Recent reviews by Turkish Massage Owl

The greatest factory game ever made so far.
Satisfactory a very close second for very different reasons.

Space age is just them flexing; they increased the scope of the game 10x without bloating the experience... somehow. Wube are masters of a very enticing craft.

The purest factory game returns and returns strong.

Make shapes. Deliver shapes. Learn how to scale things... or don't. Create factories that are really a collection of simple parts. Start saving collections of simple parts into larger structures you plop into bigger and bigger machines... or don't.

I completed the final milestone in hard mode without creating an "anything" machine. I could see where it would theoretically be possible to do so, but the time investment never seemed to be worth it, as neat of an idea as it was. I never progressed past 2 levels of full throughput either; the opportunity cost of upgrading my methods was too high when i could just plop down double the components i already had and be sitting on 4/3 the maximal efficiency.

Trains are great. Performance is great. Graphics are great. Paint is ok. Gems are neat, but maybe they come too late?

If you like factory games, this game sits on the peak right alongside factorio and satisfactory.

10/10
oh wait. that's only a pair. Screw it; might be good enough.

Seriously though. Incredible game. Super polished execution of a simple concept. Fun. Pretty. Addicting. Deep. Worth every cent.

Look, this is an *incredible* game with loads of promise. I feel bad saying "don't buy."

However;

The game disrespects your time and isn't balanced at all towards you ever failing. It has numerous ways to screw yourself over. It's quite buggy in dangerous places like mission checkpoints. It has a clumsy upgrade pathway that means if you ever want anything nice you have to forgo future progression. Explanations are minimal and scattered in the lore, which stinks when you get "fragile" and your car is destroyed in moments because you didn't know that fragile was a nightmare, not a mild downside. The most essential pathway upgrades are locked behind obscene resource costs, and worst of all: the hardest mission is the midpoint, which has a number of unintended consequences:

If you fail it; you're exceedingly likely to screw yourself over twice if you can make it back. The resources necessary to try again are then all locked in that final location, and therefore can't help you. The precautions you take from that point on are basically pointless because the difficulty nosedives again.... and this difficulty spike is the very first time they give you the "drive quickly through checkpoints" test with barely any explanation.

The game is tuned to hook you. It's tuned for nothing else. They're *almost* generous with the difficulty settings, but there's no way to get a helping hand on the materials grind... and no hints that the entire back half of the tech tree is basically pointless and you can easily complete the game with crude parts and a functional **mission critical bumper.**


I hope they'll eventually iron out the kinks. I also hope to come back to this game and this review and swap them to a "worth the cost" once they release some DLC that gives you something to do once you've completed the decent story.. and maybe gives you a better ending. Right now, the game is just too rough after the intro gameplay loop falls off to justify this price point. One day it might be, the engine of this rust bucket is a diamond. (ironic as I never even got **near** the final engine upgrade).


Final afterthought: in other roguelikes you bypass the boring looting you do in the early game, or speed it up. That never happens here. You only ever gain in efficiency of usage, so your handful of bulbs go slightly further. You'll have a zillion scrap, and still be opening the same chemical lockers right before you complete the story that you were opening in the start. It's cool that the car is never all that good. It's lousy that your experience is never all that much better. Sap condensers feel like the devs going "oh no that's not fun", but there's 3 other resource trees that also need that refinement pass, or a slider to turn in difficulty settings.

It hurts me a bit to give it the thumbs down. It's a **great** idea.

The game is just too unfinished for its price though. The art in final room isn't up to the quality of the rest of the game, and the intro cutscene is pretty rough.

There are loads of hidden mechanics like item despawning, and the crafting tree is pretty heavily linear, and falls apart at the end with liquids. The islands you can purchase are very constrained, and the overall grind to mechanical payoff is pretty slim. It's alot of grinding, even with the post-release patches to make things cheaper.

It needs a bit more time in the oven, and a bit more time thinking about what it means to buy islands or turrets. The balance of the game is just not good enough. I finished potions well before the end of the game, and then just had leftover items that couldn't do anything.

There are a few things that are really irksome too, like the splitter and crafter factory geometry being pretty unrewarding and uninteresting, and the overall act of designing or redesigning your various traps being slow and painful. Z index isn't respected, so you can talk to the shopkeeper when hovering your backpack.

Needs polish. Don't buy at 20$
Hope it gets some more love, because it could be excellent

Lovely. Brain melting. Fascinating and paired with a surprisingly dark story.

Unique and beautiful, and the only marring factors are some puzzle solutions feeling very "moon logic". There are also puzzles that are intensely clever. Too clever for me. I loved them, but felt bad resorting to the hints. Definitely worth the time. Most likely not worth the time to 100%

Pretty great game!

Simple but effective design. By the end of the level you feel powerful. Each new character does actually feel quite different.

Some nitpicks: some powers are basically a joke. I've never increased my health via smite damage because it's just a really difficult scenario to trigger. Same goes for some of the healing powers.

Major critiques: It's more opaque than you'd expect. It's very difficult to see what's really doing your damage, and after 5 hours I still don't know if i need to unlock both advancements on a base skill to be eligible to see the final one. It's impossible to tune a build well because blocks and rerolls aren't really a thing, and summons seem much more powerful than elemental/bullet builds.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the time I spent, but the meta upgrades (despite being silly impactful) are slow to acquire and I just don't see myself getting that much more out of it.

Maybe with a few more updates?

Super cute! Sometimes radically challenging single player experience where I learned firsthand that I'd make a terrible sheepdog! (but I was able to manage the final level in 1.22). Fun for couch co-op/comp. Fun sheep facts, excellently voiced, and more mechanically complex than you'd think; running, sneaking, and barking are all things you'll need to master if you want all the first place ribbons!

definitely worth the time!

Truly a one of a kind game. An unbelievable technical marvel who's only downside is an over-eager meta-commenting narrator that is quickly phased out for a much more palateable observer.

Steam deck review:

Controls work, but the game runs like a dog's breakfast. Fans will be 100% the entire time; the game is poorly optimised. The platforming is dreadful, the "puzzles" never create any moments of joy or intrigue, and your character moves like they weigh 600 kilos and are moving on slippery jello. Interactable components won't always work.

The underlying story is pretty ok, but it's drrraaaawwwwwnnnnnn ouuuuuuutttt. It's like they had an hourly quota that they had to hit. It's not even a long game, but the slow pace and largely repeated content make it feel glacial. Drop the second dish-alignment & monorail location **entirely**and the game will feel alot more svelte and nothing would be lost.

I'd say it looks good, but since the framerate chugs so hard on steam deck it's really hard to give them any props for it.

It's not really a game; the mechanics of play are pretty much the opposite of fun. In no universe would I pay full price for this. I'm glad I played this, because now I can skip the sequel unless the reviews have massively improved.