Everyone knows about the Tetris effect, named after the puzzle game that is so compelling players can find themselves visualising falling blocks and imagining how real-world objects could fit together long after turning off the Game Boy. Similarly, playing too much Burnout or Grand Theft Auto gave some of my uni friends pause before they got behind the wheel in real life. But few video games are so enthralling that they begin to invade one’s subconscious. I would like to nominate a new candidate for this dubious pantheon: a factory-building game called, beautifully, Satisfactory.
Satisfactory is part of an emerging genre of factory games. They’re like a jacked-up version of survival-crafting games such as Minecraft. You craft things that build widgets you can use to build other things, in order to accomplish some far-off goal … except the quantities of things needed are so ridiculously large that you need to automate it. So you set down extractors and feed raw materials into other machines via conveyor belts, and pretty soon you have a whole mini-factory ticking along, happily producing screws or plates or whatever while you run off to rig up another project elsewhere.
All of this requires resources, which requires exploration, which requires weapons and equipment to defend against hostile wildlife or hazardous terrain, which you must produce in yet more factories; what starts as a rinky-dink smelting operation rapidly grows to encompass truck routes, train lines, circuit boards and oil derricks (not to mention weird alien stuff). Increasingly sophisticated production chains mean you’ll struggle to get resource A (and B, from a completely different source, from halfway across the map) to processing point C without completely snarling up your entire factory. And that’s only the logistics. We haven’t even started talking about efficiency – load-balancing inputs against outputs to pump out widgets 25% faster, etc – or aesthetics. Personally, I can’t create stunning works of art with my factories, but I also can’t have them looking like an upturned spaghetti bowl. They’ve got to have that solid retro-industrial chic.
The game has been in early access for some time, but I only started playing recently after its 1.0 release, partly because I suspected that it might be a little dangerous for my obsessive personality type. Alas, I was right.I knew I was lost when I started breaking out the paper notebook to jot down to-do lists and calculations and, eventually, blueprints and maps even when I wasn’t at my PC. But I honestly thought I had my Satisfactory obsession mostly under control until I awoke one groggy morning to realise I had been dreaming an industrial dream of power poles and whirring machinery. My general rule is: if a game begins to alter your dreamscapes, you’re probably playing it too much.
The secret sauce to Satisfactory’s bewitching power is creative freedom, which makes the game feel as much like self-expression as like the corporate strip-mining simulator that it is. It’s the joy of planning things out and seeing how they perform in motion; of observing and making minor adjustments; of accomplishing small tasks that add up to big things, but being free to make whatever kind of baroque cathedral or brutalist monstrosity as you like on your way there. It helps that it’s gorgeous to look at, even as you pave over a wild paradise with boxy industrial machines that fill the air with smoke and clanking.
Between the industrialised dreams and some hand-falling-apart issues, my only real choice was clear: regrettably I must shelve Satisfactory for now. Possibly it will come back as more of a hobby, like model trains or noodling around on the bass; something to mess about with once in a while instead of pouring hours and hours into at a time. After all, I’ve only just unlocked uranium mining, and it would be a shame to just let my factories just sit there gathering virtual dust … right?
