Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Factorio

Currently clocking in as the highest user-rated Steam game of all time, Factorio represents one of the most successful indie game launches ever, with over 500,000 copies sold so far. If you haven't heard of it, it's basically a 2D factory building/management sim that tasks you with brazenly appropriating the natural resources of the planet you crash land on to construct a factory complex with the ultimate goal of constructing a replacement rocket to get the hell off the planet. You also build tanks and turrets and stuff to repel the native aliens trying to take their land and resources back.

I've only played about an hour so I'm not nearly ready to really write anything substantive about it (it doesn't help that dozens of hours of Mad Max hasn't exactly kept my puzzle-solving skills in top form), but the think that stuck out to me so sharply was weirdly similar to real life the setup for Factorio is. I can't be the only a little weirded out by this, right? I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and hope that there's a different aspect to it that will present itself, but the way this game frames resource grabbing and killing of native creatures as intrinsically good actions is... uh... interesting.

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