It's straightforward. The mechanics are simple. The purpose is clear. There's no confusion as to what you are expected to do and what tools you have to do it.

It's diabolical. The puzzles are sometimes bananas, requiring some pretty twisted logic and lateral thinking. While you strive for a solution, there's a constant nagging feeling that sometimes your solution is just inelegant and you need to do it better.

It's oddly darkly humorous. There's a strange undercurrent of defiance against your alien overlords, from listening to the audio diaries of the project managers who came before you, from resenting the food pellets that drop into your cell when you complete sections of the game.

It's also gorgeous - not so much in graphics, which are perfectly adequate, but in the efficiency of the presentation. No main menu. No weird visual effects cluttering up the screen. No unnecessarily ostentatious setpieces. No splash screen! On load, the game drops you right into where you left, so you can literally load the game and get building. There's a gorgeousness to seeing your machine, your factory do its work, and the satisfaction that comes with it makes the effort all the more worth it.

It's one of the most interesting puzzle games I've ever played, and I'm enjoying it hugely despite not being great at coming up with particularly creative solutions.

Infinifactory does this thing I love. It makes you earn your enjoyment of it.

You load up your next task and take a look at what you'll need to produce and what materials you'll have to produce it with. Immediately, some ideas start popping and you think, "Okay, I know what to do." Ten minutes later, everything's wrong and you realize you were being naive. But you keep building and trying things because that's just who you are. An hour later, things start to click. You still feel dumb as bricks but you're at least smarter than you were ten minutes ago. Then, long after you began, you have a working production facility. You are a genius. The smartest of the smart. Nothing can bring you down from this high.

Then you get to see how your solution rates against everyone else who's finished that same factory and it turns out you're actually pretty much middle-of-the-road. But maybe you can go back and adjust some things and score better? Or maybe you've learned some things and maybe your vision and clarity has leveled up and just by starting fresh you can shave your score by half?

Whatever the case, you have had a blast. You've been challenged for the first time in who knows how long. You've had fun and by all the things that you might even consider swearing on, you've earned that fun.
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SpaceChem is one of my favourite puzzle games of all time. I adore its design and its open-ended puzzles. I was interested in Infinifactory because I liked SpaceChem. I was also skeptical. I didn't like the idea of doing puzzles in a 3D space. I didn't like the aesthetic. I didn't like the whole factory concept.

I needn't have worried. Infinifactory is actually probably better than SpaceChem. Which hurts me to say. But it doesn't hurt too much because I'm busy having tons of fun.

I can be very brief about this game:

If you like Zachtronic's SpaceChem, you will like Infinifactory.
If you love SpaceChem, you will love Infinifactory.
If you hate SpaceChem, you will hate Infinifactory even more.
If you think SpaceChem is too hard, you will find Infinifactory undoable.

If you never played SpaceChem, what are you waiting for? There is a free demo available. And if you enjoy it, rest assured that you will enjoy Infinifactory too.

Heartily recommended for all those who love tough puzzles and enjoy building complex machines.

I should've made a review for Infinifactory some time back but I kept putting the time off, waiting for the time when I could make a review worthy of such a fantastic game. I fear I will never be able to do the game justice, so here goes with a short review as ideas simply pop into my head!

As you can notice from my first parapgraph I think extremely highly of Infinifactory. For some time I was searching for a puzzle game with great replayability. I heard about and played Spacechem, which is an impossible game not to mention when reviewing Infinifactory. Both are developed by Zachtronics and both employ identical mechanic, but Spacechem is in 2D and Infinifactory is 3D.

The essence of the game is to take some materials as an input and manipulate them via building a machine/factory from different types of blocks to conform to the required output. So you may have to rotate and weld two different types of blocks together or receive a broken item, remove the broken parts and replace them with good parts. The variety of puzzles is very good and you don't feel like you're repeating the same processes during your progression.

The beauty of both games is that each puzzle can be solved in maybe an infinite variety of ways, so once you have made a solution you can go back and attempt to streamline various factors of your machine : footprint, cycles and blocks used. Very similar to engineering projects in the real world!

Hopefully some of your friendlist will also play the game as in game leaderboards are included for each puzzle to further the replayability. There are slots to save three of your machines for each of the puzzles, so you can purpose build a machine for each of the scoring criteria e.g focus one machine solely on having the smallet footprint possible even if it is at the expense of being less efficient and having an increased cycle count.

I'm approaching 60 hours into the game and I am half-way through the second campaign of the two. I've gone back and fine-tuned a few of my older machines and completed a couple of the community made puzzles. There are literally hours and hours of gameplay available. I'm generally not a "sandbox" type of guy either so Zachtronics have definietly managed to include the magic ingredient with this one.

