myEveryone knows about the Tetris effect, named after the puzzle game that’s so engaging that players can visualize falling blocks and imagine how real-world objects might fit together long after they turn off the Game Boy. Similarly, playing too much Burnout or Grand Theft Auto gave some of my college friends pause before getting behind the wheel in real life. But few video games are so fascinating that they begin to invade the subconscious. I’d 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 an upgraded version of survival and crafting games like Minecraft. You create things that build widgets that you can use to build other things, in order to achieve some distant goal… except that the quantities of things needed are so ridiculously large that you need to automate them. So you set up extractors and feed raw materials to other machines via conveyor belts, and pretty soon you have a whole mini-factory up and running, happily churning out screws or plates or whatever while you run off to set up another project somewhere else.
All of this requires resources, which requires exploration, which requires weapons and equipment to defend against hostile wildlife or dangerous terrain, which you must produce in even more factories; What starts as a small-time foundry operation quickly grows to encompass truck routes, train lines, circuit boards, and oil derricks (not to mention weird alien stuff). Increasingly sophisticated production chains mean that you’ll have a hard time getting resource A (and B, from a completely different source, from the middle of the map) to processing point C without completely ruining your entire factory. And that’s just the logistics. We haven’t even begun to talk about efficiency (load balancing inputs and outputs to generate widgets 25% faster, etc.) or aesthetics. I personally cannot create awesome works of art with my factories, but I also can’t allow them to look like a plate of upside-down spaghetti. They should have that solid retro-industrial elegance.
The game has been in early access for some time, but I started playing it recently after its 1.0 release, partly because I suspected it might be a little dangerous for my obsessive personality type. Unfortunately, he was right. I knew I was lost when I started tearing up the paper notebook to jot down to-do lists and calculations and eventually plans and maps, even when I wasn’t in front of my PC. But I honestly thought I had my satisfaction obsession pretty much under control until I woke up groggily one morning and realized I’d been dreaming an industrial dream with power poles and whirring machinery. My rule of thumb is: if a game starts to mess with your dreamscapes, you’re probably playing it too much.
The secret ingredient to Satisfactory’s fascinating power is creative freedom, making the game feel as much about self-expression as the corporate strip mining simulator that it is. It’s the pleasure of planning things and seeing how they work in motion; to observe and make minor adjustments; of doing small tasks that add up to big things, but being free to make whatever kind of baroque cathedral or brutalist monstrosity you want on your way there. It helps that it’s beautiful to look at, even when you pave a wild paradise with boxy industrial machines that fill the air with smoke and clang.
Between industrialized dreams and some crumbling problems, my only real option was clear: I must unfortunately shelve Satisfactory for now. Possibly it will return more as a hobby, like modeling trains or playing bass; something to play with from time to time instead of spending hours and hours at a time. After all, I just unlocked uranium mining, and it would be a shame to let my factories sit there collecting virtual dust… right?