Next Fest 24|3 Day 3
Micro-reviews for Day 3 of Autumn Next Fest 2024, exploring Block Factory, Microtopia, and Manufactur' inc.
This post was originally on Discord, and as such does not contain additional information 2025+ posts have
A few less games today for a few different reasons, one of them being that Block Factory stole 3 hours of my life (in the best way possible).
Highlights: Block Factory
Microtopia
An enjoyable little automation game. I appreciate any game like this that has a feature that at first glance is "why would I want this?" and then becomes absolutely crucial (counter gate my beloved). I really enjoy splitting all my little robo-ants into smaller chains of tasks, and look forward to doing even more trail spaghetti in the full version
Playtime: ??h
Manufactur' inc.
I want to like this, as it's a very pure spreadsheet game with some interesting ideas (all players influencing shared prices of items) but the demo is undercooked. It is not clear how to progress, little control over how your factory actually works, and by the time you figure things out, you might (like me) have ran out of base resources which are crazy expensive to buy. And it crashed when I tried to inspect new buildings, so that's not fun. I'd wait for it to develop a bit more, and check it out in a year or two
Playtime: ??h
Block Factory
Incredible factory game with a premise similar to shapez, but instead of abstract shapez you're making small dioramas with tiny lego brick models. It's a good mix of being straightforward to do, allowing a lot of optimization potential, and having the twist of requiring you to be very careful with your resource usage if you want to be able to meet all of the speed requirements at once (something that is hardly an issue during regular play). I've spent nearly 3 hours in the demo alone, and I expect to spend many more whenever the final game comes out