The main focal point of Techtonica now related to digging to later floors and leveraging the Elevator. In the EA versions, the Elevator was the final part unlocked and teased more content. Well it’s here now.

Basics

You unlock the elevator in the tutorial on floor 1. It teaches you to insert mining bits to dig to the next floor, and that’s about it. In truth, the elevator does quite a bit more.

• Every elevator floor has power floors surrounding, and each of these transmits power from other floors. Unfortunately it doesn’t do a good job of explaining how power is transmitted in 2 groups – floors 1 to 11, and then 12-16.
• You can interact with the elevator to manually insert or remove 1 stack of something on a given floor.
• Every floor has 30 ports that allows
  • Exports to any other floor (adjust the # above the port). No need to filter, so you could technically have a sushi belt (a belt with different things on it), but I’d recommend not given that you’ll create backlog eventually.
  • Unfiltered imports (adjust the # to the floor you are on). As these are unfiltered, you need a filter inserter, and eventually a stack filter inserter to only remove the item you want.
• There are 2 more ports for mining bits. You can only insert 1 stack at a time across both, so in reality there’s no need for 2 at all.

Intermediate

Given the basics above, the elevator should become a bus hub of sorts between floors. What will likely happen instead is the following:

• You will designate a floor as a main factory. This will likely be Victor, but it may be another.
• You will designate a floor as a power generator – I’d suggest Freight given the abundance of water.
• You will designate a floor for the Core Composers, shipping research cores to take up space. This can be the same floor as power generation as they can be placed above.
• You will designate more than 1 floor as a distribution centre.
  • This floor will intake items, store them, then distribute them to the proper floors. You need to do this for Blast Charges and Biodiesel.

Complex Scale

Understanding how to work with the elevator, and it’s limitations, will impact your ability to scale. The real challenge in all this is that production chains will massively change over time as you unlock more research. If you want to build at scale, you’re going to have to dedicate entire floors to a specific purpose, and send them to a logistics floor.

• Multiple mining areas shipping chunks/bricks.
• A foundry floor for basic items. This includes all ingots, slabs, and bricks. Saturated belts are fine here.
• A fuel generation floor. Initially only for Biobricks, but eventually Biodiesel. It is amazing how much material you need for Biodiesel.
• A plant-based floor. This will generate a LOT of byproducts and if my math is correct, be the largest consumer of power.
• A building logistics floor. This is a different beast, as you want to send the items to the elevator storage so that you can draw down from it on any floor. This part sucks because any item on a belt heading to the elevator is wasted. Stick em in containers instead and head to the floor to fill up.
• A research floor. This may seem straightforward, but the scale of material needed is eye opening.
• 2 intermediate construction floors. 2 simply because there’s so many materials.

The challenge with this model is that you will lack information on throughput. You may be building 30 Relay Circuits a minute but have no real indication of how many are being consumed.

In the EA game you needed all of this, but on a single map which caused rather significant performance issues. With the floor model you are presented with the option of doing 90% on a single floor, or spreading out the love. You can most certainly take option 1 and reach the end of game (I did) but if you want to make it scalable, you’re going to need to build on multiple floors. I know I needed to build a logistics floor for fuel + blast charges… shipping each of those to 5+ floors takes up too many ports.

Some bits of 1.0 are related to Tier 9 production, which is brand spanking new and with my new save, I can’t really comment upon aside from saying it looks to have taken the scaling challenge and double dared it.

For the non-tier 9 stuff, there have been recipes tweaks, node changes, and balancing across the game. Net result is more stuff to collect, and generally simplified recipes and math. Alternative recipes have been tweaked to actually be useful! It’s quite good changes all around. New items and things are quite fascinating. SAM Ore, Mercer Spheres and Somersloops now have a practical use, and one that is frankly game changing.

Dimensional Depots are virtual containers that allow you access to materials without actually having them in your inventory. You need SAM Ore + Mercer Spheres to create boxes in supply chains to automatically add them to the storage, and you also need them to upgrade the boxes themselves. At max upgrades, you can virtually hold 5 stacks of any item, and re-upload them at a rate of 240/minute. With the exception of massive foundation layouts, this means that any tweaking of layouts can be done without worry of inventory levels. No more running out of stuff and having to trek back for something stupid like 12 rods.

Alien Power Augmenter is a power structure that boosts your total power generation by 10% (up to 30% if you feed it end-game items). It takes 10 Somersloops to create, and with 106 total available, you can’t build infinite amounts. 10% doesn’t seem like much, but let’s say you add 5 for 50%. That’s half your power output for very, very little cost.

