Sixty Four

It bills itself as a mixture of a clicker game and a factory game, but it kinda just ends up failing at both. I play and enjoy both genres, so I thought this would be fun, but its not scratching either itch.

a factory game you primarily progress by building up your factory to produce new things, and if you end up producing things that will take a long time, you spend your time optimizing your production and increasing throughput, not just wait around.

and in a clicker game you progress by time, with the ability to speed things up with active play. but you can walk away for a while and come back later so the waiting time isn't consumed by staring at the game.

But this game requires constant babysitting any micromanagement. You can click on things to speed up your resource gain, and that would be fine, but even if you aren't doing that you need to be refueling buildings constantly, so you can't idle for more than a few seconds. At the same time, you can't scale up like a normal factory game because it has idle game exponential scaling of costs, so your ability to build and optimize gets constrained by the progression as a clicker.

Maybe later in the game things improve, but so far its only increased the demands to babysit it. Things need refueled constantly, and the material gain of the current tier resource is a trickle, and overall it just ends up being extremely tedious.

I feel kind of confused by this game.

I feel in Automation games like Factorio, Satisfactory, etc, the fun comes from the scale and complexity of the systems.

In clicker games, the fun comes from hoarding resources from AFKing and coming back to make sweeping improvements,

This game feels like it wants to be a bit of both, but asks for constant attention in the most tedious ways by needing to constantly refill every small element of your factory, and if you try to find creative ways to automate it, it just laughs at you for it.

I don't get what the value of this is, the gameplay of clicking to refuel things isn't really fun, or engaging enough to feel worth the time, but also the cost of things scales so hard that even if you tried to give the game your full attention and scale it to your pace, the game says no, as costs become incredibly restrictive and force you to sit around, waiting for millions of resources to build up to make anything of value, while giving you nothing to do with your time but looping refilling your factory.

And even theeeeeeeeeennn... why the ♥♥♥♥ does the same building burn fuel at different rates based off how many things its interacting with? even if you try to play by the games rules and say, okay I'll sync all my stuff up so I can sweep through and refuel everything in one go so I can tab out for a few minutes, the game again laughs at you and your ♥♥♥♥ breaks in under 2 minutes of you not paying attention.

I don't understand the objective of this game. Building out systems to optimise gathering resources is super fun, and an interesting puzzle, especially with the limited range of everything in the game, but being throttled in the scale of your factory, and the constant babysitting it demands just makes the overwhelming majority of this gameplay loop the most boring part of these type of games.

I’ve finally finished this game, so I wanted to get my thoughts down into the steam reviews section.

First of all, I think the marketing for this game doesn’t quite get at what this game actually is. It’s not a factory builder, it’s not an idle game: it’s a Forager-like, a genre so small I can think of exactly three entries (one of which is this game, and one of which is Forager). It’s not a game about automating everything, and maximizing all possible output. Instead, it’s a game about maximizing the output of every single interaction; of making every single click go for miles, instead of just inches.

For the most part, I think it succeeds in that. While in the early game you micromanage every single part of this tiny little machine you gradually build, by the late game you just click and hold to move your mouse to a couple of important places. It’s grindy, sure, but most of that grind is (reasonably) fun: you can take pride in the idiosyncratic solution you’ve made to the game’s puzzles as you mouse over every bit of it, and you can start planning your next steps.

However, I did say most of that grind. While I suspect a few of these points have been fixed by various post-release patches (I started my save on nearly 1.0), a few of them are still sticking points to me, personally. The following spoilers will span the whole game, so be warned.

• Hollow stones, early on, are annoying. Even with the patch to double their spawn rates, they are finicky as hell: you can only even figure out you can collect them by clicking them far too many times, and having to manually collect hundreds of them by manually teleporting to the hollow rock research site is just annoying. Plus, time warp is a mechanic which seems to do nothing but exist to be vaguely irritating, and not in a way that makes the game especially interesting.
• Hell gems are a very unique mechanic which I like on the whole, but which are still tedious when you first unlock them. Even with maxed autoclicker, a hell gem block takes a while to break, and you have to manually collect a fair few of them.
• Another point on hell gems: hell vaults are annoying. If you want to purchase something which is just below your hell gem limit, it is tedious as hell to have to repeatedly click it to select it, and then repeatedly click to place it.

On to other points than just pure game design & balance. I think this game’s sound design is extremely good. Early on, it’s great that you can hear every sound; by the late game, even though there’s a deluge of different noises, they still all broadly work together without being dissonant. I think there’s space to improve, but I think it’s already got an extremely good foundation.

The narrative is alright. I like that it’s there, providing an extra minor incentive to reach the next milestone, and it sets the tone of the game quite well. It could be better/more interesting, but I don’t think it makes the game worse that it’s present. It is exactly what it needs to be.

Before the most recent patch, I probably would have complained about the UI. However, with the new patch making Q jump the menu to whatever you’ve selected, the UI is actually very snappy. This is a great sign for the game as a whole: a whole lot of solid QoL tweaks in the last couple of weeks have really streamlined some very rough patches throughout the game.

On the whole, Sixty-Four is not a game for everybody. If you’re expecting a traditional automation game, you’ll be disappointed by the lack of automation; if you’re expecting a traditional idle game, you’ll be disappointed by the lack of idling. That said, the game rides the line between the two quite well (and I say that as a diehard fan of both genres). Even if my feelings are somewhat mixed, I’m giving this a positive recommendation because it really does do something interesting, and doesn’t quite play like anything I’ve played in some time.