Steam’s mechanical new puzzle game has taken over my brain

The other day I was on my way to get drinks with some friends after work, but in my head, I was still at work.

I had just spent a 45-minute subway ride with my nose buried in my Steam Deck playing Kaizen: A Factory Story. Set in 1980s Japan, the inventive new project from Coincidence (a studio formed by members of expert puzzle developer Zachtronics) is an “open-ended puzzle automation game” in which players optimize product assembly lines to mass produce things like watches and coffee makers. I was wracking my brain to create an efficient camcorder assembly. Even after I threw my Steam Deck into my bag and started walking towards the bar, I couldn’t stop thinking about that camcorder.

Kaizen delivers puzzles that fully occupy your brain until you crack a solution. Outside of some interstitial story bits that meditate on the changing nature of production circa 1986, most of the action takes place on green grids. I’m shown a picture of the item I need to make and given the individual parts I’ll need to get there. My job is to connect all of those parts by placing down gizmos like arms and drills to move, cut, and attach parts. But I also need to automate each one, by programming a multi-step set of actions that tell my gadgets how to move and when.

That was easy early on when I was creating a pair of binoculars. To pull that off in an elegant two-step solution, I had one riveter attach an eyepiece to a barrel and another attach that barrel to the hinge. Then I programmed an arm at the bottom of the hinge to flip the entire thing over. A second eyepiece and barrel spawned where the first were (one of the many rules I learn throughout the game), which then happens to be on the other side of the flipped hinge. My riveters fired again and suddenly I had a fully formed pair of binoculars with every piece attached.

Any time I construct a viable build, a green light turns on — and I’m hit with a jolt of euphoria. The minutes of brainwork it took to get there turn into a short video, only a few seconds long, that shows how my ingenuity will pay off in an efficient production line. That’s the immediate brilliance of Kaizen: The team at Coincidence take a mechanical process and turn it into an incredibly satisfying puzzle game, one that feels spiritually linked to The Incredible Machine and educational engineering games of the late ‘90s, from Bridge Builder to Pontifex. When each puzzle ends, I’m immediately tempted to go back in to see how I can optimize my solution even more. I can do this in less steps, with less parts, taking up less space.

This was my crisis later in the game: Welding a lens, microphone, and viewfinder to a camera body was easy, but slotting a tape deck in was proving challenging. First I had to cut a 3×4 square out of the camera body. Easy. I threw down a column of cutters and used an arm on a rail to push the camera into them. That hollowed out enough room to slot in the tape deck. Then all I’d have to do is drag the camera back to its starting position and use an arm to push the tape deck up into the now hollow spot. But there was a problem I didn’t account for early on: I had to actually connect the deck to the camera in some way with a welder, but that wasn’t possible in my current design.

The welder quagmire was the only thing running through my head as I trekked to the bar. I was drawing up new schematics in my imagined green grid. Should I scrap the entire thing and start again? No, there had to be a way. Suddenly, a bolt of inspiration hit me: What if I put that arm in charge of pushing the tape deck on a horizontal rail? That way, I could program it to not just push up, but also drag the deck left and right. I would only need to add one more step, dragging the camera and tape deck simultaneously over a welder that could attach the two. I was so desperate to test that theory that I started figuring out how I could excuse myself to the bathroom once I got to the bar so I could pull out my Steam Deck and finish the job.

I didn’t need to do that, because thought never left my mind as I spent 90 minutes chatting with friends. Once I got on the train, I executed my now fully formed plan and nearly jumped for joy in my seat when the green light flipped on.

The challenges are only mounting from there I am now in the world of fast fashion, learning how to cut fabrics and rejoin them at new angles to create tube socks and jogging shorts. I need to figure out how to carve out the center of an object without cutting through the edge to get there. It has taken me hours to set up elaborate production lines only to miss a completely obvious flaw that tanks my design and forces me to scrap it all. I love every minute of it.

No one will ever know the work that went into my designs. They’ll just see the GIFs of the final product that I can generate and share after each puzzle. Those only show a few seconds of machines clicking parts together. It will look effortless, but I won’t forget the hours I spent rubbing my temples and muttering ideas to myself. While Kaizen’s story mourns the loss of hand-crafted goods in the age of mass production, it also stops to celebrate the invisible engineers who make that magic happen. You can never truly automate human ingenuity.