When Zactronics closed up shop, many automation-loving gamers were sad at the loss of a studio that created scrappy yet incredibly complex and creative puzzle games. Little did we know that some of the team would create Coincidence, a new studio that would continue on some of the DNA of their previous home. Kaizen: A Factory Story is the most polished and approachable game from some of this team to date. It feels familiar, whilst also opening up factory machine chain building for a new audience, making it the perfect entry point if you’ve never considered this style of puzzle game before.
We play as an American sales rep who moves to Japan in the mid to late 1980s for a sales role. When he arrives, he ends up on the factory floor to help see how the products are made, and as he (you) has a knack for it, he ends up being railroaded somewhat into this new career path. Over the course of the game, you’ll travel to different factories to support factory mass production of different types of gadgets. From plastic food displays to fast fashion to home appliances, each story chapter provides new items to create, and it gives you almost total creative control over your production line. This creative freedom also plays into the success criteria of each level. If you can create a factory process to build the item perfectly, you pass. However, you’ll see a chart on how fast, cost-efficient, and space-efficient the factory process is. You can’t ace all three, but you can replay levels and try out different approaches. It’s wonderfully open-ended and welcomes repeat playthroughs.
When on the factory floor, your game screen is divided into distinct areas. A grid of the factory sets out your build area, allowing you to drag and drop various objects onto it. If you are building a toy robot, each piece only has one entry position, so you’ll need to build one arm and leg, flip or move the robot, and then attach the second arm and leg. You can do this using factory arms and slider tracks to grab, move. and drop objects. Each arm can also flip an object, too. Then there are two types of rivets to weld items either side by side together, or weld vertically or horizontally through items together, like a kebab. Lastly, you’ll have cutters. These can be static or attached to an arm to form a drill. These can carve out metal to make room for buttons on an electrical item, for example.
All these tools are introduced quite early on, with little else added afterwards. What changes instead is the complexity of the items you need to build. Instead of making a plastic sandwich, you’ll be making bidets by carving, flipping, joining, and poking bits of plastic around the screen. At the bottom of your playscreen is a block-based timeline that reminds me a bit of a video editing tool. Here, you can place up to 4 blocks running simultaneously that can move different arms in your build to make the machines work. Kaizen lets you move back and forth, seeing how your machine process plays out, and it flags where items crash into each other, or objects get stuck. This is very helpful, although because the interface forces you to drop your next move onto the timeline first, then change the arm and its movement, there always seems to be an error message flashing! You’ll get used to it quickly and spot when the errors are relevant.
Whilst this is all a step forward from previous automation games in terms of slick, easy to understand user interfaces, there were still a couple of minor niggles with controls. Arms, rivets, and tracks need to be rotated into the right orientation to work, and this is tied to an odd mouse movement that didn’t always work. This was mostly a niggle when trying to select a track under an arm, as the game gets confused over which item you are selecting. It’s easier to just drag the arm off the track and readjust the track before reinstating the arm. It’s a minor quirk that you’ll get used to, but I think a rotate or extend up/down keyboard button could have been a nice alternative control method. The only other technical issue I had was audio and cutscene skipping and stuttering. It’s a shame, as the voice acting cutscenes gave a nice slice-of-life work anime drama background to the game. I enjoyed it. There is an odd turn-based pachinko minigame that pops up across the game, which adds some variety to the mix. I seemed to win every time, but maybe I was just lucky. I liked the idea of turn-based pachinko and it’s implemented well enough, but the main reason to buy Kaizen is for the factory puzzles.
It’s the open-ended creativity that Kaizen: A Factory Story fosters that makes this game a gem. Having a totally blank slate might be daunting to some, but for me, it opens up a world of possibilities. With structured tools, rules, and limitations to work around, this is the clearest, most approachable Zactronics-like game to date. If you’ve never tried one before, start here. You won’t regret it.
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