The makers of notoriously hard puzzle games have released a fantastic easier one
Kaizen: A Factory Story is one of two brainy PC games I'm currently hooked on
In the new PC puzzle video game Kaizen: A Factory Story, players assemble calculators, plastic imitation sushi and, I’m told, a pair of socks, using some unusual rules.
They place each component on a green grid and then place and program mechanical arms to pull, push, poke, drag or flip the parts.
If the object they are constructing requires a duplicate of the part—let’s say the player is building an “world clock” which requires two faces that tell time for two locations—they cannot simply place a second part on the board. Instead, they place the first clock face, then must push it out of its own way, which will cause a duplicate to appear. (There are only a set number of parts, so you can’t do this ad infinitum.)
Using this technique in Kaizen, I recently created a plastic hamburger. I placed a bun on the board, nudged it one row down, so that a second bun appeared. I flipped the new bun, used a mechanical arm to drag it two spaces down. Then I dragged both buns to the left, to affix them to the other parts.
Here’s a GIF of my solution:
That’s an early puzzle, before the calculator, before the computer that I’m going to be assembling next and long before, I’m told, the vexing rice cooker and the even more challenging socks.
For fans of puzzle video games, the release of a new one from Zach Barth and the former Zachtronics team, now re-formed as Coincidence, is an event.
For those of us who’ve longed to get into such games but found the likes of Shenzhen I/O, TIS-100 (“the assembly language programming game you never asked for!’) and Opus Magnum too brain-breaking, Kaizen is an extra special event. It’s one to which we’ve finally been invited.
“Kaizen is really about making puzzles that more people can solve,” Barth told me last week.
It’s meant to be more approachable, or as mass-appeal as a Zachtronics-style game can get (Longtime Game File readers may recall Kaizen’s publisher, Astra Logical, teasing last September that Barth’s team was working on a more approachable game. This is it.)
So far, it is easier and more welcoming, if your writer here can be the judge. I’m 15 puzzles into Kaizen, the farthest I’ve ever gotten in one of these games.
Yesterday, I made a compact camera. See this GIF?
I was proud of myself.
What I didn’t do, though, is make that camera in one, snappy turn.
I found someone on Steam who did that. Here’s a GIF of their solution:
There was a second half to what Barth told me about the new game’s difficulty.
Yes, Kaizen “is really about making puzzles that more people can solve,” as he said. And that, he added, “means that more [people] can take a crack at optimizing it and experience that second tier gameplay that's usually pretty inaccessible in a lot of our games.”
That second tier involves solving a puzzle as efficiently as possible, an obsession among the Zachtronics (and now Coincidence) faithful.
Since his first game, Barth told me, players of his and his team’s games have made a second game out of solving each puzzle as efficiently as possible. At first they did this informally, swapping solutions to figure out how to achieve the fastest solution times. Barth caught on and began letting players see how their solutions fared against others. (Hence Kaizen allowing players to export GIFs of their solutions, as seen in this article).
“To the extent that our games have gone viral, it's usually because somebody will start playing one of the games, and then they'll get all their co-workers or their friends to play it,” Barth said. “And then they will all be competing on the friend leaderboards.”
Everyone chases those optimal solutions.
“People would tell stories of our games taking out an entire development team at a game studio for two weeks, while they all competed in TIS-100,” he said.
The less daunting Kaizen presents a set of puzzles enmeshed in a story set in 1980s Japan. The game’s main character, David Sugimoto, travels from America to work in sales at a Japanese firm, but is surprised when company officials task him with designing assembly lines to build increasingly complex objects and gadgets.
The word “Kaizen,” the game’s writer, Matthew Burns, told me, was a “business buzzword” 40 years ago. It’s a term for “continuous improvement” associated with Japan’s 1980s economic boom.
Making games quickly
Efficiency in manufacturing isn’t just the game’s theme, but the ethos of the Coincidence team’s approach. They made the game quickly, in about 18 months. Speed was a necessity.
“We make games, because we have to stay in business,” Burns said. “Time spent developing a game is money. And salary and personnel costs are by far the largest cost in making a game. And so, when we develop games, we try to do so very quickly. We don't spend a lot of time just, kind of like, trying to find the fun or swimming around in this huge state space of ideas or things like that.
“As a designer, Zach picks something and just goes with it and sees it through and kind of makes the game. We try not to spend tons of time just in pre-production hell, just like, ’What about this?’ ‘What about this?’ It's really just like: ‘Okay: Pick it, Make it. Do it.”
Actually, they wanted to make Kaizen in 12 months, not 18. They’d made Shenzen I/O in four months. Making the game’s graphics in 4K, instead of just 1080p probably slowed them down a bit, Barth said.
That’s okay. They can try again and optimize.
More Kaizen:
Not-quite-bug reports: “When I make a really good puzzle or a really bad puzzle,” Barth said, “people email me and they're like, ‘Is this a bug?’” This is common, he told me, since players can’t tell if a puzzle is broken or they’re just not getting it. “Anybody who emails me thinking that they found a bug, they're usually so apologetic already, that I’ll just be like, ‘No, actually, this is the thing.’ If they say they're stupid, I'll be like, ‘You're not stupid. I made this game. Lots of people are emailing me about the same thing, you know?’” Often, they’ll email a second time to say they solved the puzzle before he can even reply.
