“All right” is a humorous word. This may mean that something is sublimely prepared, but it can also be used in a crushing sense. All right. This is fine. But there is another, serene and free sense in which you can say that something is fine. For example, when a friend gives you tea, because “he only has milk for semiconductor.” S’Fine. Or when they say “no, let’s go to another pub.” Sure, good! You just spend your free time with pleasure. Kaizen: Fabryczna history is a good game. This is a mystery that makes me feel good, I don’t find a perfect solution.
If you played any developers game in Games Concoinceidence (née Wychtronics), you will have an idea of what is coming. Free Forms Puzzler about programming compact items for building things. Each puzzle gives you several dismantled elements to connect in the right way, hoping to make a TV, a camera, toilet and so on. There is a compact picture of your intended product, always pinned to one corner of the screen. You drag and drop various elements to the working area, and then plant the rakes of the arms, Zappy Welders and dental exercises, while programming them with uncomplicated commands. You can drag the timeline there and back to see how things will go. Clunk. You threw the TV screen in a metal shoulder. Return back, moron and try again.
As I say, Kaizen is not a game of WSKTRONICS – this company has been closed. But everyone you know and like, who worked there, do similar things as a coincidence. The result is another satisfactory Brainscratcher about cleaning pistons, vortex, fusers and virgers, all to create the best production line for a pair of jogging shorts or the best personal computer from 1986.
Then the game is set – you are a Japanese American in Tokyo in 1986 shiny. This is a story about the desire for greater, but often in need to think about your expectations. Between puzzles you get fragments of a visual style story, full of characters who would like to make cooler toys or come up with more impressive plastic food.
But they usually have to compromise in this vision and scale. The hero David arrives in Japan, thinking that he will be a massive player on the business side of Matsuzawa, but eventually works on the factory floor. There, he can be forced to combine affordable radio or cut the flanges into shirts with razor gadgets. As it turns out, it’s okay too.
The puzzles themselves are more similar to the Jigsaws than the previous games of the same designers. This seems easier and less mathematical, with a much smaller number of commands needed to complete any puzzle. It is as if Wilmot has worked out if Wilmot had to program a compact robot team to perform bulky lifting. It also forces you to think in a modular way. What immense fragments of this Betamax recorder can I connect on one side of the work space, and I together with its smaller button panels on the other side? You need to consider development very much, not only because you will receive a higher result for maintaining compact things, but also because your machine can get in your own way. Do the double screens of your counterfeit game boy have enough clearance to escape around your arms? Can I overturn the whole false sushi box without hitting all welders that I have already built?
Despite the fact that it is more accessible, it still makes my brain in particular. I start to think about things, desperately looking for a hyper-effective solution before I found Jerry in the middle of the decent. Sometimes I transfer and rotate parts, move the components along long paths, when I suddenly go back and see that my allegedly brilliant solution is only one massive work of Rube Goldberg. With a compact amendment, I can remove half of these components and finish working in a split time. This is satisfaction with the games of this studio; Being a performance master completely by mistake. “Your methods can be a bit unusual,” says David’s superior at some point. “But you have results and it counts.”
Challenges grow in later chapters. When I handed the rice a stove and saw that the controls had to be located in the middle of the machine, my brain went “oooo”. This meant that I had to cut parts and stick them later, like performing a immense pot operation. But soon I discovered that it would not be that uncomplicated. I did not have a member needed to connect the gap. For 45 minutes I hit my head on this puzzle before I finally understood the uncomplicated concept of “puncturing” the problem. When I was instructed soon after to fold this coffee machine, I whispered quietly: “Oh, shit.”
I remember how I saw Honda advertisement on television years ago. He talked about the word “OK” and how it was one of the most common words of English. He was also embedded in a factory where employees thoughtlessly pressed immense metal prints of the word “OK”. The point was that “OK” was not good enough – there was always something more that could be done. There has always been a better word to print.
Kaizen’s story reminds me of this advertisement. It is a story about factory people who meet with things, but always bearing in mind some improvement. Except that there is a certain tension between the idea, that the improvement should be prosecuted and sometimes admitting to “OK” Is Everything you need. One of the managers you meet is obsessed with the unfortunate format of the video cassette Betamax, because it is a “higher quality” product. Other employees in vain are trying to explain to him that high -quality sometimes does not matter.
This tension between perfectionism and satisfaction is an ideal topic to discover, which we previously called “Zachaliks” after the main designer Zach Barth. These are historically games that forever encourage you to find a more competent solution – faster, cheaper, smarter. However, if I love them, my progress almost always stops in the last act. Looking for excellent solutions, he is stuck and I don’t even try sloppy. “Perfect” and “ready” may not be enemies, but they are at least roommates who leave each other passive and aggressive fridge notes. It is nice to watch the game interrogates its own practices through tired rooms, frustrated assistants and wealthy bosses of history.
Matsuzawa’s production is full of employees who are not where they want to be. But this is not a story about unsuccessful dreams. Instead, it is a reminder that people have a built -in engine of optimism and although our ambitions are often condemned to contraction, it is worth doing so that this shrunken version of our hopes regardless of this. In the next thing we can be exaggerated.
An ordinary robot is as good as we can. We will not always overcome the puzzle in the most optimal way. Sometimes the most competent solution is simply the one that allows you to press a immense green button to start the factory. In Opus Magnum, the previous game from these programmers (and still my favorite from the whole work) the machine I built often had synchronous beauty. It was an elegance game. However, Kaizen seems to be a game of acceptance. My factory lines are incorrect, boxing, but exceptionally ok. When it comes to form and function, everything is fine here.