Production Augmenter is a new entry for machines that double their output for no additional input but 4x the power cost. Hitting a bottleneck? Throw a few in the chain and quickly solve it. Want to cut space elevator production in half? Boost the final items.

Teleporters allow you to link 2 portals anywhere on the map for a major power cost and a new item that requires 1 Nuclear Pasta (!!). I had a mod that did this, but was limited to tier 5 components and for practical reasons meant I didn’t need hyperloop canons (which are cool but dumb). This new version is worse in almost every way (availability, cost, complexity) and I fully expect it to get tweaked substantially over time. Just like the Parachute had near-zero usage due to the cost, this is conceptually sound but practically useless. (Listen, I get the argument against fast-travel. I really do. Exploration should be meaningful. Running back to base for a stack of concrete half the map away is the dumb we don’t need. The guesswork in a hyperloop canon is something that can go in a corner.)

New Cosmetics in the shop and HUB. You can change your looks, and have new paint options for the base. Not needing to collect flowers to paint is AMAZING.

Straight Belts are now an in-game option when building. This seems minor, but from a visual perspective it cuts the time laying belts down by at least half, if not more. Also applies to railways (CTRL) to make super straight lines. YAY!

Clipping is less an issue now than before. For those who don’t care what it looks like as long as it works, this is heaven. It’s also the only way a main bus can work without drinking yourself silly.

Drones can use any fuel, not just batteries. They go faster with better fuel, but now you can have backup options instead of a totally crippling production failure.

Mk6 Belts are here (1200/min). The costs are crazy, so for practical reasons you’ll only use them on the output of 250% Mk3 Miners and then split them to Mk5 belts (2x 780/min). So… win?

Blueprint Designers have Mk2 and Mk3 now, which go from 4×4 to 5×5 and 6×6. I guess this has some use for Nuclear Power Plants or Particle Accelerators. I don’t see why this needs upgrades, it should just be 1 version. And a larger one at that.

Overall, 1.0 brings a rather significant set of changes to the game across all spectrums. Lots of quality of life changes, more flexibility in production chains, better crafting tools and a brand new tier of tech (first since like 2019). I would have easily argued the last major patch (v8) was enough to launch, but this is more like an expansion.

If you haven’t played, you should. If you have played and put it aside, hard to think of a better time to spin up a new factory!

This is more for me, and honestly maybe the search engine virtual gods get this to the devs. From a prior post I mentioned that Techtonica has a communication issue, which perhaps is an identity issue. The launch of Laser Games (a weird FPS mode) instead of any news whatsoever on factory improvements wasn’t well received. In that space, I want to collect my thoughts on what should be on the future roadmap.

First and most importantly. Techtonica does not work well for large factories. You will have 2 machines producing wire, at MOST. This is fine as almost all the game has no need for it, but the late game portion would certainly benefit a lot from it.

New

Things that should be added to the game, that are likely resource intensive and will take time.

• Resource Tier
  • Currently there are 2 tiers for minerals. I don’t think this game needs liquid resources, but it does need a 2nd tier for plant-based production. These are closed-loop items, and needed to optimize the 2nd tier of minerals. The issue is that it is not currently possible to have enough of this and it needs a 2nd tier.
• Blast Tier Resources
  • Not all material can use Blast Tier resources, so new options are required allowing you to remove all first generation miners.
• More Inserters
  • Stack filters are amazing, but they need filter options for mass production chains.
• Research Station
  • Each station unlocks a new tier of research and base building options. Another is needed. Or perhaps, some use for the XRAY station as it currently has none outside of research unlocks (which could simply be a locked door instead).
• Storyline
  • The game “ends” at the large elevator, a tremendous opportunity is present to expand the types of biomes present (only 1 currently), as well as more terraforming options. I think the MOLE is awesome, more please.
• Blueprints
  • This is less important at lower scales. There are some niche use cases (Blast Charges).

Change

Things that should be fundamentally changed as they don’t work. These are hard to do, but less so than new content as their purpose needs clarity.

