in the following story. There are some very minor spoilers here, so if what you’ve read so far has convinced you that you want to play the game and go in cold, now would be a good time to stop.
The story of the first character you play as revolves around finding your kidnapped husband, ideally before he gets eaten by a flesh eating shapeshifter called a Siren, who hired said kidnappers.
At one point on this journey, the person I needed to shake down for information was a wealthy tobacco merchant/farmer, with a luxurious estate. After having the guards let me onto the estate, I talked with the merchant, and agreed to get him the deed to a farm whose owner wouldn’t sell. Having zero intention of getting and handing over the deed, I instead used my new found access to his property to case the joint, with the intention of doing a robbery later.
While walking around, one of the hired guns patrolling the facility asked me to deliver a letter for him. A love letter in fact, asking this other gunman to quit their jobs here, and run away together. I was more then happy to oblige, mostly out of the hope that if they did do this, there would be two less experienced marksmen present when I would be trying to break in several days later.
However, the second gunman couldn’t read, and so he asked me to meet him at a saloon in a town nearby to discuss it.
You see, it turns out that the nearby patrons are a wee bit homophobic, and by wee bit, I mean that the bar was about to devolve into a gunfight. (In retrospect, I don’t actually know how they knew the illiterate gunslinger was gay, it was never mentioned in any sense.)
I was then presented with 3 options on a menu. 1. Buy the homophobes a round to defuse the situation. 2. Challenge them to a fistfight. 3. Guns blazing.
As I didn’t have money to get everyone piss drunk, I instead opted for a fistfight, hoping that I would be able to just crack a few heads, and make an exit without committing a murder. Immediately after I did this, the game went into the aforementioned combat, and I realized two things. 1. I didn’t know how to actually equip fists. 2. Just because I intended to follow the spirit of fist a cuffs and knock these knuckleheads about didn’t mean that my posse did.
My companions instead pulled an Always Sunny, just started blasting, and several seconds later, the bar had turned into a gun fight.
Reload Save.
This time, instead of proceeding to the local Saloon, I went to the nearby General Store, pawned a bunch of shit, and then entered the Saloon. I was able to buy the assholes off to not start shit, and actually talk to the dude I was supposed to deliver this letter to. Except instead of asking me about the letter, he went into a dialogue tree as if he was still guarding the mansion, asking if I had the deed to be delivered.
Reload Save.
Sell shit. Buy liquor. Talk to gunman. This time, his dialogue options were related to the amorous letter, which I finally delivered, and read to him, as he wasn’t able to read. He was actually happy about the prospect, and decided to wait for his admirer/lover. They got a happy ending, and I had two less guards to worry on my breaking and entering.
I think this snippet does a good job of illustrating the experience of Weird West. It has incredibly strong writing and decently subtle worldbuilding, but its combat is a unfun jank fest, and it’s often buggy. The game claims to be an immersive sim, but once things escalate, there’s often no option other than violence to resolve things. That’s not a ” immersive sim,” that’s just a combat system with physics involved.
I’m going to play more Weird West. I find the story compelling, and I am curious about how it resolves. But that’s in spite of the game’s janky combat and bugs. Honestly, it’s fairly likely that at some point something will break badly enough, and I’ll just quit playing, and read the ending off a wiki somewhere. As such, I don’t currently recommend it.
If you still wanna play it, it’s $40 on all platforms. Console has it on PlayStation 4, and Xbox. For PC, it’s on Steam, Epic, and it looks like it will be on Gamepass in a month or two. For my money, I’d wait for that.
I like Satisfactory. There are a lot of other things I could say about it, but I spent days playing shapez.io, and Satisfactory is Shapez.io in 3D. That is to say, it’s a game about automation and factory construction, and the optimization of those systems.
The story of Satisfactory is that you are [EMPLOYEE#7190] for some gigantic space megacorporation called Ficsit, pronounced Fix-It, and you’ve been dumped onto some lush untouched wilderness to turn it into a giant factory. The reality is that it doesn’t matter that there’s a story, because there might as well not be one.
In any case, after being dropped down onto a planet, there’s an opening segment that amounts to a tutorial. After being introduced to the ability to construct buildings and craft parts, the player is free to do things at their own pace. There’s no real time pressure to get anything done. There is some hostile enemy wildlife, but even those are pretty non-threatening. Let’s talk about those for a minute, because Satisfactory is a game about building things, specifically giant factories, and everything that doesn’t contribute to that feels fairly vestigial and pointless.
