Zachtronics team unveils fresh puzzle game based in 1980s Tokyo

Lubricate your brain with some pure Omega-3 oils, a new puzzle game from the makers of Opus Magnum and Eliza has been announced. Kaizen: A Factory Story will be an “open-ended puzzle automation game from the original Zachtronics team, set in 1980s Japan” in which you’ll build toy robots, computers, TVs, and… katsu curry? Well, why not. Although the studio behind this engineer ’em up is technically new, the main designers – Zach Barth and Matthew Seiji Burns – are the same folks who brought you Exapunks, TIS-100, and Shenzhen I/O. This, my friends, is very good news.

“It’s not a Zachtronics game,” Barth told PC Gamer in an interview following the game’s announcment. “This is a Coincidence game, which is a totally legally distinct game studio.”

Coincidence have already released one game – Add Astra, an educational puzzler about math and racing. But this looks like a more intentional successor to the automation crown. All the hallmarks of the designers’ previous programmy puzzlers seem to be intact. You play as a fish out of water (in this case a Japanese-American who finds himself working in a factory on the outskirts of Tokyo), you’ll tinker with machinery to come up with efficient (or comically inefficient) solutions, and you’ll export GIFs of your assembly lines with all the pride of an Instagram mum showing off little Gregory’s latest crayon spew. It has solitaire, but the solitaire is also pachinko. It’s called “Pachi-Sol”.

It does have one new interesting feature, though. You’ll be able to scrub back through your building process in a rewind-ish way, and edit it from whatever specific point you royally messed up. Which sounds like it’ll be handy on bigger projects.

Many writers at RPS have been fans of these games over the years. I swooned over Shenzhen I/O, which saw you emigrating to China to make circuit boards. Sin lost sleep (in a good way) while playing thoughtful visual novel Eliza. And when alchemy dabbler Opus Magnum released it left Matt, Graham and myself competing to make magnificent machinery (sadly, the powerful GIFs in this article no longer work). “I really like making my dumb little games that don’t matter,” said Zach Barth following that game’s release. Games that don’t matter? Excuse me, Opus Magnum remains one of our best puzzle games to this day.

A few years later Zachtronics would close, but not before releasing its final game, Last Call BBS. It looks like that swan song was actually just a big white duck quacking musically, now that Barth and Burns have returned with Coincidence.

We’ve been in the habit of calling these puzzle games “Zachlikes” ever since Alice O’Connor (RPS in peace) coined the term, although Barth, after whom the genre is named, wishes it were different. “I hate saying Zach-like,” he told PC Gamer. “If anybody has any suggestions for a different thing we can call them?” Hmmm… I don’t know. On the one hand, you did release a whole book with Zach-like as the title, somewhat sealing the term with approval. Then again, it’s true we often caution against auteurism in the RPS treehouse. What to do, what to do.

Let’s put these thoughts off until Kaizen: A Factory Story comes out. A release date hasn’t been announced yet. I’ll set up some elaborate electrical alarms to go off when we know more.