FACEMINER

FACEMINER is the video game equivalent to one of those fancy restaurants where everything looks and feels perfect, but the actual dish sizes wouldn't even satiate a rat. In other words: it's too short for the asking price.

(Audio)visually, the devs made something that I wouldn't roll my eyes at if called a masterpiece. The soundtrack is a banger and the UI of your 1999-based computer OS was done perfectly. I'm also going to credit the story for being a poignant reminder of what happens when you let a group of 1000 obscenely rich folks build datacenters that use more electricity than a small country so they can sell every single detail about us to each other to get even more obscenely rich, but I'll spare you my leftist analysis.

The gameplay, however, is where the game(!) falls flat on its face. I can really appreciate good soundtracks, killer visuals and a tight story/message, but above all else, I want my video games to have good gameplay to separate them from the movies and music out there. Don't expect the exponential growth factor of Cookie Clicker or the mechanical richness of Universal Paperclips. Trust me, we'll get back to that second one.

90% of the upgrades are the equivalent to "take less damage" and 9% are "watch abstract numbers go up". There are very few upgrades that add new mechanics that keep the player hooked. This is because the game's story has an average runtime of 2-3 hours if you pick the standard game length option. There just isn't enough game for me to solidly recommend this title.

Again, I really appreciate what the devs did here and I'm not going to unjustly call this game a cash grab, but it's just too expensive for what it offers. I'd say this is a $3 experience at most.

If you don't care for the audiovisual aspect (which again, this game nailed), I'd suggest giving Universal Paperclips a spin. It's a free to play web game with a surfeit of mechanics with more or less the same message as FACEMINER, although it's about physical resources rather than data. If Universal Paperclips is a bit too much for you to chew, I can also recommend the web-based game Crank, where you, well, turn a crankshaft until you get robots to do it for you, among many more things.

Finished the hard mode (which is literally just artificially lengthened) in 2.6 hrs with a few periods of afk.

This is a basic incremental game with one system that you will manage for the entire game, there is no real development. The only progression mechanic is buying upgrades of the Auto face identifier. Everything else around that is just buying upgrades to not lose the game, i.e. enough CPU, RAM, cooling and some others.

Story is dull and cliché with nothing new or interesting.

Hard pass, even for free.

Faceminer touches on environmentalism, AI, machine learning, crypto-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, neoliberal techno-spiritualism, business-speak, the politicization of climate activism for commercial gain, just to name a few. It's timely, engaging, and technically well executed. You could find a laundry list of little things to love about Faceminer.

I do think how it ends undermines its messaging just a little bit. What Faceminer warns about is very real and very possible, but that fact isn't reinforced by the premise of Faceminer being unrealistic for 1999. The way the game ends further undermines Facerminer Corporation as being fantastically evil, as opposed to an exaggeration. Not that I dislike the ending; it's very foreboding. That works well with the forward-thinking message.

My only gameplay nitpick is endless mode, namely late-game power generation. It takes a lot of time to make the money needed to get upgrades after a few hours, but you can't true idle Faceminer because of cluster node failures, viruses, and how fragile your balance sheet is that late. Needs a lot of babysitting that isn't rewarded like how it is in the main game.