Sure, there’s some hostile wildlife, and trees, and rocks, and whatnot, but they only matter to the extent that they get in the way of building. The AI for this wildlife is laughably stupid. The primary enemy, a sort of dog/armadillo thing, has constantly gotten stuck on loops trying to charge me, and then running in endless circles. It’s ineffectual enough to be forgettable, and annoying on the few instances when they actually do manage to connect a hit. The weird murder bumblebees are frustrating, but mostly pointless. Combat is just not very good.
Exploration is a somewhat similar boat. You can select from 4 different worlds to spawn into when you start the game, but they’re all fixed, not random. There are a few things that you can pick up as you venture around the world, and some crashed ships to find, but even those crashed ships are only interesting because they can give you access to hard drives, which give you research. Research lets you pick between various sidegrades/unlockable recipes.
Research is the game’s primary internal motivation. Most additional buildings, structures and tools are unlocked by research. The game itself consists of tiers, and completing the previous tier’s mission unlocks the next two tiers or so, and those tier’s associated missions. All of these missions involve feeding resources into something, usually your space elevator or remote dispatch drone.
Research serves a sort of tutorial gate, forcing the player to get familiar with what they currently have unlocked before they get access to more complex buildings. Let’s look at how the game handles electricity as an example.
Almost every building in the game requires electricity to actually do anything, from auto-miners to assemblers, to constructors. At the start of the game, after building the HUB, it comes equipped with two biomass burners. These can be powered by stuffing them full of leaves, and wiring them up to whatever needs power. Additional power requires building more biomass burners, which will also need to be kept supplied.
When you get far enough along the tech tree though, coal becomes available. Coal-powered generators can be set up to have coal routed directly into them with conveyors, so manual refills are no longer necessary, but in addition to coal, they also need water. This means pipes, and potentially, pumps or a pump system to make sure that water is getting where it needs to be fast enough.
Getting the most out of your power setup with coal can be a bit more involved than biomass burners. It requires at least 3 building types, a miner to dig up the coal, a coal burner, and a pump to supply the water. You might find after building your first set of generators that you need more power, and end up setting up a few more, only to realize that you’ve underestimated the amount of coal to keep things stable. Or maybe you redesign things, and forget to connect your pumps to the rest of the grid, causing a network wide outage, and forcing you to restart the coal plants semi-manually with an attached biomass burner. Maybe you’re burning too little coal, so you set up more burners, only to realize you’re now behind on water.
At its heart, Satisfactory is a game about optimizing systems. Optimize your inputs and outputs, remove bottlenecks, and try to make sure you have enough power throughout it all. While the exploration and combat feels rather week, the building gameplay is incredibly enjoyable. The game is still technically in Early Access, with a fair amount of “WIP” content, but nothing to make me hate it. You can find a link to the game’s site here, and I heavily encourage you to check it out.
P.S. When I started Gametrodon, I did so with the intention of not wanting the site to turn into the game equivalent of those baking websites that open with 3 paragraphs about how this recipe was the last surviving thing they have from their great grandmother, who got it from a mysterious shop next door that disappeared the day after they purchased it. But Satisfactory really makes me want to do one of those writeups, because it has a lot of things you could write about related to the game that aren’t really related to the game.
You could cover the fact that the game had timed Epic Store exclusivity when it first came out about 5 years, still requires some sort of weird ghostly cross-play solution to play online, and that switching that behavior requires you to contact customer support for some reason. You could point out how it’s kind of weird for a game to still be in “Early Access” after 5 years of development and patches, and the weird things that exist in the game because of that, such as the creepy fucking alien artifacts that will speak to you, and make scary noises, but have been a work in progress for over 3 years. Or maybe you could cover the sort of weird tone the game takes around construction and its theming. “Here’s a perfectly vibrant planet, full of unfucked nature, get down there in the space suit you’re renting from us [VALUED EMPLOYEE#3719] and fuck it up.” I’m not sure that the lyrics “Paved Paradise, Put up a Parking Spot” was supposed to be a How To guide. It’s vaguely uncomfortable, much like any worker placement board game where you realize that the “workers” you’re placing, based on the game’s setting and historical context, would have all been enslaved Africans. Not uncomfortable enough to make you stop playing immediately, but it does make you pause the next time you’re about to pull it out at family game night.
In short, there’s a lot of interesting hot takes you could make about Satisfactory. Fortunately the preceding paragraph of extended one-liners has gotten my desire to be Yahtzee Crosshaw off my chest. I don’t need fame and fortune from writing snarky hot takes about video games.
