Captain Contraption's Chocolate Factory

Great little puzzle game where you assemble foodstuffs in an automated factory you design. Reminds me of The Incredible Machine and also Nom Nom Galaxy. Remember seeing this one on Imgur and am glad I tried the demo.

TLDR: a great retro puzzler that avoids frustration through clever mechanics As others have mentioned, this feels like a spiritual successor to The Incredible Machine but with an unexpected dash of Lemmings thrown in. I loved The Incredible Machine back in the olden days, but I wasn't big on Lemmings. Brilliantly, though, Captain Contraption's Chocolate Factory manages to sidestep everything I found frustrating about this genre of game. Instead of requiring 100% perfection, the you only have to hit 75% of your quota per stage. Instead of a strict budget limit, it gives you a par cost to shoot for. Instead of making you 100% complete every area before moving on, or even finish every stage in an area, you just have to hit 30% completion. Since every stage has three goals (hit the 75% quota, hit the quota under par cost, and hit the quota in a wacky variant of the stage), this means that you have options. If you want, you can brute force your way through, hitting the quota on every level through expensive and complex mechanisms. If you just can't figure out one stage, you can go back to one that was easy for you and try to get it under par and/or complete the wacky variant. The presence of the leaderboards is surprisingly encouraging as well. They show you where your solution to a stage ranks in terms of cost, speed, and results. When the par was 450 credits and you only spent 300, you should feel proud, even when you see that someone else managed to do it in 60 -- that just means you've got more to learn about the mechanics. When you go back and try to figure out how someone did it so simply, you inevitably figure things out that will help you in the levels to come. In short, it's fun, it stretches your brain, and it's way less stressful than its forebears. I recommend it.

This is an excellent game. Very much like the Incredible Machines or Krusty's Funhouse (underrated). The concept of the gameplay is straightforward enough and you end up tweaking like you would in Spacechem to get that better performance. The soundtrack, I'm never usually bothered about in games. I will say I'm not sure it fits the game, but equally, its one of, if not the best I've ever heard in a PC game.

If you like puzzle games, this is well worth you time. Very clever!

Man I'm lucky to have found this game haha. What a fun little thing to play. I hope more people discover it.

Review by Arthur (8 years old): I really like it! Even though it sometimes gets frustrating, it's very fun. The challenge levels are fun and a bit tricky. In free play it's fun to make random things. It's like Contraption Maker but in this game the challenges are better. Overall, I would recommend it to children and grownups. 9/10

The Incredible Lemmings, sort of

This game is like if a Love, Death, and Robots version of Willy Wonka made The Incredible Machine as an anthropological edutainment system to teach about the extinct human race.

Great little physics-based factory game! Cook the almonds, melt the chocolate, fire them through cannons and over conveyor belts to the goal. Each scenario is an interesting little challenge, and the high-score boards push you to make your factory just a little bit more efficient! Good fun at a low price, what's not to like.

Definitely not for me.