Rogue Factory

Rogue Factory is 20 minute bullet hell, a pretty standard offering from the genre, contemporarily speaking. What makes it different and interesting, but also what it does worst, is it's spell factory mechanic. Because whilst it's cool and rewarding, there's no copy-paste, no stamps, no way to move sections neatly... Effectively no QoL. You'll spend much longer, TOO much longer, tinkering with this part of the game.

Have had a wonderful time with this game. A fun mashup of the factory x bullet heaven niches, but leans more heavily on the factory part of the game. This is a nice introduction to factory games if you've been interested in them but intimidated by the scale and complexity of the more focused factory experiences. My main criticism would come from the battling portion of the game, it is quite simple and limited in depth, simply adding more monsters and scaling their stats as time goes on. There's an unexplained mechanic involving a monster that spawns 3 purple orbs, which go to the corners of the map, and when you collect them you get buffs to your potions. This allows you to scale exponentially that some players have missed when attempting to win or go endless. There is an ARG introduced once you kill a certain monster in endless mode, found in the collection log and takes playing quite a bit longer to discover everything for yourself. While I say ARG it doesn't require any fancy tools or knowledge, just paint. It was an exciting time coordinating and discovering the different elements of the solution in the discord. There are rewards that aid you in your future runs if you make the effort to solve the ARG. Overall I've had a lot of fun and would recommend the game to anyone that enjoys factory games or wants to try one out for the first time, it's a nice simple play loop where you won't feel intimidated by complex 10-step recipes with byproducts and strange ratios (though there are byproducts in one map that might throw you off). If you enjoy puzzle games the ARG is a fun thing to sink a few tens of hours into as well. There's rewards for the ARG, and there's plenty of totems to unlock to further enhance the gameplay, as well as interactions between totems to discover.

This is an odd combination however it mostly works.