1. I have started and never really gotten into a couple of Zachtronics games in the past but now that I've let Infinifactory get its hooks into me, I think I'll have to revisit them all again. This game is great and you should play it.
2. This frequently gets described as a puzzle game but that's not quite right. You solve problems more so than puzzles. Puzzles normally end w/ elegant solutions. Infinifactory gets ugly.
3. Your task is to build constructions of block shaped elements that are then used to assemble other block shaped elements into multi-block shaped elements. It reminds me quite a bit of making automated machines w/ redstone in Minecraft.
4. Number 3 makes sense as apparently Infinifactory's predecessor, Infiniminer, was a huge inspiration for Minecraft. I didn't know this until now. I'm sorry.
5. The setup here is there's a bunch of evil aliens making you engineer the stuff described in number 3. You learn more of your situation through audio logs you find laying around because this is a video game and that's just how it's done.
6. You are not actively involved in plot development aside from beating each stage. Everything interesting goes down off screen and you find out about it through the setting. This is fine. The plot serves the purpose of creating a tenser atmosphere and that is all it needs to do.
7. Number 6 being said, Infinifactory does reward you w/ quite a bit more depth and nuance than you'd typically expect from what is basically an excuse plot, especially as you push into later levels. It builds a realistic feeling world when all is said and done.
8. You are also rated vs. other players on various criteria such as how many blocks you've used
and the footprint of your structure. You put a lot effort into the solutions you've build so this little bit of incentive is enough to really push you to coming up w/ better ideas.
9. Honestly though, while it is satisfying to come up w/ solutions that are
clever and elegant top to bottom, the best thing is when when of your
ideas doesn't quite work and you have to slap together hackneyed fixes
that take longer than it would have to just redo the whole thing from
scratch and you wind up w/ hilarious monstrosities that people will
ignore when you incessantly post them on social media.
10. Speaking of, this has a animated .gif exporter and it's awesome.
11. The magic here is that there is no definitive solution to any of the problems you're presented w/ so any way that you might figure it out is equally valid. Once curious thing that you'll find if you go looking for other folks' solutions to the same problems is you'll frequently be surprised by how common some of what seems like your clever solutions prove to be and vice versa.
12. This game is much longer than you might initially think so if you are just trying to get through it, maybe don't spend too much time refining your earliest solutions until you see how much there actually is to offer. The later problems are more interesting anyway.
13. Infinifactory feels quite a lot like designing circuit boards or writing code but being good at it has no practical application so it's fun instead of being something you can make money at. As such, this is a good game for those days when you want to exercise your mind w/o the man breathing down your freaking neck. Go for it.
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