I was down to just sorta hold my nose and bear the kind of "white pharaoh" story this game was putting in front of me with all of its topical references from two years ago and PG-13 "raunchy humor" cause yeah, it's a game about big meaty men slappin' meat: it's puerile, and the gameplay is fun. Definitely wasn't having a good time with the story and how it was acting towards, like, all brown people ever, and then it dropped the most unpleasant "fat ugly transgender sexual predator" caricature i've seen since Duncan called Jeff a "transgender troll" on Total Drama Island almost two decades ago.

Should have trusted my instinct with the amount of Hitler Particles radiating off this damn game.

Surprised I never reviewed this. It's among the most important games in my collection. Of all the games I own I trust only Receiver 2 to make me feel scared, exhausted, and trapped and not just quit.

I hope it never comes, but one of these days it's going to be the time that we have prepared for, and with the fear it gives you this game is in conversation with that. It makes you panic so it can talk you through it, it slows you down to make you patient, and it makes you scared so you can learn how to do it scared.

Keep it together, it's all in your head.

What a distinct pleasure this game was during nextfest. This demo is worth a play all on its own, and I fully expect to buy the game when it comes out. In addition to the forehead-smacking innovation of falling sand chemistry-as-industrial-mechanic, It recognizes two wonderful things about factory games: The fun bit is when things go wrong, and the thing you should be working towards is exploration, maybe even story.

To the first point, contamination and mishandling are very well represented by the falling sand idea, and it was exciting to see materials get harder to handle and more contaminated and mixed as I moved through the world, and I hope it only gets more messy and dangerous in the full game: discovering that the snow in my sand was freezing in the washing pool and clogging it, and then that the evaporated steam was raining into my slag burner and clogging that too was a wonderful puzzle experience.

Factorio, Satisfactory, and often industrial mods for Minecraft all mostly fail to make worlds where your ability to traverse them is through engagement with the game's core factory mechanics. The most Factorio offers is a jetpack, but you can walk anywhere there's not enemies, and stuff like trains don't actually open up the map any. This game has actual puzzles underground that you solve with things your factory gives you. I really hope this is leaned into in the full game.

There's a little bit of slop in the character and building controls and the reduced movement speed at the start is dumb, boo hoo how will I ever survive etc etc.

Plays good, feels good, more mechanics than i was expecting (definitely didn't see the StS-style path map coming). Story spent a bunch of time answering "why am I here" before it even raised the question. I'm here to go fast, dog, if you want me to wonder where I am you gotta introduce me to where I was.

Three hours of tutorial for the least-complicated parts of the game, i get the ship drydock, and it seems like the whole game just shut up the moment i actually needed to be told how to do things. i think i sequence broke the bit with the relays and got softlocked so maybe something else was supposed to happen but even if that has worked I *really* did not need to told what a gun was with steven universe dialogue.

This game fundamentally altered my understanding of beauty.