• Inserters & Complex Crafting
  • Everything that requires 2 ingredients can be optimized with Stack Inserters.
  • Everything with 3 or more ingredients is a complex build, requiring direct belt inputs, rather than a bus. Either Fast Long inserters need to be added, or the recipes need to be modified.
• Research Cores
  • The amount of space required to store these is beyond excessive. Making them smaller is not an option, but alternative storage options or compression is required for late game.
• Trains / Mass Transport
  • These are borderline OP once they are running and researched. However, they only work on 1 product at a time, meaning late game builds have dozens of trains and massive manually constructed logistic stations. It’s 5x larger than it needs to be. Logic filters would help.
• Power Options
  • Tier 2 crank generators are 10x more powerful than their normal cousins, and something should be applied in the mid tier as scaling is an issue. I had over 60 normal cranks, and they were replaced with 7 tier 2. Transferring power between locations is also painfully complicated, and 99% of the time easier to simply use power floors for super long distances.
  • Atlantum should be an optional power source, it’s not used for much currently.
• Concrete Production
  • Base building is cool! Having to pre-construct from a list of 50+ items is not, and your inventory cannot hold it all. This should be a concrete base item, a steel base item, and paint. Create a building tool that uses these products as base material to construct different shapes.
• Research Acquisition
  • I like that you need to scan to unlock new research items. I like that most of these are locked behind rooms with material requirements to unlock. I absolutely hate that some research are in hidden caverns, under flower piles. The OmniSeeker tool needs to point towards missing research, as a sort of compass (it used to).
• Exploration
  • Finding hidden nooks is amazing. There’s a pile of hidden stuff in the lower east corner. You need to dig like a madman to get to it. It looks amazing! And once you’ve seen the space and scanned it, you’ll never return. The entire game is based on one base at Victor, and some storage near the elevator (or a late game factory). It needs to leverage exploration to use the space explored.
• Jetpack
  • It needs a vertical climb option, even if it needs Atlantum fuel to get there. Vertical factories are a nightmare to manage without it.

Optimize

Mostly math-based changes, where the content itself is minor but the impacts are significant. Almost exclusively QoL, which is where Factory games shine.

• Mining ratios are generally OK.
• Crafting ratios are ok in the early to mid game. At late game, you get into spaghetti as the ratios are fractional and not balanced. 7: 2.5 : 1 production chains require a hub/spoke model, which due to the way transport options are present, it just doesn’t work.
• Alternative crafting recipes need to be more efficient. Especially the plant-based ones. They currently shift bottlenecks around, rather than getting rid of excess material.
• Blast Core ratios are less about optimizing and more about absolutely stupid belt pathing. Getting 3 blast cores every 12 second to a blast miner feels like magic instead of math.
• Seeds. There are not enough in the game in order to have a late-game build. They are not consumable, so it’s a closed loop and therefore math exercise. Either a new tier is added here, or a 10x ratio applied to the crafting path.
• Stack Sizes need to be standardized to common levels. Say 5 (buildings), 50 (mid-tier material), 200 (base material), 500 (construction material). Why stack sizes of similar material are all different is mind blowing to me. It makes transporting things to unlock doors a pain when you need 20+ inventory slots of stuff. It also messes up storage containers.
• Item destruction needs some tweaking. I’ve got a factory setup just to burn through excess materials. I truly think Satisfactory has the best model here with the SINK. It also takes much too long to unlock, so you’re going to have too much plant material for a long, long time.
• Sand/Gravel needs a real purpose. Currently two uses, a very complex crafting process for alterative recipe or destroying things. I should not need 5 steps of crafting for an alternate recipe.

I think Techtonica has more potential than other games, if only because the foundation itself seems more sound. Clearer communication and a more firm roadmap can help guide the player feedback for quicker development. It’s clear after playing that there’s a ton of potential here, I really hope the devs are able to focus their efforts and reach it.

I have many opinions about Early Access games. Nearly as many as there are EA games in fact! I would say that in most cases, EA games are interesting incubation projects and investment in that space is solely related to my desire to help a small dev team try out an idea. I am far from an angel investor, as my only return is the ability to experience that idea (and maybe, maybe, influence it). Then there are outliers, horrid ones and beautiful ones. For every Valheim there are a thousand or more bad apples. How many Stardew Valley clones do we need?

V Rising is much more like Valheim in terms of getting the essence of genres down together, in this case survival + ARPG. First and importantly, both of those genres are notoriously complex to balance. Survival is just… it’s having a moment. The concept of building things, then using those things to collect more things to build more things, all while not dying is the rage. Finding the balance between reward and challenge is the hurdle. Things like Rust where you can lose dozens of hours of progress, well that just plain sucks. Others like Enshrouded where it just rains power, maybe a bit less so. ARPGs well, that is all about the flow of moment to moment battles. If it isn’t responsive, if you can’t make out heads or tails of what’s going on, then it just doesn’t work. Where survival and ARPGs intersect is the idea of RNG loot. You can’t just get lucky and get a god sword in a survival game, it would break everything.

