This adorable pixel art factory-automation game blends the conveyor belt chaos with another popular genre: you'll need to contend with the residents of the local town and form relationships if you're going to have their help in achieving your manufacturing dreams. Little Rocket Lab just released this week on Steam, and although my title reads a little like clickbait, I think calling it a fusion of Factorio and Stardew is a pretty dead-on way of understanding what the game is going for.
It's made with an isometric perspective, and the pixel art resolution is a little closer to the farming life-sim, but otherwise there's obviously a lot of Factorio-esque stuff going on here: gathering materials and filling up plots of land with winding conveyor belts, carrying objects to facilities that will meld them together into whatever the next required ingredient is for your endlessly engineered march-of-progress.
The big goal is even similar: this time you're returning to your home town to complete your mother's dream of building and launching a rocket into space. But there are other people living in this town! And getting along with them will be integral to the success of your venture. It brought a smile to my face when the trailer showed some older residents gathering in a crowd on a sidewalk which... had been bisected by the player's sprawling conveyor belts, cutting off their path.
It proceeds to show a very silly and contrived robot-engineering solution to the problem, which is cute, but the main reason this excited me was that it shows the game is willing to engage with the thematic issues that would arise when smashing these two disparate genres together.
I could easily picture a version of this idea where the two halves remain almost entirely separate, trekking to the village and then returning to your ever-expanding factory by night. But the interplay between these ideas and all the situations that may arise from the collision are sure to generate all sorts of fun story ideas.
You can find out the rest of the cute industry-meets-village-life moments for yourself as Little Rocket Lab is available now on Steam.
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