Factori is a lovely little logic puzzle game that made me feel as smug as a bug in a rug. Wait I think that’s supposed to be snug but you get the point. It’s currently available on Itch.io but with the announcement that it was coming to Steam, I decided to give it a try and it made my morning so much more satisfying than my now-cold cup of coffee.
Factori centres around the letter I. The best letter in my opinion, as it’s the one my name begins with. With a variety of distortions, merges, and rotation machines, Factori allows you to make the letter I into any other letter in the alphabet. And then once you’ve got a hang of these letters you can begin to make words which is the ultimate aim of the game. From Ox to Dragon, the game sets up some challenges, and then you can input your own words when the game’s complete to give yourself more variety.
The game is simple but getting through these words elegantly can get tricky. At first you start out easy with two Is becoming a V, introducing merges. Then you can bend Is into Cs, rotate them, and combine them until you’ve got the entire alphabet. There are various ways you can make some letters. It’s up to your imagination of how shapes can come together to make something new, but once you’re down manipulating the shapes to your will, stats make the game competitive.
You could get through every word the game gives you within an hour or two. Once I understood the logic of Factori, I got very quick at making new letters but the end-of-level stats are what intrigued me most. How did anyone complete this level with only 8 buildings? I needed 10! Or how have you made it through with only a few letters overflowing? I’ve got 60 Ls still on screen for every P I could produce. The logic gets even better when it challenges you against how well other players built their alphabet factories.
And this is where the game weaves in multiple ways to construct the same letter. Some will need less steps than others while adding more factories for another may actually help you overflow less letters. It’s all ingenious resource management.
Factori is small but mighty. It’s currently available on Itch.io (opens in new tab) and I’d encourage you to try it out yourself as a nice breath of fresh air between other games, or you can wait until it gets to Steam (opens in new tab) next year for some logical fun.