Sixty Four is a very elegant abstract factory sim with sinister depths
Out today
It starts, much as when writing articles for videogame websites, with a blank page. More accurately, a white space of indefinite extent. In the middle of the white space there is a curious little yellow machine, a kind of motorised plunger akin to an oil derrick. In the story of Sixty Four, you're late to some kind of social engagement, somewhere beyond that beaming expanse of whiteness. But there is time, even as texts from a friend appear down the lefthand margin, to mess around with the strange yellow machine.
Hold the machine's plunger down with your cursor, and the white space nearby lifts and darkens into cubes with a roar of shifting tectonic plates. Click repeatedly on the cubes, and they tinkle and shiver and eventually burst into flocks of smaller cubes, which peel away and swarm into a suddenly visible resource counter at the top of the screen.
Even as you create and burst more of these cubes, and even as the friend you're texting grows increasingly exasperated, a store tab appears on the righthand side, where you can trade the smaller cubes for other machines. One machine makes the big cubes break up faster. Another stops the plunger on the first machine resetting between pushes. Some of these additional machines need to be fuelled using yellow and purple cubes that fleck the surfaces of the big black cubes. The fuelling element transforms a game about the tactile gratifications of popping geometric objects into more of a strategy experience, with production and supply loops and, yes, there it is - the beginnings of full automation.
After 20 minutes or so - god, has it been 20 minutes already? - you're deploying chunky microchip-esque "resonators" that break up nearby big cubes for you, plucking their surfaces rhythmically and producing a discordant soundscape that filled me with dread, even as I lost myself in the task of building another, neighbouring cube-production facility. The machine is alive. It is beginning to play itself. It still needs me to click on it periodically to refuel the secondary machines, but I sense that it now has a momentum all of its own, that it is carrying me along with it - and there is talk in Sixty Four's launch trailer of "facing the darkness". Oh dear.
I haven't played much beyond that, and frankly, I'm afraid to, but suffice to say that Sixty Four is an idle clicker about building abstract factories that may yet prove to be a very good existential horror game. Tonally, at least, it reminds me a little of Void Stranger.
If you need more sense of the scope, the trailer above includes scenes from much later in the game, when your cube extraction facility should have swollen to Factorio-esque proportions. Perhaps you'd like to give it a play, and let me know how things pan out? Sixty Four is out on Steam today for more or less the price of a takeaway coffee, and possibly also your soul.