Four games on the Thinky Games collective radar debuted on Steam today: some big anticipated titles like the Japanese-factory sim Kaizen from Coincidence and the word-game deckbuilder Word Play from Mark Brown of GMTK, as well as the lesser-known releases You Are the Code and Loophole.
Kaizen: A Factory Story is perhaps the most hyped-up release of this batch, because a new programming-automation game from Zach Barth is always going to get some fans excited. The founder of the eponymous studio Zachtronics, he's now working under the studio name Coincidence, but the games have much the same lovely flavor people have come to expect.
Kaizen takes you to a factory in 1980s era Japan, where you'll assemble and program factory lines that arrange and weld together all sorts of components into all sorts of products. Like any of the classic Zachtronics titles, and the little genre they've inspired, the name of the game here is optimization and efficiency first. Plus it comes with a cute new solitaire minigame, something that's become an expected inclusion in titles from this team.
Word Play is the 2nd big game release from Mark Brown, the YouTuber-turned-developer behind the popular channel Game Maker's Toolkit. With a built-in audience of a couple million viewers, it doesn't really feel like Mark needs our help, but there is another reason to talk about Word Play: it's a big poster child for a recent design trend of games that take the roguelite-deckbuilding-gambling stylings of Balatro and apply them to word games.
You'll be using randomly drawn lots of letter tiles to spell words, purchasing upgrades and modifiers, and trying to reach increasingly high score thresholds to keep your run going. Similar ideas have been brewing with lots of developers these days, as we've seen other takes on this concept from OMG Words, Wordatro!, Seuphorica, and the upcoming Birdigo, just to name a few.
You Are The Code is a smaller-scale release which throws you into a computer system already programmed with lines of code, waiting to be executed. The issue is that a bunch of literal bugs are crawling around inside it, chewing on and messing with your carefully written scripts.
This is a puzzle game where you're trying to end up at a specific output, and need to figure out what sequence of code activations can get you there. Squash the bugs before they corrupt your files too far and make this task impossible... unless there could be a way to use them to your advantage? (It's worth noting that this is an Early Access release, so there may be some bugs present that are less intended than others.)
Loophole is a first-time Steam release for the developer (with a generous 40% off launch discount), a time-travel puzzle game centered around the concept of creating clones of yourself and then co-operating with them to "escape into the past" before things fall apart around you. The premise reminds me of a webgame that I featured in a newsletter previously, but this time around it comes with some complications: if you run into a past version of yourself, you've created a paradox, which usually isn't great news. Time will tell if this one will make an impression, but the mechanics look like they have plenty of potential for tricky puzzles.
You can get Kaizen, Word Play, You Are The Code and Loophole all on Steam now, each at various levels of launch-window discount.
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