It took eight seconds—I counted—for factory game Modulus's trailer, featured in today's PC Gaming Show 2025, to hypnotize me.
Joy in factory building and automation games is a spectrum. For the most engineering-brained, the efficiency of a perfectly balanced input-output system is king. For artists it's having a canvas to design assembly lines that aren't just efficient, but beautiful. For those with Gamer Brain, joy comes from the progression of producing small parts that can be used to make bigger parts that will eventually lead to a mega factory operating at a scale they never could've dreamed of at the start.
But underneath all that, I'm pretty sure everyone who loves factory games is an absolute mark for a bunch of little objects trundling along on a conveyor belt while a bunch of machines animate in mesmerizing rhythm.
The animations in these games are the sugar that will fuel a crippling addiction, no matter what specific sweet flavor of factory building you fancy. I can already tell Modulus has some great ones, and with a brighter, more solarpunky feel to it than Factorio or its fantastic Space Age expansion. Despite being 3D it reminds me of the beautiful 2D art of SimCity 3000, only in constant whirring motion. I felt the sugar high just seconds into the trailer above.
The gimmick that makes building in Modulus quite different than in my favorite automation game Satisfactory, is that you can design your own components out of little voxel blocks. This portends terrifying things: what if a factory game could satisfy both the engineering brain and the artist brain simultaneously, melding efficiency and creativity into one unholy process?
We actually know the answer to that question thanks to Shapez 2, which last year led us to declare that 2024 is the best year we've ever had for factory games. But Modulus's wholly different aesthetic, and what also looks like a pretty different approach to what you're doing with all the parts you're creating, seems like an alternate recipe to get to the same result: total obsession.
Modulus has a demo on Steam now, with its early access release just a few months away: it's out on September 18.
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