I have thus far in my life avoided playing any factory automation games because I only ever see them recommended in the same breath as dire warnings and laments. “Play Infinifactory! It ruined my life! “, “I now exclusively play Opus Magnum inside the skip that is now my home after my family kicked me out. 10/10!”, etc etc. But the way Number Machine‘s extendo-arm hex pushes sets of tiles has awakened something in me. Taking a sprawling genre and making it tiny and a bit pastel is basically a genre unto itself now but one I’m a supporter of. Here’s a trailer.
“Number Machine is an open-ended factory and automation game with math mechanics,” touts the Steam page. “Move, combine, split, destroy, and modify numbered orbs with math to form the required structures with specific shapes and values”. Maths, you say? Ah, but look at the little pushy arm go! “Use conveyors, pushers, lasers, magnetism, rotators, and much more to create an efficient system”. See, now you’re speaking my language, and it’s a language that was shaped, moulded and tempered in the white-hot crucible of 1990’s puzzler The Incredible Machine.
This one is from Arielek, of Please Fix The Road fame. We’ve never covered it, but a lot of other outlets did and enjoyed it, based on the happy little Steam quotes. Eurogamer even slapped a ‘recommended’ sticker on it – a veritable ‘triple sumptuous’ on the EG scale. Number Machine is due out sometime next year. In the meantime, you might be interested in Edwin’s interview with Zachtronics’s Zach Barth about the Warhammer 40,000 factory sim that never was.
