Factorio — 32.5 hrs
Played on: Windows 11 Pro (26200) · 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-12900K · 128 GB · NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 · NVMe SSD My time: 32.5 hrs
Fun 9 · Skill Ceiling 10 · Onboarding Tax 8 · Jank Tax 9 · Dad Tax 7 The Verdict: 9/10 — "Cancel my meetings."
Factorio doesn't have a hook. It has a compulsion, wearing a hook's clothing. You plant one drill on one ore patch to make one red science pack, and eighteen months later you're staring at a spaghetti of belts wondering why your throughput bottlenecked at a smelter you forgot you built. The factory must grow is not a tagline, it's a diagnosis.
32.5 hours in and I've barely left the starting planet, which by this game's standards makes me a tourist. Doesn't matter. I know exactly what this is: the purest distillation of "optimize the system, then optimize the optimization" that PC gaming has ever produced. As someone who used to min-max build orders for a living, this scratches an itch nothing since has touched — every belt is a build order, every bus a supply line, and the game rewards the same obsessive iteration that used to win me StarCraft games at 3am.
Here's the honest Dad Tax conversation, because this is the one title where it actually cuts both ways. Factorio has zero designed padding — no battle pass, no login streak, no artificial grind bolted on to keep you subscribed to nothing. One purchase, one expansion, done; Wube just announced 2.1 as their final major update and walked away clean. That's the rarest kind of respect a studio can show your wallet. But the game itself is a black hole disguised as a factory floor — it doesn't pad your time, it just quietly eats it, an hour at a time, with your full and enthusiastic consent. I've had to physically close the launcher mid-session more than once because "just fixing this one belt" is a lie I tell myself with total sincerity.
If you have anything else on your calendar this week, that's a warning, not a review.
👍 — for anyone who still dreams in build orders; block off a weekend before you start.
