Steam’s “Fests” are an almost weekly event now, growing ever more niche as the behemothic game store tries to think up another category to highlight. Now that the Steam Summer Sale is over, the board is cleared for another fest, and this time it’s Automation. Which is to say, all those factory-based games that you kids love so much.
Gosh, people love to organize shit. There was a time when video games were all about gruesomely murdering people, watching as the viscera was torn from their dismembered limbs, hearing that sloppy, wet slap as a severed leg flopped messily to the ground. But now it’s all factories and conveyor belts, with careful industrious management and not a writhing stream of entrails to be found. And we let children play these games?
To give you an idea of how popular this reasonably new genre has become (yes, yes, such games have appeared since the dawn of the hobby, but not as part of a thriving genre), the Automation Fest includes 259 games, primarily from the last ten years. And that’s a lot of games to look through if you don’t know where to start. Fortunately, like the well-oiled, overly elaborate machine we are, we do know where to begin digging through the stockpiles, and which games you should—I dunno—place on the conveyor belt to your wishlist? Is that something? (Well, it’s something—Ed)
It would be foolish to attribute the current success of automation games to one specific developer, not least because no game appears in a vacuum, instead influenced by the decades of development that came before it. But that aside, I’m going to entirely attribute the current success of automation games to one specific developer: Zachtronics.
Founded by Zach Barth, Zachtronics first created Infiniminer—a game which influenced Minecraft—and then blew up puzzle gaming with 2011’s SpaceChem. But in 2015, the studio released Infinifactory, combining ideas from both, and in doing so, instantly made automation gaming A Big Thing. Rather than simply being a factory sim where you build these intricate assembly lines to solve challenges, Infinifactory also had a batshit storyline of alien abduction and being forced to manufacture suspicious equipment likely to be used for nefarious purposes.
Now 10 years old, it feels like the granddaddy of this whole festival, discounted to half price for the week.
Rather than bloat the rest of these selections with other games from Zachtronics, which could very reasonably just have the entire list to itself, I’ll just note that nearly all the studio’s classics are discounted this week. There’s Opus Magnum, SpaceChem, Shenzhen I/O and many others at half off. The studio’s last game, Last Call BBS, isn’t discounted, but you can pick it up as part of the Zachtronics Puzzle Pack which contains all the games, currently 39 percent off.
At the other end of the timeline sits Satisfactory, 2024’s smash hit evolution of the genre, where your assembly line constructions also take place on an alien planet, but this time in an open world that you’re free to explore, and even featuring combat. But, of course, the primary focus is on making a factory, which here can be ridiculously tall, complicated, and…exploitative of local nature?
First-person is obviously not the normal way such construction-driven games are played, but Satisfactory has absolutely nailed it. (And before we move on, can we just sit back and give a small round of applause for the title? Perfect puns are too easily glossed over, and this deserves its props. Until you’re Googling for it, and then…) This is a factory-building game with jump pads and vehicles and angry fauna.
It’s pretty hard to overstate the popularity of Coffee Stain Studios’ game (yes, the same people who made Goat Simulator!). This has received an eye-watering 237,000 reviews on Steam, and over 96 percent of them are positive. That’s just extraordinary. And nearly a year after release, it’s still seeing 25,000 or more people playing simultaneously every day. And for good reason. This week you can pick it up for 30 percent off.
And here, bridging between the two ends of the genre’s long road, is Factorio, 2020’s mega-hit automation game. The 2D, top-down factory-making sim feels a lot like a precursor to Satisfactory, with its free building, predatory local fauna, and enormous world. (Well, this one’s infinite, while Coffee Stain’s is a slightly smaller 30km².)
Do not be fooled by the late-90s style of the graphics; this is a thoroughly modern game of ludicrous complexity, where you mine your resources, research your tech, and automate your production lines, all while—yup—exploiting the local ecology. As such, you’ll also need to defend your factories from external forces. Oh, and credit where it’s due: this game went to Kickstarter in 2013, two years before Infinifactory appeared.
Factorio has been wildly successful, selling millions of copies, and developers Wube Software are still releasing updates as recently as…today! Wube has also committed to never putting the game on sale, which—honestly—good for them! That means it’s always $35, whether you buy it during this fest or next week, but 96 percent of 217,000 people reckon that’s a good deal.
And let’s complete the loop. While it’s only been out for a few hours, it’s fairly safe to say that short of a very surprising twist, Kaizen: A Factory Story is about to be the next big automation game. Why? Because this is developed by Coincidence, which is Zachtronics in a new hat.
Funnily enough, Zachtronics was closed in 2022 because Zach Barth thought the studio had become stuck making factory-based puzzle games, and wanted himself and his studio mates to be set free to develop other things. Three years and one math-based puzzle game later, it seems that other things weren’t perhaps as attractive as they looked, because Barth and chums are back with a brand new automation-based puzzler. Whoops!
While Kaizen only has a handful of reviews so far, all have been very positive. This time, you’re running a Japanese assembly line around the turn of the 1990s, working out how to arrange machinery and processes to best create a range of products. And its story explores the time period in what I’ve read are surprisingly emotional ways.
A little more off the beaten path is Word Factori, a puzzle game in which you must create words but only after having invented recipes for the alphabet.
What begins as a rather cute game about combining letter parts through various machine parts to build new ones, starting with only the letter i and building from there, very quickly becomes the most astonishingly intricate and brain-hurting challenge. It looks so friendly and welcoming, but when you’re trying to optimize your production lines for the more efficient creation of tricksy words, you’ll realize its real depths.
Spelling the word “CAT” has never been so difficult.
Obviously there are so many other games worth checking out in the selection, and we’ve barely scraped the surface of even the best-known examples here. If you’re looking to get into automated gaming, these are an excellent way to start, but make sure to dig through the full list for any treasures that may perfectly match your mood.
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