Optimizing? Yes. Chasing perfection? No: “I think a lesson that applies kind of both universally to this game itself and the development of this game and then maybe life in general is not being too precious about things,” Burns told me. “I've worked on teams before, especially AAA teams, where people are really holding on for that perfect thing to be developed and to come along. AAA games, when I worked on them, they took, like, three years [to make], and that was already too long. Now, AAA games are five to seven years in development. People are saying that that's that's too long, and I think … thinking that there's that 100% thing that you're going to get to if you just keep waiting, rather than just accepting a kind of like 90% and being, ‘Aright that's good enough, I'm going with it,’ that's something that I've had to apply a lot to the stuff that I do—even including the novel that I recently wrote,. You can't just sit on it forever and hope it's going to be perfect. You have t keep things moving and and and say, “Yeah. Okay. I think that's good enough. We're never going to get to the next thing if we get stuck on this.’”
Item 2: Like Minesweeper, but you’re finding islands
I saw my former Kotaku colleague write that the puzzle game “Nurikabe World is cleverness wrapped in prettiness.” Hmm.
I bookmarked the Kotaku article, read it weeks later.
Nurikabe World is kind of like Picross or Sudoku or Minesweeper? But you’re poking out squares of land to make waterways and islands?
Became obsessed (not just me!)
Item 3: In brief…
🚫 Steam has been making headlines for a mass-deletion of sex games, many of them featuring incest.
Valve said it is complying with requirements from credit card companies, PC Gamer reports.
🚫 Vice has been making headlines for the deletion of articles on Vice’s Waypoint gaming subsite about Steam’s mass-deletion of sex games.
The articles had scrutinized Australian anti-pornography (and occasionally anti-GTA, anti-Detroit: Become Human) group Collective Shout, which took credit for pressuring credit card companies about Steam.
In protest of the deletions of the news pieces, two third of Waypoint’s contributors, including its managing editor, have quit, as Aftermath explains.
🎮 Virtuos, the gaming mega-firm that primarily focus on outsourced co-development, is laying off 270 workers in Asia and Europe, Game Developer reports. (
Virtuos had about 4,000 staff. In February, the company’s CEO told Game File that they’d managed to avoided mass layoffs and had “boringly steady” increases in headcount.
😮 Ubisoft reported lower-than-expected bookings (player spending) for the April-June quarter because of—and this is something I haven’t seen in an earnings report before—a problem around its hit live-service game Rainbow Six Siege: ”significant disruptions due to technical pricing issues, which have now been identified and addressed.”
More detail from Ubisoft report’s section on Siege: “player spending this quarter saw a significant impact from a pricing exploit with prepaid currency cards that temporarily inflated virtual currency wallets.”
The company said a major revision to the game, Rainbow Six Siege X, nevertheless drove the game’s highest monthly user count since Covid lockdowns in 2020.
💰 A judge in California has rejected a proposed $7.8 million class action settlement from Sony over the cessation of sales of PlayStation Network game download codes, Reuters reports.
Among the hang-ups: The settlement would have paid plaintiffs in the form of store credit, Tweaktown reports. Sony and the plaintiffs will be able to revise the terms and try again.
🎥 Microsoft has removed the ability to buy TV shows and movies through an Xbox, Eurogamer reports.
💡 Pokémon Friends is a new educational Pokémon puzzle game for kids, surprise-launched on mobile and Switch today, with development input from Japanese education company Wonderfy.
Item 4: The week ahead (or, because this was meant to run on Friday, the week we’re already in)
Wednesday, July 23
Wheel World (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) is released.
Thursday, July 24
Super Mario Party Jamboree + Jamboree TV (Switch 2) one of the first of Nintendo’s wave of paid Switch 2 upgrades to Switch 1 games, is released.
Wuchang: Fallen Feathers (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) and Killing Floor 3 (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) are released.
Item 5: Game File goes viral
The July 18 edition of Game File was stuffed with new reporting about Ubisoft that I largely found through my review of the company’s unreported July 10 annual meeting and the company’s annual report, which had been issued in June.
It’s not new for me to see my reporting aggregated by other outlets. I welcome it (especially when they give credit).
But this one was special just because the sheer range of stories that spawned from its many parts, all from reporting I did—and that you got to read on Friday—about events that were over a week old but had otherwise been missed.
The new Ghost Recon thing: I tipped off Insider Gaming about this nugget, because they’d been covering leaks about a new game in the series. They picked up that news, then dug into the annual report to find a story about Ubisoft microtransactions, and listened to the annual meeting to get a longer version of the why-Star-Wars-Outlaws-struggled answer I highlighted. They wrote up the guy asking about Valorant, too.
The bit about Star Wars’ “choppy” brand rep hurting Outlaws: A lot of outlets went with the Star Wars bit, generally with the expanded answers others wrote up. Nintendo Life, GameSpot, Wccftech, Inverse, IGN, Kotaku, PC Gamer, and PSU.
A brief line about Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ development costs: Got picked up by Tweaktown, GamesRadar and… Gamer Braves?
Ubisoft CEO’s reaction to Stop Killing Games: Rock Paper Shotgun wrote that up. As did Metro, Pure Xbox, GamesRadar and the very cool new This Week In Video Games from friend-of-site-SkillUp-and-friends.
Ubisoft’s CEO being confronted by an investor worried about “woke”: Kotaku and Gaming Amigos grabbed that.
Ubisoft’s business at risk from online gamers bashing them? Inkl, Windows Central, 80.Lvl, GamesRadar.
Etcetera.
Note: I was going to see how many of the items from Friday’s newsletter spread on YouTube, but after my preliminary search results turned up: “Ubisoft CEO Drops TRUTH BOMB About Star Wars Outlaws DISASTER – ADMITS Star Wars Is DEAD,” I decided there were better things to do with my life.
Man. Last Call BBS is sooooo cool, but everything in it is hard. Even the one where you just assemble and spraypaint model robots is hard!
Great reporting as usual, Stephen! That part about Steam and Vice is wild and also super disappointing, both for the censorship AND for the way the reporters at Vice were treated. That's just despicable.