V Rising has found a way to balance both, where your survival and power is gated through progress on bosses. Each boss increases in difficulty (as does the area of the world in which they reside), providing more crafting options and therefore more power options. You’ll get new spells, new modifications, new weapons, new armor, new minions. It generally works. It absolutely shines as a co-op PvE game. It has the construct of PvP games (I am avoiding that altogether, for reasons). As a solo game, there are periods of very high frustration, primarily due to the lack of scaling based on number of players. That effectively means that some boss fights can go on for quite a while as a battle of attrition, as the power curve is almost always putting you at a disadvantage. With very few exceptions, each boss takes multiple attempts until you figure out their mechanics. Some take many more attempts. Some are frankly walls due to tuning, or perhaps a very clear reminder that this game is meant for 2 or more players on a boss.

Two parts to that. First, each boss has a clearly indicated power ranking. You have one as well, based on equipped gear. Improved gear comes from killing bosses and unlocking crafting options, or somehow you get RNGsus to bless you with a random recipe (that you likely cannot make due to crafting options). The end result is that you’re nearly always 5 or so power behind in each fight. But 5 you say, that’s a small number! Each point your are below, you deal 4% less damage and take 4% more, so that’s a 20% penalty both ways. Second is the environment. Some bosses are solitary, some are not. Some patrol. Some are inside or outside. No two battlefields are the same, so mechanically you are fighting the environment (and sun = death here) as much as the boss itself. This has a net effect of every boss being substantially different which is an amazing experience!

Combat mechanics are solid. A bunch of weapons, each with strengths and weaknesses that fit your style. There are a ton of spells, though I’d argue few have much use outside of niche situations. For the most part, an offense spell and defense (shield) spell are core. It takes a long time to figure out how healing can be integrated into your gameplay. This is a game that rewards tactics and drastically punishes brute force.

I think the castle building portion is extremely well done. You feel like you have a lair with flair. The progression of the various mechanical bits sort of works, but you end up with a tad too many machines for my likes, which makes the castle have a much more practical approach. The game plays on a Steam Deck, or a controller. Both put you at a serious disadvantage in complex combat due to the way the camera works and how some spells need to be lead, which is infinitely faster and more accurate with a mouse. One boss in particular was 20 failures on the Steam Deck, then a first attempt clear on the PC.

The game has a very rudimentary teleporting function, with about 10 gates strewn about a fairly large map. Rudimentary in the context of 75% of the items you can collect cannot be teleported, meaning long treks back to base. I get this construct in the first couple zones. It doesn’t impact corpse runs, so this is just the huffing-it-back-to-base part. Sure, you can move your base – which is a simple item to trigger, but honestly 30+mins to put everything back in place – but why? I’d strongly recommend that in the server setting options you allow teleporting with all items. Trust me, you’ll spend MORE than enough time corpse running, you won’t need it for farming too! That said, if you want to travel faster, find a horse with 10+ speed, and 6+ acceleration.

Overall, V Rising is a rather interesting game and one that successfully navigated the Early Access quagmire to come out well ahead. The game manages to blend two complex gaming genres into something that is smooth, enjoyable, and challenging. If you can play co-op, then you’re going to have a blast! Solo work, expect a fair chunk of challenge throughout. A few more thoughts to share on this coming…

Levels. Levels everywhere.

I’ve unlock Tier 4 research, which is a rather significant milestone as the game pivots from terrestrial to space-based. Well that’s a stretch… see, you crashed from a space station and you need to build connectivity to progress. It’s a rather massive shift of objectives, where all prior efforts were simply “build more stuff”, you now have major (and massive I may add) structures to build.

The main challenge at this point is simply scale. Where before most things needed 1 to 10 material to craft, these things require hundreds. So optimization and spaghetti belts is the name of the game! Two terms that run counter to each other.

I find in most of these games you reach a point where you just simply realize your initial design is bad. Like really bad. DSP has you figure this out once you leave your planet, when you’re essentially forced to scale up and build new. It also has great tools to help. Satisfactory’s main burnout factor is exactly this, where you know hours of work in a design have to be redone because all of a sudden you need to mine 12,000 copper instead of 300.

Foundry does not yet have built-in rebuilds. You need to tear down and restart. It also doesn’t deal well with mini-factories because the raw materials are used for a ton of stuff (well, not Technum so far). Plus, if you do want to rebuild, then scale becomes a very, very interesting challenge as inventory limits (like Satisfactory) make things complicated. You’re going to need a scalable main hub. This thing has tons of belts (2 wide, one for the belt, one to split) in order to create material for later use (which you will store, or perhaps add to the belts. You may get lucky and a material is only used for one thing (say…Ignium Powder). Maybe.

