Satisfactory kicks you in a hole, murders you, and makes you like it

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

I didn’t understand what was amazing about Satisfactory until it kicked me in a hole, murdered me, and then stole all my stuff.

I’d spent my first two hours with Coffee Stain Studios’ industry builder—which hit its 1.0 release, crossing that mythical line that says “This is a video game now, and not just a demo with a price tag,” last month—in a hazy mixture of confusion and irritation. As someone who’s given far too many hours of my life to The Great God Idle Games, I was familiar enough with the game’s basic automation engine template, and its obvious, compulsive pleasures: Use resources and tools to build a machine that lets you build bigger, more complicated machines, repeat until your entire pristine world has been transformed into a big pile of conveyor belt spaghetti. But as I slowly familiarized myself with the game’s particular quirks—the limitations and freedoms afforded by its first-person view point, the slightly annoying satirical tone, the early need to hoover up hundreds of pieces of foliage to keep your furnaces fed—I wasn’t sure what the big deal was. “It’s first-person Factorio written by someone who liked Portal,” I caught myself thinking on occasion. Why is everyone on my Steam friends list obsessed?

The shift, for me, occurred when the game started pushing me toward doing a bit more exploration in the alien world it takes place on, the better to acquire resources more rare or complex than the basic mining staples it starts you with. Despite a bit of hesitation—I hadn’t been terribly impressed by the game’s first-person melee combat when I’d gotten a taste of it in the opening minutes before I set up my base—I started roaming the countryside while leaving my factory to cook. I even found myself having fun: Discovering drop pods that could only be opened by supplying them with power; picking up weird new resources I could feed into my research machines once I got back to base; accruing a big surplus of delicious leaves that I’d be able to feed into my furnaces to keep the lights on for another few minutes. After a few minutes of this general doddering, my perambulations brought me to a massive stone arch that had been dominating my horizon ever since the game had started, with a number of strange glowing flowers around its base. Approaching one, assuming I’d be getting some new useful alien plant matter, I was concerned, then panicked, as it lifted itself off the ground and began blanketing the area in toxic gas. Watching my health drop rapidly, I turned and ran—straight into a several hundred-foot hole I’d had no idea was there. That was Satisfactory Death No. 1.

When you die in Satisfactory, you drop everything you carry—and since I a) hadn’t really been thinking about dying as a concern, and b) had been out picking up rare and interesting stuff, my Death Crate represented like 90 percent of my total value in the game at the point that I had reached. And now it was at the bottom of a hole, surrounded by poisonous plants. The next half hour was, let’s put it, stressful, as I tried multiple times to find a safe way back down to my first set of remains that didn’t involve either asphyxiating or shattering my legs. (Call these Satisfactory Deaths No. 2 through 5 or 6.) Finally, I managed to skirt the plants enough to find a semi-safe drop down the chasm that only mostly killed me, and discovered my Crate happily resting on the ground, deep beneath the surface of the planet. I had all my stuff back! In a cave! Filled with monsters and poison gas and god knows what else. In a game with no easy “teleport back to base” function. Hm.

What I’m driving at, by telling you this story, is the simple fact that Satisfactory is a game capable of generating stories. By importing a light version of the exploration/survival elements of games like Minecraft or Rust into its basic factory-building template, the game grants itself the ability to create pleasures far more potent than the simple joys of turning a verdant paradise into an industrialized hellscape in the name of efficiency. Its magic comes from being a game where you can both find yourself sneaking through a cave, desperately jabbing hopping scorpion bugs with a cattle prod while collecting arcane alien relics that whisper to you about blood and effigies, and a game where you can use the remains of said monster bugs to help you tweak the efficiency of your automated takeover of the ecosystem. (It’s also a game where you can zipline across the landscape at high speeds on power lines, which is incredibly fun. But I didn’t figure that out until after I’d engineered my escape from the chasm by building a ramshackle ramp out of the materials I’d scavenged from my own corpse.) It smartly doesn’t layer the survival elements on too heavily—there’s nothing like a hunger meter to manage, or anything else that would split focus from the basic resource management goals of the factory. But it maintains just enough of them to feel like an adventure, and not a spreadsheet. In any game that works on a loop like this, you have to be excited to see what’s next in order to keep motivation flowing; Satisfactory‘s genius is in making that exploratory anticipation part of its world, and not just its menus.