Sometimes I spend my lunch break at work playing games. I spent one of those precious hours last week building a factory in Infinifactory. For the full 60 minutes I was engrossed in testing layouts and aligning conveyors and wiring sensors, only to discover at the end that my design was flawed and simply wouldn't work. Instead of falling to frustration, my brain kept churning through solutions until it struck upon one, and it stuck with me for the entire day until I could spend hours more that night constructing it.

This is the crux of what makes Infinifactory so amazing, that even failure is an engrossing and enlightening experience. And you're sure to fail now and then as the game asks more and more of you, from moving boxes from one wall to another all the way to breaking down starships and building cannons out of the pieces. It's the kind of puzzle game that presents you with a seemingly insurmountable task, and through only the basic systems presented it helps you experience that delicious eureka moment when everything clicks. I'm getting ahead of myself here, but it's hard for me to contain my admiration for everything Infinifactory accomplishes.

You play an unnamed human who gets abducted Fire in the Sky style by aliens. Instead of probing your tender orifices, however, they just task you with building factories for them. Every puzzle takes place in an exotic location with hatches that produce objects, and a platform that demands a finished product made from those objects. Your job is to use your infinite supply of factory blocks provided to combine, separate, and rescramble the input into the appropriate output. As I mentioned before, this can be anything from linking three boxes together to constructing a missile to breaking down a whale into packaged meat.

The beauty of this setup is that you have simple tools that can be spun into factories of infinite complexity. Your basic work blocks are things like conveyors and rotators and welders that get the job done. Added to this though are sensor-controlled pushers and blockers, destructive grinders and lasers, and even programmable counters once you get far enough in. The combination of these elements allows you to create meticulously-timed networks of shifting lines and presses that can produce satellites, starships, and even fully-furnished rooms. And consistency is important as well, because every puzzle requires you to produce not one but ten of the requested object. The amount of combinations possible also means that there is no one solution for any puzzle, but a vast array of elegant or brutish layouts to experiment with.

Discovering the full potential of your blocks through the campaign will take well over a dozen hours, spread across upwards of thirty puzzles that gradually ramp up in complexity. As you progress so too does the story, conveyed through audio logs, meetings with your alien overlords, and some quality environmental storytelling. I won't spoil what happens at the end of the campaign but I will stress that it is one of the most pleasant surprises I've had in recent memory, especially in the additional content it reveals. On top of this is a wide-open testing mode, a custom puzzle creator that lets you set up your own scenarios, and a fully-integrated Steam Workshop that lets you share and download user-created puzzles of surprising quality.

Honestly I would be in love with Infinifactory if it had even a quarter of the content. There are few things as satisfying as watching a sprawling industrial complex churn out rovers or tanks in perfect rhythm, complete with hearty whirrs and clanks. The sound design deserves some special mention for the perfect effects and incredibly chill soundtrack (included free with the game!). And there's even an element of community with your solutions being rated against those of your friends on criteria like how fast they work and how much space they take up. This is a puzzle game that leaves nothing out, combining rock-solid design with excellent story, presentation, and spread of features. Infinifactory has easily claimed a place as my favorite puzzle game of all time, with a perfect balance of challenge and satisfaction.

It melts your brain until you remember that you can drop blocks in three dimentions, and gravity only matters to what you're producing.

Its a puzzle game and it makes me cry.

8/10

the food pellets taste good

I'm mixed.

Story wise, I was playing through campaign and somewhat enjoying the subtle plot and gameplay. But then the game pulled a complete 180, and then I didn't enjoy the story line nor new mechanics at all. It began to feel like a boring chore so I stopped playing.

"YEESH! I'm so glad that challenge is done so I can fianlly see whats next. Oh, more of the same . . . ALT+F4"

Challenging and beautifully put together

*I like to create contraptions and I have this tingling feeling when I sit back and watch them operate

*I like to have to stop playing a game for 3 days because I'm not good enough to find a solution and have to think about it in the shower

*I like to have to use a pen a paper to help me play video games

*If I ever get abducted by aliens, it'd be totally cool to help them build war machines etc. so they can continue their invasion of earth

*Building machines that transform cute animals into packaged meat products sounds pretty cool.

Infinifactory probably isn't for everyone, but if the above list appeals to you, dive in, you won't regret it.

Good for knocking down your ego a bit,

An intellegent factory puzzler. Having you think hard about how and where to place your given tools, from conveyors and rotators to pushers and welders. There will be a lot of trial and error but, if you pull through, the end result will be worth it. Seeing your machine take inputs and assemble them together into the final product.

I lost my mind, but the game won another soul.

My friend Brian likes to play Factiro and Minecraft like games to build ever more complex refinery dialogs in games.
It was not until this game that I would ever finally understand how that could be “fun”.


This game is little bit like The Talos Principle, to me. You wake up on an Alien ship. You meet your new "managers" (Read; you don’t really know what’s going on).


From your cell, you can access ever more difficult puzzles which requires clever thinking from you with blocks that do a variety of different things. Starting with conveyer belt blocks. Each new puzzle adds one or more new blocks to the mix, this added with increasingly complex end solutions required to move on. Think, I need these three blocks to meet somewhere and get wielded together at the right time and then get moved to the very end and so forth.



I'm in no rush to finish this one. Half the fun is just trying to figure out a working solution. It's rare I play a puzzle game like this. I usefully tear down Professor Layton like games puzzle wise. Infinifactory on the other hand has me wanting to slow down and sort of savor the experience, instead. I would recommend this game to anyone who really likes puzzle games that have no one solution to any problem but complex enough that this becomes part of the challenge!



The interface is really smooth by the way. It's really easy to build, rotate and remove blocks quickly. Which is good because you will be doing a lot of this while also jet packing around the levels.


Who would I not recommend this game to?
Someone who wants either a lot of story (it is there but sprinkled in with extremely dark humor) and or a lot of action (unless you find completely puzzles thrilling!).


Graphically speaking, it’s not bad, the word that comes to mind is clean with just a hint of cell shading around the edges.

I get a lot of new games through the Humble Monthly Bundle these days (I just got out of college and things were tight for a while), that being said, if this game was on sale by itself I would've picked it up eventually, I had my eye on this one. First as a gift to Brian but also for myself to check it out at some point. It seemed quirky to me but in a good way.

Oh, and one last thing, the game naturally understands that there are many ways to go about solving each puzzle, beside each level you get three accompanying slots next to every puzzle for possibly (read; radically so) different solutions to the same one and it shows you how much more effective each one is from one another. So conceivable you could always come back and increase productivity of each puzzle.


I know this must sound boring to someone out there but trust me when I say, as I get older learning how to effectively manage a pipe line becomes increasingly important and it tickles me to play something that sort of, if albeit in a more abstract way, reinforces this mind set. After all that’s part of growing up but no one said it couldn’t still be fun!