Infinifactory

Infinifactory is Zachtronics' first-person factory-building puzzle game — the studio's specific brand of automation-engineering brain-bender translated into a 3D environment. The premise is that you've been abducted by alien overlords and put to work designing factory layouts that assemble specific products from raw inputs. Survival depends on building factories that work; survival also depends on not dying during the assembly process, which is a non-trivial gameplay caveat.

The gameplay loop is genre-standard for Zachtronics in the best way. Place conveyor belts, welders, pushers, sensors, and other industrial blocks into a 3D space to transform incoming inputs into the required output. Every machine block has specific behavior and interacts with the others in ways that produce emergent solutions. The campaign covers 50-plus puzzles, each presenting a new product, each solvable in a wide variety of approaches.

Histograms are the social hook. Every puzzle ranks your solution across multiple optimization axes — solution size, cycle count, factory footprint — and shows how your design compares to the friend list and the global community. Optimization compulsions tend to take over once a puzzle is initially solved, and the same setup that took you twenty minutes to figure out is often replaced by something half the size and twice the throughput over the following hours.

The campaign frames the puzzles inside a story delivered through environmental detail and audio logs, gradually revealing more about the alien overlords and the broader situation you've been pulled into. Steam Workshop integration lets you create, share and play custom puzzles, and the sandbox mode pushes the engine's next-generation block engine well past the campaign's constraints. For anyone who loved SpaceChem and wanted it in three dimensions, Infinifactory is exactly that.