The general concept is base materials, sent to belts. Then you fork off the belts (with splitters) to craft whatever items you need. Maybe you add them back to the belts if they are used down the line. So you’ll start with 4 base materials, then 8, and by the time you reach tier 4 you’ll be near 10 items (or 20 wide).

The good! news in this is that the map has no size limits, so you can build as much as you want as long as you clear the trees. The less good news is that the more you spread out, the more you need to travel (and the more belts you need). The medium news here, and frankly logistical craziness, is that you will likely need to truck from a 1000m away the base material to feed this machine.

So guess what my next plan is? Oh, it will be glorious!

I had put Satisfactory aside for a while, mainly due to the frustration of the map. That’s really what the core of it is, because getting from point A to point B is painfully long, and if you have any vertical walls to traverse, the tools are atrocious.

In something like Skyrim, you travel somewhere, unlock fast travel and sort of forget about the travel path next time. Well, maybe you don’t because there’s some sort of emergent gameplay along the path, or some random chance at something. Satisfactory has none of that. The world looks amazing, but every single thing is placed with purpose and once you’ve found that purpose, the path between points is simply padding.

So I started to think about why the map was so frustrating, or more specifically why I needed to engage with it so much. The answer boiled down to two main things. First, the world-building tools are quite limited, in particular regarding trains (the slope limits make some paths much too complex), so that you’re having to be extra creative to build things. A nuclear plant is going to be 99% over water, because it’s the only open space you can use at that size. Second, the puzzle pieces provided to build things are too limited – your inventory is simply too small. The map is so darn big that you’re going to need thousands of meters of belts, but can only carry a few hundred.

The answer to this is mods. Or was mods. So:

• Increased inventory. Found a mod that gives 300 inventory slots. It is crazy how useful this mod is.
• SMART! which allows building multiple buildings at once. It used to provide the ability to link belts too, but that broke in v8. This cuts factory build time by a good 75%, especially if I want to line up splitters/mergers above ground.
• Teleporters. Once you unlock plastic, you can unlock the ability to build teleporters. I cannot explain how amazing this is. I remember having to walk nearly 10 minutes from one corner of the map to another. Amazing.
• Flight. Ok, this was a mod but has been a game option since v8. It makes building things so much more fun and removes the inventory management nightmare of the actual jetpack. It does trivialize Power Slug collection. Which I am ok with because you never needed it at the start of play anyways, and by end game, you had near infinite jetpack fuel.
• Unlock all alternate recipes. This was a mod, not an option in v8. Alternate recipes are variants to construction that provide alternatives depending on your available materials. Some are absolute bangers in improvements, some are more of a mess. Unlocking them meant exploring, pulling power cables all over the map, and having inventory of dumb things… then waiting 10 minutes for RNG to unlock something. I get doing it once, but it’s a good 8-10 hours saved.
• Docile creatures. The PvE elements in this game are pointless. Effectively it knocks you down cliffs. So turn this off. Also a game setting thankfully.

I am conscious that most of this reduces the value of the bespoke world building the devs have applied here. Things were placed with purpose, and the first time I went exploring, it was a truly fun journey. But this is like a puzzle, the first time you get it done, it feels great. But if I put that puzzle as a requirement to open your fridge, then you would have a different opinion quickly.

Does it allow me to focus on the parts I enjoy, like building big factories? Heck yeah! Is that one of the best parts of this game? Double heck yeah! Is laying belts and running out of material and having to trek 20 minutes back and forth fun? Anyone? If I’ve got the mats, let me use the mats! Especially when we’re talking about laying out factories with 40+ smelters.

Tangent – I still think not having the ability to pre-fab buildings is a bad choice, but also realize that it’s made entirely because of inventory / scaling issues. I’d rather have 15 manufacturers in my bag than the mats for 15. Also means that you’ll build a wall of containers holding mats to collect from.

Back to the topic. Exploration is good. Once it’s explored, it doesn’t need exploring anymore. I want to conquer that exploration, to tame it, or to simply avoid it altogether. This isn’t Valheim where the environment itself is the challenge, and you gradually get better at defending against it. I want to build factories that reach the sky! That sprawl to the end of view! That pump out so many iron plates that the planet’s gravity shifts as a result! Thank goodness for an absolutely rock star mod community.

I like production optimization games, what can I say?

Foundry is a voxel based production optimization game, a sort of weird hybrid of Minecraft and Factorio. It had a sneak peek demo of sorts last October, and I’ve been somewhat intrigued since. I like both of those games, and the dev company is a relatively small Canadian one, so why not give it a go.

