izigame.me

TLDR: A game with some serious flaws (though all fixable), but one worth checking out for the things that it does well.

At it's core Sixty Four is a incremental/unfolding game with factory trappings.

It is worth playing because of some unique mechanics and good looking aesthetic, though it is certainly not without its problems.

Early game has a strong resemblance to a clicker. You gain things to help semi-automate your mining, and eventually rely on your clicking less and less. However, full automation doesn't come until near the end-game and increasing costs of repeat buildings mean you can't just spam production buildings to increase output. In this way it ends up feeling a bit like solving a puzzle, trying to optimize the layout of the limited number of buildings you can afford.

One very clever thing the game does is distinguish the resources. One of the one resources is unstable and decays into other ones. Initially this is a big problem and you are building containment vessels to help build up enough of them for your new buildings. Eventually you are creating reactors breaking apart these unstable resources into massive amounts of the other resources. Each one has their own little niche (though they don't feel as distinct when it comes to costs of buildings, with most costing a spattering of many of the resources). This is something that many factory games should try to emulate.

The game is also paced fairly well, regarding unlocking new things right as the old starts to grow stale, though some sections tend to linger just a bit too long with too much grinding.

Now onto the biggest problems.

Despite trying to feel like a factory game, the interface doesn't work like one. The same button for deleting buildings is used for copying, and if you want to delete multiple buildings, you need to click individually for each one. Little things, but they add to the frustration.

The bigger problem is that some of the buildings are tall and you can not see behind them. Factorio has multiple dev-diaries with rejected building designs for this reason. There is a key to "see behind" buildings, but it really kind of sucks and doesn't help much. It makes it hard when trying to create optimized layouts with tall producers mixed with the very short production boosters (the only time I used those very short machines was with the very tall machines).

The UI also has you click on the "base" of a building rather than the building itself. This never really feels natural in situation, and especially with bunches of the taller machines, it can be hard to click on what you want. So this is especially problematic with the tall buildings.

The game attempts to alleviate the problem. The buildings that help you semi-automate things grow taller when they need attention in a visual satisfying way. But this still does nothing when attempting to layout the machines in the first place.

The next thing is that the game provides far to little feedback about how your resources are being produced/consumed. It's hard to know if you actually have a surplus of a given resource or if its just a temporary bump. I know the one resource decays into others, but have no idea how much of each you get. That information is nowhere in the game, and there is too much going on to really tell.

In the end I was producing the final resource, which up until that point I had to manually collect through a different system. I had no idea what was producing it or where it was coming from.

It also makes it hard to judge the efficiency of different layouts which seems to be the point in the game. In the end. You sort of just have to go with your gut that "yeah, it looks like this is breaking blocks faster." This lack of feedback actually got me stuck for 2 hours thinking I had some sort of bug. Several machines had affects triggered by a reaction between two resources (something easy to forget a few hours after unlocking the buildings). You can also increase the limit of how much you have of each resource before a reaction occurs (for building purposes). Then you build something and push yourself below that limit (though you still have a lot), and the reactions stop, and so your buildings stop. And this can cause your setup to stop producing more of the resources, just freezing everything up.

Not a huge problem but there are several points in the game where you can accidentatally put yourself into a place where you have to painfually and slowly build up your resources again because you broke your setup.

My final complaint, and a big one, is the story. There is all this mystery about where you are, what the machines are, what the deal with your friend and the hollow stone is... I'm not marking this as a spoiler, because there is nothing to spoil. There is absolutely no payoff to the game's story.

The game hints that the machines are some type of subconcious expression of the player. But it also goes out of the way to mention that the player character doesn't understand the highly technical labels and warnings on the machine. You would hope to get some answer to that.

You complete the final machine, go through a someone annoying segment, and then watch a bunch of particle effects. The interface glitches with physics terms and there are allusions to the big bang. It is potentially clever in the same way the "ending" of Lost was clever. You could remove the ending and slot in a different vague one and it would make just as much sense with the rest of the game.

The lack of payoff was really frustrating.

And that was my final impression of the game.