The average pop song is three minutes or less. An animated show usually clocks in at twenty three minutes, roughly, while movies tend to be in the ninety minute range. Videogames are generally in the one to one hundred hour department, but the outliers have that beat by a factor of ten, at the minimum. GaaS, sure, where you’re expected to make the game part of your lifestyle with a treadmill designed around “engagement”, but then there’s the idle/clicker games, where engagement is designed to be a minute here and there as it quietly takes care of itself in the background. Whatever the numbers may be that make the game tick, they slowly grow over time as one new system after the other appears, until resources where a dozen felt like a lot number in the quintillions or more. It’s the videogame version of tending a garden, if the fruit grew to the size of a planet, and the latest one is the minimalist factory builder Sixty Four.
Filling the white void with intricate machines
The plot of Sixty Four is that you got sidetracked on the way to hang out with friends and ended up in a white void, which as far as excuses to avoid being social during an unexpectedly anti-social mood isn’t the worst I’ve heard. The story plays out as a series of text messages between you and a friend, automatically scrolling by with each new discovery, with the friend being in turns confused and supportive as the non-void time turns into weeks and months. Time is weird in the void, more a thing to measure the production of machinery than any major personal concern, and production is slowly growing from a thing that needs constant attention into a mostly self-sustaining system that only needs to be checked on now and then.
Clicker Heroes – It’s a Trap
It all starts with a simple extractor, which pulls resources from the ground and places them around itself in a three by three area. The resources are large cubes, and they’re made up of smaller cubes in a four by four by four layout. Which is four cubed, or sixty four resources per large cube and maybe not coincidentally the name of the game. Initially everything is manual, with the extractor requiring a hold of the mouse button to grow the large cubes and each one requiring multiple clicks to break apart into its component resource. It’s an active form of play that takes a bit to get past, but soon destabilizers show up to make the cubes require fewer clicks to shatter, and entropy resonators automatically click for you. Most machines only operate in a three by three area, though, so there’s planning in building an efficient layout that harvests the most cubes with no overlap. It doesn’t help that each new unit of a machine costs a bit more than the previous one, so the massive scale of a standard automation game ends up being impractical for the newer, more useful devices that start at being prohibitively expensive and only increase from there. But the scale is slowly incrementing its way upward, and what’s expensive now will eventually be pocket change.
The problem of attention
The one potential issue with Sixty Four, however, is that while the automation kicks in and you have machines powering other machines, just about everything takes fuel to run and that’s a manual process. The destabilizers, for example, use a yellow cube as energy, and while it can be upgraded to an industrial destabilizer that has a sixty four cube fuel capacity, it’s still going to run out after a few minutes. The entropy resonators are powered by purple cubes and, once you’ve got a good field of extractors pulling up ore, it means you constantly need to be on top of making sure everything has power. One purple cube doesn’t last long in an efficient setup, and it takes a while for the more powerful version of the resonator to come along. New devices are added at a regular rate, providing new benefits and toning down the amount of attention needed to keep the processes running, but poking back into the game after spending a couple minutes away can frequently see more than a dozen machines requiring a click to refuel, with all progress having stopped until they’ve gotten attention. For an incremental game Sixty Four is very hands-on, which can be a problem depending on your available time. I’d initially planned to review the game but the gentle climb up its tech tree and the attention needed to get to the bigger, weirder machines and environmental secrets made that impossible.
That’s not to say Sixty Four is a bad game by any stretch of the imagination. The art design is excellent, its story is interesting, and it’s incredibly easy to poke in and double-check a fact for an article about the game and accidentally lose an hour tending to the grid while making real progress towards the next set of goals. It’s unquestionably a fascinating little game with a huge amount of style and satisfying feedback loop, and an interesting mix of idle and active gaming that can’t quite figure out which side of the line to fall on. Sixty Four isn’t quite so engaging as a factory game, where you can always actively build the next machine, but the resource numbers rise slowly enough that it really feels like the game should be able to take care of itself while tucked into the background, with only the occasional check-in to see how things are coming along and slot new devices into place. There’s a lot going on in Sixty Four and it’s a journey worth starting, but the idle/active balance may make it hard to hold on to the end.
Sixty Four is availabletoday on Steamand is an absolutely fascinating weirdo of a game. There’s a short developer commentary video (found here) and more traditional gameplay trailer (over here) to show it off, and both are worth a look.