At their core, this genre of game is Excel with graphics. The goals are about making numbers go up, which feed into other numbers, who also need to go up. And then somewhere in the middle realizing “what a sec, I need WAY more numbers” and truly appreciating the scale of the games.

One important part about Excel (or math in general) is that every new variable added can exponentially increase complexity. So the pace of added variables has to be one that’s controlled and mathematically sound. You can’t have one recipe need 5x and the next one need 100x. It’s also bad form to add so many variables and the inability to balance them – which is mostly found through a starter bus. In these games you need to produce everything (foundations, belts, smelters, etc..) and the number of variables is directly related to the ability to ingest. e.g. If a machine can only accept 2 materials, you can only have 2 materials.

So what does Foundry bring to the table?

• Voxels, which is a fancy word for grid-based exploration in 3D. Think Minecraft.
• Tons and tons of decorations, all from the start. Neat.
• Procedurally generated worlds. Every world is different, so there should be inherently less complex construction as the world is variable.
• Multi-player. While I haven’t done this, I can see tremendous value.
• Exhaustible resource nodes. You can’t just mine the same spot forever.
• Foundations to power everything. You need factory floors, which is a very annoying bit as your character can only jump 1 voxel.
• Loaders. These are initially limited to 1 space, then within an hour 2. The 3 space loader takes a while to unlock.
• Many machine types. Smelters, miners, assemblers, casters, pumps, etc…Many. Frankly, too many.
• Storage and the ability to limit. Used for buffering. This is great!
• Farming. Sort of. It takes more energy than it produces, not sure of the point yet.
• Research cores and stations. This is how you move along the tech tree to unlock more things to do.
• Low voltage and High voltage power. I dislike this a lot, more on it later.
• Subterranean mining. This is is interesting.
• Tasks. Not much for now, but an attempt at world-building.

Looking at the above, you can see a ton in common with Factorio, Techtonica and Dyson Sphere Program. There isn’t much in common with Satisfactory here.

Voxels – This is more related to world construction & destruction. You’re given a hand drill and you get to drill (or blow up) blocks to make open spaces. It’s also used to clear trees and rocks, that block foundations. In 99% of cases, your lack of vertical mobility means you need to go through things rather than above them (e.g. mountains). It’s interesting but finicky, in particular when laying down belts.

Procedurally Generated World – The map is infinite in size. “Seed hunting” make little sense. There’s no long-term travel options (e.g. trains or others), which means belts everywhere!

Foundations – You need a LOT. And when you think you have enough, you need more.

Loaders – They initially only grab 1 space away, then you get a 2 space loader which is essential for a main bus. The 3 space loader is a long ways out, and generally not needed.

Research Cores – I really like this model. You can self-direct the path of advancement. The research tree needs some serious QA work. One panel for crafting, one panel for mech, one panel for decorations would be ideal. Research is also a major bottleneck near mid-game, where the scale of later (tier 3+) items require a TON of material.

Machines – All machines have a config panel that is placed in such a way that if you put loaders in front, you cannot read it. They do what you think they do. It would be nice to have throughput data more obvious than 4pt text. Machine ratios can be a bit weird.

Low Voltage – High Voltage – This is how you power things. Most basic things need low voltage, which is simple enough to manage. You can also convert high voltage to low, which replaces early tech. Cool. You cannot convert low to high, and the only way to transport high is through power poles & wires, which have a 15 square limit. So like 50 power poles to get to from a generator to an extractor, which is 2-3x more than it should be. I’m sure this will be tweaked. Oh, and a platform can only take 1 transformer at a time, which is 25MW, which means “pods” of power. It breaks up foundations for a purpose I have yet to grasp. Oh, and power pole can’t clip, so your best bet is to dig them underground. I guess this is the ‘new to the genre’ part.

Belts – This is a weird thing to me. Straight belts are fine. Want to turn, you need to manually select. If you want to go up or down though, you need a different type of belt and cannot click-drag them in place. If you want to split or merge, you need a specific tool. It’s finicky. And you need a ton of them.

Advanced Pieces – The concept of a main bus lasts about 1 hour, until you need to build mk 2 belts due to insufficient plate throughput. You’ll quickly need to build those upgraded belts, but to actually do so needs some ninja belt pasta because it’s an offshoot of the main bus. Once you unlock steel production, you’ll simply conclude that a main bus doesn’t work here in the traditional sense, and you’ll have “pods” of construction. This is advanced logistics, and while I do expect it, it comes a little too early here.