A lovely feature of the game is to be able to export animated gifs from a static camera point of your working machine, which will loop infinitely. It can be very satisfying to construct a particulaly nice process within your factory and watch it loop over-and-over.

The game has a slightly comedic and quirky story that holds the levels together and they progress in difficulty at a nice rate. The levels get a bit easier when you start the second campaign and then begin to ramp up again! There are some tough levels which may put off a few people that don't enjoy a mental challenge. I found myself trying to solve some of the puzzles in my head whilst at work!!

This is one of my favourite games of 2015 so the question of whether I recommend it is not a tough one at all!! It's easily worth the full price, I bought the game in a sale and feel a little ashamed for doing so!

Infinifactory is the best puzzle game I've ever played. It takes something truly compelling for me to spend hours, sometimes days at the end, perfecting a single puzzle, and yet I have never felt frustrated. This is a game that truly earns the description 'engaging.'

Everything that happens in this game is because you made it, and you need to have your brain firing on all cylinders to make it through. But fear not, any new players considering this game: the mechanics are easy to approach and you'll be hooked in no time. Players who have enjoyed any other game by Zachtronics (like Spacechem or TIS-100) or who like similar games with similar mechanics (Factorio, Big Pharma, even the city-builder games by Impressions) will absolutely love Infinifactory, but I think anyone willing to giving Infinifactory a chance will love it too.

In this quick review, I'll discuss the gameplay of Infinifactory, it's aesthetics, and try to answer why I've been unable to put this game down.

The gameplay is simple: from a certain point at the start of each stage, a series of inputs regularly pop out a component-usually a single box, but other times a more complex shape. From there, the goal is to simply combine these inputs to meet at the output area, and repeat this ten times. The player has a number of tools at their disposal, from simple conveyor belts and welders, to parts that push and destroy. With these parts, all sorts of advanced operations may be performed- advanced techniques even allow players to build 'circuits' from these simple parts. A later level may resemble a factory made by a mad scientist, full of pipes and blocks, with piecies whirring and whizzing by, only just avoiding disaster.

Infinifactory has pleasing visuals, notable for its sturdy blocks and the orange and blue color scheme of its factory parts. The environemnts are colorful, vidid, and distinctly not of this world. The screen shots do a better job describing what it looks like than I can, but as you can see, there are a great number pleasant and varied stages, and for the most part, there feels like a good variety of factory components, too.

There is an interesting story being told, usually through voice logs and a handful of scripted sequences that set the stage for Infinifactory's otherworldly visuals. In many puzzle games, even those that do try to tell a story, the gameplay has no relation to the story. Here, there's a reason why you're building things- and you may not exactly be doing it of your own free will. The story's tone is quirky, with a grinning undercurrent of black humor. There are a few twists and turns along the way that delighted me. I found that a nicely written story like this helped ground the events and kept me interested.

Puzzles in this game have a wonderful quality where the final output seems simple, yet constructing it from its individual components can be deceptively challenging. There's a smooth difficulty curve, with tools introduced gradually and new techniques being learned organically as more challenging puzzles are introduced. By the time I'd beaten the game, I found that I could go back to puzzles that took me 90 minutes to solve and beat them in 20 minutes, with a much better score as well.

At the end of each puzzle, the player is ranked according to three criteria: how fast the puzzle was, how many blocks it took to build, and how much space it took up. I like the way that this scoring encouraged me, because it was rare that I hadn't done well in at least one category. This system encourages different styles of play-those who (like me) enjoy sprawling, messy solutions that strive to be as fast as possible, or those who favor a more restrained, elegant design.

The game comes with a capable level editor that's integrated into the Steam Workshop. Already, tons of user-made levels are available for play. In my experience, though, few have stacked up against the levels in the campaign. Most are based around gimmicks or some other novel use of the mechanics. Sometimes this is successful, but overall I haven't found it as satisfying. That said, I can't claim to have explored the workshop throughly, or to have attempted to create any levels of my own.

The true joy in this game comes from the sense of owning each solution you make. There's no single way to solve each puzzle-there are hundreds. After completing a particularly challenging puzzle, I've often looked up how others have solved theirs- not once has my solution resembled someone else's.

I never had the feeling, like I often do with puzzle games, that I was fighting with the developer to find the 'right' way to solve the problem. Instead, Infinifactory simply gives its players a handful of tools and asks, "Why don't you build something interesting?"

I think it's the mark of a great puzzle game that I have enjoyed my failures as much as my successes. I have looked back at puzzles that took me hours to solve, and even though the final result was a swollen, creaky machine, I can remember all the hurdles and struggles it took for me to create my solution and think, "Yeah, I built that."