It’s the late Eighties and the Japanese economy is booming. This was the era when Japan stood head and shoulders above the rest of the world in consumer product manufacture, with companies such as Honda, Panasonic, Toshiba, and Sony becoming the household names that we know today. With electronics and automobiles being shipped all over the globe, this becomes the perfect backdrop for Coincidence Games latest automation puzzle game, Kaizen: A Factory Story.
As David Sugimoto, an American taking on a new role at Matsuzawa Manufacturing, you’ll be dropped in at the deep end, not taking on the cushy sales job that you expected but instead being trained as a designer of automated factory lines. For anyone familiar with the members of the teams’ previous work at Zachtronics LLC, you’ll be pleased to know that you’ll feel right at home here, knee deep in commands and engineering tools. These commands are entered into a multi-lane timeline allowing multiple operations to be processed simultaneously, as you juggle moving parts around on a two dimensional plane before finally combining components into a mass market product.
With the ability to move freely along the timeline, seeing each motion as it takes place, you’ll soon be welding and flipping, shunting and chopping with aplomb, with a funky synth-pop soundtrack as your constant companion, putting together some of the most cutting edge electronics seen by man (well, at least before the 2000s). From VCR camcorders to children’s plastic onigiri, you’ll be armed with a few simple tools and your imagination as you find the most optimal way to produce products in this booming economy. Puzzles start relatively simply with only a few parts to be combined but soon enough, the products get more complex, requiring even more processing and some clever manoeuvring to finally get them into a shippable state.
Dragging and dropping items is so very simple and intuitive, as is the ability to affect changes to each component with a simple right-click menu, that there’s barely any friction as to manipulating the automation in front of you. Between that and the cleanly presented art style, the only real hurdles are the puzzles themselves and those hurdles will only get bigger and bigger over time. Finding ways to maneuver components past fixed objects, using tools in unexpected ways, timing moving parts to smoothly dodge one another. Each solution that you find will invariably lead to new ways of thinking, with applications in both new challenges that lay ahead and in optimisation of your past solutions.
As someone who has occasionally dabbled with this style of game previously, I’ll admit that I may have been a little cocky at first, quickly moving through the first areas without too much trouble but before I knew it, I was soon up against the brainteaser blockade. Manufacturing techniques are initially introduced at a slow and steady pace but will soon have you scratching your noggin, wondering just how it’s even possible to create a bloody pocket calculator!? But with a few minutes of tweaking (well honestly, hours if you add it all up!) and the click of the big green “START” button, oh my! The feeling of everything clicking into place is just sensational.
There’s nothing quite like struggling your way to an answer and the release (and relief) of everything smoothly coming together like clockwork. But that’s not the end of it. Oh no. If you want to get into the top percentiles of the online leaderboards, there’s yet more work to be done. With separate scoring for area used, time taken and cost incurred, there’s always something that you can work on to make everything run as efficiently as possible.
Tired of building and want to soothe your aching brain? Why not spend a little time at the Pachi-Sol machines? A fusion of classic Solitaire rules with the randomness of a Pachinko machine, it’s a light-hearted break from the head-scratching that you’ll be doing throughout the main campaign. Match the randomly generated numbered balls to another that’s only one above or below the current value as the ball drops from top to bottom, then they’ll both disappear. Simple. But as the balls soon start to run out, you’ll have to carefully judge each turn to ensure that all balls can be cleared from the playfield in time before you run out of moves. It’s a light and simple palate cleanser, refreshing between the main puzzling levels set before you.
With a light-hearted and charming narrative that’s not afraid to raise a smile or two, Kaizen: A Factory Story comes across the friendlier little brother to games such as SpaceChem or Opus Magnum but under that pleasant exterior lies another fantastic programming puzzle game that will push your grey matter into unknown territories. This is a seemingly gentle puzzle game that’s ideal to introduce new players to the automation genre, under the hood, Kaizen: A Factory Story still offers more than enough scope for veterans to tinker away at, optimizing their automated creations as they strive for perfection.