This year’s RPS Advent calendar is here and it’s time to fill the niche behind every door with 24 delicious wild-shaped chocolates. But man, it’s hard work making these chocolates. Too much manual work. I wish we could somehow automate the process – maybe we’d just have to exploit the planet’s resources and turn it into a giant chocolate factory spanning the entire solar system. Yes, that should work.

Behind door number one is Factorio: Space Age!

Ollie: As is certainly often the case, Factorio was the game that got me into factory building games. My first three or four runs were halting, painfully slow attempts to learn the language of conveyor belts, inserters, fluid dynamics, and walker defense. It took me about 400 hours to get to the playthrough that actually took me to the end of the game. And since then everything has clicked. I understand what I have to do and when I have to do it.

And then Factorio: Space Age came along and turned everything on its head. In a deliberate reversal of my previous experience, the first hundred or so hours went incredibly smoothly as I set up my factory in the usual manner. And when I fired my first rocket, everything came to a standstill. Outside the atmosphere, different rules apply. I thought I knew the language of Factorio, but it turned out I only knew the one basic dialect. With each new frontier, each new planet, I was forced to abandon much of what I knew and start again. And that made the first visit to each planet one of the most exciting gaming moments I’ve experienced in years.

Take the lava planet Vulcanus, for example. There are no iron or copper deposits in the ground here. You’ll need to manually pound rocks to get tiny amounts of the basic ores, slowly growing up to the point where you can start funneling lava directly into foundries to produce iron and copper in ribbon loads. Instead of water, there are sulfuric acid geysers that you can combine with calcite to create steam for power generation. And you have to keep your builds compact because you’re in a tiny safe room surrounded by the territories of giant, near-invulnerable worms called Demolishers that will kill you with a single touch.

Not strange enough? How about the spongy landscape of Gleba, where everything collapses into useless rubbish within minutes? Instead of starting with iron and copper, you have to harvest fruits and combine them into organic machines that don’t require electricity but run on nutrients like an organism. And if anything gets blocked, your entire production line will collapse into nothingness, creating some of the trickiest new logistical challenges I’ve encountered in any factory game.

Or perhaps you’re looking for the oil-filled oceans of Fulgora, where thunderstorms periodically strike the surface and ancient ruins litter the landscape. In a brilliant reversal of the regular Factorio rules, you must start at the top of the tech tree and work your way up Fulgora by tearing apart the high-tech ruins, salvaging processor chips and modular frames, and then breaking them down even further so you can make it through the basic building blocks iron and copper are preserved. And at the same time, you need to build lightning rods to protect yourself from the storms, which can also provide your factory with potentially unlimited energy if you can harness enough lightning.

Factorio: Space Age is astounding in its scope and ingenuity. Playing it feels like playing several different factory games at the same time, all cleverly linked together and each of which, in its own right, is among the most interesting and satisfying games in the genre. It may be overwhelming at times, especially on the first playthrough, but there’s also a level of focus on the player’s quality of life that’s unmatched in any other game I’ve ever played. A thousand hours later, I’m still discovering wonderful little quality of life tricks that I can’t believe I went so long without. I find new ways to build, new ways to expand, new ways to slaughter the native life forms of the planets I need to exploit.

It’s been a phenomenal year for Factory Games, perhaps the best ever. Satisfactory reached its full release, Shapez 2 was released and Factorio: Space Age made it clear that this game is still the king of the genre. I’d say you should take some time next year to try it out, but you might actually want to take it entire Year.

Go back to the Advent calendar to open another door!