The team behind many of studio Zachtronics' hit puzzle-automation games have formed a new venture called Coincidence, and they've just debuted the trailer for their upcoming game Kaizen: A Factory Story. It's a bit of a funny situation you run into when describing this newly announced assembly-line-programming title, because even if it wasn't being designed by Zach Barth of Zachtronics fame, "zach-like" would very much be the natural go-to genre descriptor.
Playing as a businessman who's just arrived in Japan and looking to rise up the ranks, Kaizen puts you straight to work managing the programming and running of an assembly line putting together all sorts of things: in the trailer we can see TVs and robots being machined, flipped around and welded, as well as more unusual items like a curry and rice dish. This comes from the makers of such optimization-and-efficiency focused games as Opus Magnum, so I have no doubt we'll be spending lots of time refining our spatial contraptions, looking for every tiny area of improvement possible.
The game is set in the Japan of the 1980s, during an economic boom that had the rest of the world taking notice. Just doing some surface-level Google learning about the meaning of the word Kaizen I've started down quite an interesting history rabbit hole: the term refers to an ideal of "constant improvement" that formed the ethos of early Japanese industrial titans like Toyota, a business practice of vigilantly seeking out and eliminating waste and redundancies. Knowing what it feels like to play a Zachtronics title, I can't help but feel it's a very appropriate name for their next spiritual successor.
If your favorite of their oeuvre was the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection from 2022, Kaizen has something fun in store especially for you: a cute new Pachinko-style solitaire arcade game that you can waste some time on when you want to "take a break from factory life."
Kaizen: A Factory Story doesn't yet have a release date, but you can wishlist on Steam now to keep up with any news. It's being published by our friends at Astra Logical.
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