A cheap little indie released this week combines two notoriously time-sucking genres into one monstrous whole. Widget Inc has the production-matching flow of a factory game but the gameplay of an incremental, letting you build up successive layers of industry in order to make ever more complex technology over 12 tiers of tech and associated upgrades. By cleverly expanding to take advantage of machine adjacency bonuses and terrain types you can get those production numbers ever-higher in order to unlock and research new tech at a good pace.
It has a demo that takes a couple hours to beat and gives you a good taste of how the game's simple first few tiers of tech play as you begin to unlock optimizations for a growing industrial complex. It's pretty neat stuff and so far hasn't shown the kind of bog-down points that other incremental games sometimes rely on to expand their playtime.
Here's how developer Leaping Turtle describes Widget Inc:
"A hybrid factory builder / incremental clicker game. Starting from humble beginnings, master the many crafting processes to build up resources and expand your factory. Then, using your newly automated production, unlock new technology and grow ever closer to your goal of spreading to the stars."
That first part really is a succinct description of how it plays. Each little building has its own button to click or minigame to play so that you can get its product—all of which gets automated as you buy ugprades for that building until you never have to do it again. In a capacitor factory, for example, you add up numbers to reach a specific goal, while in a power plant you just hold open the valve to let oil flow in.
You can find Widget Inc on Steam for $5, though it's 10% off until November 7. Take a look—it's the coolest one I've seen since last year's The Gnorp Apologue.
