Topping leaderboards means building better machines, often from scratch, and excising any bad habits you've developed over the course of your first run. It's possible to beat the game with inefficient solutions, as I have, but a tremendous challenge still remains. The difficulty escalates steadily over the course of the fifteen-hour campaign, but unlike Spacechem you're never confronted with a time limit or a resource budget. Pressing F10 at any time causes the game to generate a looping gif of your factory, saved to your desktop to do with as you will. It's the sort of thing you'll want to share, too. 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 What is it? Complex, block-based factory construction game.

Infinifactory game