Sixty-four – Sixty-four review – Intriguing, but redundant

Sixty-four is a factory building game that starts from scratch. From the start, we notice that this is a particular game, particularly with its rather offbeat tutorial: we observe an individual responding to messages by SMS to a friend, and over the course of the tutorial, his interlocutor worries about his disappearance, caught up in the game. There is a somewhat psychedelic and disturbing dimension which is reflected well in the overall game design.

The objective of the game is to automate production as much as possible. We start in a confusion general in front of a machine which, when activated, produces black blocks forming in the 8 cardinal directions around it. By clicking on them several times, these blocks break and you recover (initially) “black” resources called Charonite. With these resources you can build other machines that you must place near the extraction areas (where the different black blocks appear) to automate part of the process, thus saving you from clicking to extract Charonite from the block. These machines must be powered by these same resources, initially.

Other machines will speed up the production of these blocks or allow you to produce them independently using other resources. Because yes, Charonite is only the first step. After a certain amount of mining, your factory will start mining other resources, represented by differently colored cubes (yellow and purple for levels two and three, Elmerine and Qanetite respectively). In summary, you pierce the ground and pass the first layer where Charonite is found to reach another resource, buried deeper. At first it will be rare, then more and more frequent, and the process repeats until arriving at a third resource and so on.

Each new resource will allow you to design more technologically advanced machines, allowing you to interact with them less… but there's a catch. As mentioned previously, progressing in your extraction will allow you to reach new resources, but to the detriment of the first which, little by little, will be exhausted. The problem is that you always need resources from levels prior to the one you are exploiting in your progress. The only solution is to create production plants, but also to start a new extraction, a new drilling, alongside the oldest ones to have several levels of extraction in parallel.

Sixty-four leaves you looking for how to move forward, the tutorial scripted through text messages becoming more and more anecdotal and rare. Each level of resources discovered gives you new construction possibilities which you must analyze yourself via a brief description, in order to determine their usefulness and effectiveness. The player confusion aspect is clearly intended in the title, and that in itself is not a problem. Whether it's the tutorial, the minimalism of the game in general, everything is intentional.

So it all depends on reflection and optimization. However, this is where the problem lies for me: once you have discovered the game, the magic fades. This becomes terribly repetitive, and even redundant, because, as explained previously, you must always maintain the production levels of the different resources. Additionally, as you progress, milestones become longer and longer to reach, leading to long periods of gameplay where you're just clicking and waiting. A big grind, in short… And the mystery and incomprehension side of the universe that you want to penetrate is completely obscured by this weariness which sets in after a few hours of play.

A game that, in my opinion, would be better suited to a mobile platform than a PC, where one could simply harvest resources offline, acting only when necessary. Too bad, the game didn't captivate me for long.

The game is available on Steam for 6 euros (excluding promotion) so it's not stolen either, it's worth the price and the time it takes to play.

– Game tested by Seiei on PC with a version provided by the publisher