Elevators – I think this is a really cool part of the game, where conceptually you dig a giant hole, put an elevator, then mine below ground. I say conceptually. Digging that hole requires explosives, and the field of view means you’re likely to fall into said hole with no way out (Jetpack is the only practical option). Then actually putting an elevator in needs substantially more room than you would think as it will be blocked by seemingly random things. And finally, once you do have an elevator in the hole…now you need a cave to mine and power within. The finicky parts of this are just ooooozing potential.

I’m curious as to how this game as an EA will move forward. It really doesn’t do enough to distinguish itself from its peers, where I’d argue Techtonica is the closest comparison and is a few years ahead. On the very positive side – it doesn’t crash, is fairly well optimized, has good art style, is fluid, and has generally “good bones”. If my gripes are all about quality of life, I think that’s an amazing achievement.

I would like to think that we all have a switch in our brain that likes to see things improve. Incremental games are like a scratching tool made specifically for that itch, where the focus is almost purely on numbers getting bigger with tactical decisions. The word ‘prestige’ is more widely spread now.. mainline games call it New Game+, but with incrementals its the mechanic of restarting, but having to do this a dozen or more times to reach the end.

(The) Gnorp Apologue is a very simplistic game where you control gnorps trying to break a rock. As you progress, you get more options to create more wealth. Get enough wealth, get a talent point, which unlocks more options. The joy of this game is that the source of wealth changes as the game progresses, so that an early obvious choice becomes rather useless later on. Your strategy changes multiple times, and there are multiple options to get all the way through. Personally, I went fire arrows, guns, rockets, and then grenades (for weak points). There’s a wonderful feedback mechanic where the screen just gets filled with more stuff. Yeah, I like more stuff! Game is about $10, enough to reach the end of it all by hours 8 or so. There’s replay options with time-trials, or different builds. It also plays decent on the Steam Deck.

To The Core has you piloting a ship meant to mine various planets and destroy their cores. Each core you destroy causes a planet prestige where it gives 3x the resource but has 8x the health. This is NOT an idle game, with a rather substantial amount of tactical decisions required. I will say that the first hour is a right slog, where progress is very limited. You’re given minor tools, little information, and progress is very incremental without feedback on progress. Once you move to the 2nd stage (of 5), you get a better appreciation for targeted activities to reach specific goals. e.g. I want more health, I need more coal, I will farm the coal. As you progress on this path, more options present themselves – like having rockets, or poison, or electrical orbs. You eventually reach a point where you don’t even use your ship, just let the doodads do all the mining for you. The largest difference here compared to (The) Gnorp Apologue, is that the progress tree is hidden until you hit certain milestones. This honestly sucks, because some of those milestones are useless, but gate amazing things. Had I known that farms were a thing, darn tooting I would have beelined for it! The game has a decent concept, but the execution is a bit wonky. Also, it does not play well on the Steam Deck due to mouse/keyboard commands and needing active play.

You may be sensing a general theme in gaming of late, where smaller dev teams are focusing on ideas rather than graphic fidelity. I’ve got a post on that coming up, but in the widest space possible I think it fairly obvious that people would much rather play a great game with bad graphics than a bad game with great graphics.

Anyhoot, incrementals that have an end, great mechanics, and a solid loop, and have figured out how to scale are worth my $$$. Many more out there to try!

If you saw the cult film, then this may ring a bell. Now there’s a metroidvania (ish) game that’s out and about, and indie in the name of the game. I am a fan of the genre, I liked the movie, and I have an itch to support small dev groups, so I picked this one up.

The game is about 10hrs or so to complete, with a decent chunk of content done. I’m sure you could blast through it in half that, or spend another 5 or so hours trying to hit 100%. Following the genre, you start off weak, get various upgrades, which unlock different areas. But this is more like Mega Man, in terms of you have 4 options, pick the one you want, and the items therein may be better designed for another boss. I opted for Sewer, Skatepark, Junkyard and then Wastes. Each areas gives you a skill and a weapon – the Sewers has by far the best skill, and the Wastes a ridiculously OP weapon.

You can get a bad ending, or head to the final dungeon and what is arguably a super boss. That one was a mix of frustrating due to some weird RNG.

First, this is not Hollow Knight or Blashphemous. I am friggin’ spoiled for having played those games and put the bar so high I can barely see it. Turbo Kid is a smaller game in almost all respects, and does a decent job of hitting its targets.

The difficulty of the game starts very high, then peters off as you get more health, then spikes again at the final levels. Most of this is related to finicky controls that are not precise enough for involved platforming. You can kill every boss without taking a hit (once you figure out their patterns) due to dodge rolls, but the environmental hazards are the real pain in the butt. Enemy spawners can fill your screen and the knockback effect of contact can throw you into blades and your doom. The video above shows the use of a bike, and while true, this has the depth of control of Excitebike – especially when you are attempting the various trials.

