Steam users are exquisitely good at finding niche games and bubbling them to the top of the algorithms. One of the latest lucky enough to receive this treatment is Sandustry, an incredibly smart combination of mining sim, incremental game, and factory builder, all delivered with the charm of Terraria. And if that sounds daunting (and it did to me), then I’m pleased to report it’s all exceptionally well-introduced.
Incremental games—the strange genre title for a branch of idle games in which, however it’s played, you blast through a skill tree of unlockables to make rapid, dopamine-drenched progress—are big right now. But they’re also almost always incredibly simplistic. Meanwhile, the recent fad for factory games goes the other way entirely, rapidly introducing vast levels of complexity that require a mechanical engineering degree to fathom. Which makes Sandustry‘s midpoint between the two such a fascinating experiment, and one with excellent results. This is a game about digging holes for ore, sure, but it’s also about streamlining that process with improvised, scrappy machines of your own design.
Sandustry adopts a pretty recognizable 2D cube-based pixel design, the favorite of so many games since Terraria first flattened Minecraft, and it’s ideal for the quick-‘n-dirty nature of your click-and-drag designs for your impromptu production lines. Draw a launcher straight up with your mouse, pull slightly to the right to make sure it sprays materials in the correct direction, and then draw a conveyor belt in your chosen direction to bring the goods to a staircase-shaped shaker that’ll separate the mineral wheat from the sediment chaff. But at the same time, you’re a character in the world too, jumping and hovering about, with a pair of shovels to rapidly dig away at the dirt.
At the beginning, you’re asked to mine sand for gold. To do that, you first need to get the sand wet, which you can do either by digging dirt such that it falls into water below, or by transporting it to a big pool with the mini-machines. Then it needs to be shaken, with the separated gold collected below and delivered to your collector. And here’s where the incremental nature kicks in: the more gold (and other valuables) you collect, the more unlockables become available, letting you add new machine types, tools, and eventually upgrades. You’ve got a constantly updated list of goals to achieve, and an ever-growing skill tree of tempting additions to add to your suite of abilities.
Here too, Sandustry gets the pacing just right. Frustrations you might have encountered are very quickly met with new options that address them (very early on, for insance, you get the Sweeper Drone, which collects materials from the ground when gravity isn’t helping out). And as soon as you get to grips with what’s already available to you, the game starts offering an awful lot more. Got used to getting basic gold? Well now it’s time to…control the weather! Yup, you’re next task is heating underground water sources to create precipitation to lead to rainfall, all while pursuing the hunt for Fluxite to get upgrades, and building machines that can best deliver your burnt residue to your kinetic press, to suddenly and dramatically increase gold production…
Silicone chips
This meeting in the middle of two such disparate genres is incredibly impressive, and has very quickly hooked me in where I’d usually bounce off hard from factory-sim gaming. It feels too much like a job! But here, in Sandustry, it’s delivered with the hectic pace of incremental games that I find so brainlessly compelling. I guess this time it’s brainfully compelling, requiring innovation and imagination, instead of just clicking a whole bunch.
It’s only been out a few days and has already amassed nearly 2000 user reviews on Steam, where it currently sits at 97-percent positive, which is no small feat. And while I’ve only poked around at the early stages, I’m very much admiring the astonishing factories other players are already managing to build.
Sandustry is out now on Steam, and currently 35 percent off, making it less than ten bucks.
