Solutions are tremendously gratifying to watch no matter how accomplished they are, and there's a simple reliable joy to watching complex machines work. 'I refuse to comply!' I cry at my captors, my protest taking the form of a rubbish forklift factory that outputs waste in the form of superfluous wooden benches for no good reason whatsoever. Solutions express much about their creator-fastidious efficiency, subtle grace, or, in my case, a degree of slapstick incompetence that I have chosen to frame as defiance. Infinifactory's tremendous personality, however, comes from the game's systemic elements as much as its scripted ones. There are amusing cutscenes and moments of black humour in the design of certain missions that recall, more than anything else, Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. The pride that stems from cracking a tough problem stems from a more substantial place than the vast majority of games in this genre because you haven't just bested the game's designer-you've bested yourself. The result is a puzzle game where you feel a distinct sense of ownership over your solutions. You are given tools and a goal and told to build your own way to it. At the beginning of the game, you are abducted by aliens and set to work building factories in a variety of isolated sci-fi locales: the surface of asteroids, dystopian cityscapes, floating platforms among fleets of blocky starships.Īs in Spacechem, the genius of the game is that there are no 'fixed' solutions to problems. The name invokes Infiniminer, the game that inspired Minecraft, but Infinifactory isn't a sandbox in the same sense even though it controls much like Minecraft's creative mode.

This is a first-person puzzle game where you construct logic-driven machines using blocky components. The game is a showcase for imagination as well as intellect. Solving a problem in Infinifactory is a creative challenge as well as an intellectual one. It's so good, in fact, that it moves beyond its genre and starts to yield benefits from elsewhere. Judged on those terms, Infinifactory is a very good puzzle game. The quality of these games is determined by the way you feel when you move past confusion into understanding-how excitedly you punch the air when it all clicks into place, how many honorary doctorates you consider granting yourself when a designer's logic reveals itself to you. Influenced by Spacechem, Minecraft creative mode I'm not gonna lie, it takes a while to get super-comfortable customizing the thing, but they have a ton of default configurations so that it'll be setup for you basically right off the bat.What is it? Complex, block-based factory construction game.

That's 3 spells already based upon HOW I pull the trigger, just incredible and I'm so glad they made this awesome Steam controller. Then I told it to do 2 other ones if I'm holding the rear paddle grip button (one of the extra 2 buttons on back of controller). Instead, I customized the right trigger on the Steam Controller with the new feature 'Activators' to cast 5 different spells instantly just by the different ways you can press the trigger.įor instance, if I just pull and release the trigger quickly it'll cast Aard (force push), if I pull and hold the trigger it'll cast Yrden (circle of slow), and if I gently hold the trigger (also called a soft pull) it'll cast Quen (magic shield). They want you to first semi-pause the game to bring up a radial menu, select the spell, then get out of the radial menu, then press the right trigger to cast it (BLECH). It's good enough that I play some games with it that normally would be mouse and keyboard only (for me) because of the insanely awesome things you can do with it.įor instance, currently playing Witcher 3, and casting magic (they call them 'signs') is a pain in the neck with an old regular controller.

I used to use an XBox controller exclusively, got the steam controller, used both interchangeably for about a month, then I haven't used the XBox controller since January (the Steam controller is that good). It has extreme customization and a much better feel looking around an environment and pointing at things than a joystick controller (which is a lot of what you do in Infinifactory). I really, really like the steam controller.

Infinifactory ps3