There are minor quests, a battle arena (ugh), vendors, slotable passive upgrades, and a decent amount of stuff to find. In most games of this genre, I like going back to explore more fully the world, but here every zone looks pretty much the same, and navigating the world requires near constant use of the map as a result. I really like the ideas this game is trying to reach, but the execution is a tough one. Maybe with a few patches, these quibbles will be addressed.

It’s an interesting take on the genre, its a rather small dev team (30 people) and I still think it was a good purchase. Plus, works great on the Steam Deck!

First, always bet against this IP. I have no plans game releases for Sony, but good golly, they seem to release right next to other major IPs. Which stinks, because this is a real crown jewel in open world games for a dozen reasons. It’s now out on PC, which is the full package, and is both optimized and looks absolutely spectacular.

(Optimization Note: PC ports have had some absolutely notorious optimization issues. H:FW is a glorious exception on the main game – as it was designed for PS4. The Burning Shores expansion was built for PS5 and has a unique asset caching process, which can cause massive slowdowns if it doesn’t load properly. Aside from that, holy cow does this game look & play amazing.)

The original game was a very interesting take during the “put bows in everything” phase of game design. The general storyline blended social issues and hard sci-fi, with very impressive combat mechanics. The game looked amazing, and had a rather groundbreaking way to manage field of view and memory allocation. Issues were mostly around character art, and the Ubisoft-put-icons-everywhere-on-the-map minutiae. The sequel came out in 2022 on the PS5, so I won’t rehash too much on that front. I still don’t own a PS5 because I know that Sony will release the 1st party games eventually on PC, so the value-add there is quite low.

Forbidden West improves on nearly every single aspect of the prior game. The story is more coherent, with a relatable protagonist (Aloy may be my favorite female game character), with more world flavor and better design. The enemies have more variety and added tactical options. The skill tree adds more options for customization based on your preferred playstyle. Customization/crafting is both streamlined and easier to track. Accessibility options are amazing. Questing has more variations. You get a glider! It also leans much less on the old-world story as a crutch, as that story was complete in the prior game. It’s all about the now and what’s next.

The combat mechanics here are really quite fun. Each enemy can be addressed in multiple paths – speed, rewards, or brute force. Speed is achieved through exploiting physical and elemental weaknesses. If you do this properly, 1 or 2 arrows may be enough to take down almost any enemy. This is all but required when you have multiple opponents. Equipment becomes key here, as you need as many elemental attack options as possible. Hunting for rewards is a risk/reward activity where you are aiming to maximize item drops for crafting purposes. This only works with Tear damage, primarily from arrows, though you can optionally use gauntlets which are deal more of this damage but you can’t really target. Finally, brute force is simply attacking blindly, including melee damage. It is the “oh shit” mode of combat, which is harder than both the other paths. I do feel there are too many combat options on the plate, especially short-range options. You’re not going to go toe-to-toe with a robot T-Rex or a flying robot bat. Lack of defensive options means that any non-ranged attack is at a MASSIVE disadvantage… and 99% of combat will simply revert to hunting bows.

While the first game suffered from having too many things to do, Forbidden West provides a bit more flexibility here. Things are more targeted rather than simply a bunch of map icons to parse through. If you zoom all the way out, the ? icons are things worth exploring and all the other icons are more or less “fluff”. You don’t need to collect 40 doohickeys, which is great! Case in point, there are less cauldrons this time, less rebel bases, less proving grounds. I will say that there is a long-tail option here, namely the Arena that you open up near the tail end of the game. If you want to have more combat difficulty, this is the place to play.

The storyline is better (?) in that is closes every question mark from the prior game, adds a ton of world building, and does a good job of setting up the next installment. The plot flow is just fundamentally better. The villains are lackluster, effectively being gods with no moral compass – quite similar to the issues Marvel has. For the most part, they are simple plot devices that can quickly be moved past.

I would like to take the time to truly appreciate the overall complexity/balance/design of a game such as this. It’s astounding that a world this big can be entirely seamless and populated. That every NPC has a voice actor. That the breadth of content has tools to help parse and direct your play. That you can pretty much apply the combat approach that fits your feel. That there are SO MANY ACCESSBILITY options!! At no point have I felt the game was unfair, or questioned the decisions made in the development. It all has purpose and all feels like part of an integrated system (so meta!)

If anything, Forbidden West reminds me of what I truly expect from a AAA game, and how much of a gap exists between games developed with clarity of vision and obvious leadership, and those that do not have such. An absolute gem.