Developer: Lino Rabolini

Publisher: Lino Rabolini

Played on: PC

Release Date: June 21, 2024

Played with: Mouse

Paid: $4.77

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I don’t know if I get Coin Factory, and that’s weird, because really, what’s there to get?  It’s a game about making money, plain and simple.  It’s so straightforward on the face of it that the tutorial can be completed in less than a minute.  And to be clear, I understand what the goal of the game is: place down tiles to create a little money-making engine until you’re able to generate ten trillion dollars and buy the Box tile that ends the game.  Continually tweak and optimize your designs so that you can cut down the time it takes to buy the Box on a given level, or branch out and try different maps to test your skills under an assortment of restrictions.  It’s really not that deep, which is why I find it confounding that it baffles me so.  Perhaps, then, it’s silly for me to be writing about a game that on some level I find completely inscrutable.  However, it’s my hope that in doing so, I’ll be able to achieve some level of clarity on what Coin Factory is trying to do, and whether it succeeds.

I gave a brief summary in the previous paragraph about what you’re doing in Coin Factory, but to dig a little deeper, here’s how the game flows.  You start out small, with just a Factory tile and an Output tile that you can place wherever you like on a board.  The Factory spits out one coin every second, and you can freely build conveyor belts to let the money make its way to the Output (a literal money pit), where it gets added to your available cash.  That cash can then be spent on a gradually expanding menagerie of tiles, from Jumpers that let coins hop over one or more spaces, to Accelerators that increase the production of whatever they’re pointing at every few seconds.  The cost of each tile increases the more you buy, and most tiles can be upgraded to increase their production and/or efficiency.  It rapidly takes on the feel of an incremental game like Cookie Clicker, though with a spatial element added that makes things a lot trickier to manage.

That spatial element brings in the main challenge of Coin Factory: the coins always have to make their way to your singular money pit.  In practice, this means all the coin-producing tiles you place down rapidly become the very things congesting your playspace.  At the start of my first run, I was happily placing down Factories everywhere, then drawing conveyors in to smoothly transport everything where it needed to go.  However, when I wanted to put down Accelerators to begin infinitely scaling production, I realized there was nowhere to place them that wouldn’t break up a belt or block a Factory output.  Next thing I knew, I was reworking my entire layout so that I could make everything fit and function as needed, which led me to a realization: in Coin Factory, sometimes less is more.

Factories are great on paper: they’re the main thing that produces coins for you, and if they surround a tile known as a Central, that tile will produce the sum production of all the touching Factories.  However, each Factory on its own caps out at a flat production rate, even once fully upgraded, meaning that if you want to scale past producing hundreds or thousands of coins per second and into the millions and billions, it’s far more efficient to make room for other tiles.  Who needs other Factories when you can place down Forests or Accelerators that boost production more than what those factories would be providing?

Unfortunately, it’s not always clear how the boosts work.  Forests, for example, say that they boost the production of surrounding Factories, however I also found that they seem to work on Centrals.  This is in contrast to other tiles which explicitly say that they work on both Factories and Centrals.  This confusion wouldn’t necessarily be so bad, except that there’s no selling or moving of tiles; if you place something and decide you don’t want it anymore, you don’t get any sort of reimbursement.  I understand that adding in a selling mechanism could introduce unnecessary complexity, but it would be nice if there was a way to preview the impact of placing a new tile prior to locking it in, at least for the ones that only provide passive benefits.

Speaking of nice-to-haves, I wish that there was a way to highlight all the tiles you can currently afford to upgrade.  As it stands, particularly in larger factories, it was a nuisance to have to click through every tile (or at least one of every type) to see if I could afford the next available upgrade level.  It would also be good if Coin Factory had a bit more direction at times; while the brevity of the tutorial seems nice on paper, it meant that I went into my first run without any real knowledge of what I was supposed to be doing, including whether there was some sort of end goal or if all my efforts were just to make a number go up.  This extends to unlocking new tiles, which I still don’t fully understand.  Sometimes I would enter a new map and have new tiles available for purchase, while other times they’d show up when I earned enough money to buy them while playing through a level.

In fact, to espouse further on the game lacking direction, I wish Coin Factory had a more formalized level progression instead of the freeform approach to content that’s currently present.  The game has an arcadey approach to levels where you’re constantly chasing a lower time score, so it seems tailor-made for a bunch of individual missions that you progress through linearly, possibly with rewards for beating certain time thresholds.  It’s strange, because it seems like the developers have no shortage of new levels available: there are daily and monthly challenge maps that could have easily been made always available via a level selection.  Yet what’s present instead are a handful of basic maps, some puzzle maps that put various restrictions on your production capabilities, and the aforementioned rotating challenge maps.

 There’s also Coin Factory’s events, which feel like they were thrown in just for the sake of it, rather than because they actually aided the design.  They periodically pop up in the corner of the screen with some cryptic blurb about what’s going on, at which point you can choose to click on the event to trigger it.  Doing so will either speed up production for a few seconds or slow it down, depending on what the event is.  It very quickly becomes obvious which events will do what, though, which meant I simply ignored ones that seemed like they would be a detriment and activated ones that didn’t.  It all became formulaic and dull very quickly, and often I just disregarded them altogether, as they added an element of randomness that didn’t fit in well with a game so focused on optimizing a production pipeline.

I think the events are indicative of a sort of identity crisis that Coin Factory has, where it can’t decide whether it wants to be an engine-building puzzle game or a laid-back incremental game.  The focus on optimizing your engine under myriad restrictions and limitations, as well as the events that seem designed to keep the player consistently engaged suggests the former.  However, the latter seems appropriate due to the often lengthy gaps of time between upgrades and new tile purchases; my first few runs lasted around an hour, much of which was waiting.  I just found it hard to stay engaged, and often buying the Box to end a run felt like a blessing, and not just because it could mean logging a new best time on the map.

Credit where it’s due, though: from a UI perspective, Coin Factory is smooth and sleek.  The word “hypnotic” continually crossed my mind whenever I looked at one of my factories ticking away, with coins sliding smoothly down conveyor belts, merging into higher denominations, and finally dropping into the bottomless coin pit to be added to my current finances.  It’s actually distractingly satisfying: I often found myself losing my train of thought while attempting to figure out how I could better optimize my factory, simply because I was getting so much enjoyment out of watching the motion of the coins.  This is helped by music that, while a bit repetitive, can sync up to your production line to add more emphasis to each hop or drop of currency.

One last point of weirdness to touch on is that Coin Factory includes a Bitcoin tile; it seems like an odd inclusion in a game that generally abstracts out the production of money to involve things like Factories, Drums, and Accelerators.  I will give the game credit, though, the tile is at least labelled as “Evil Corporation”, and acts as a money sink throughout the run until you’re able to get rid of it; a rather apropos use of cryptocurrency given the bulk of its use in the real world.

I don’t think that Coin Factory is bad, but I also don’t think it’s for me.  Maybe that’s rather apt: it’s effectively a microcosm of capitalism where you need to infinitely scale your financial growth, at least until you become a multi-trillionaire; hardly the type of ideology I’m partial to.  However, I’ve gotten enjoyment out of games like Cookie Clicker, which have similar themes with substantially less interesting gameplay than Coin Factory.  I think it comes down to the fact that Coin Factory doesn’t really know what it wants to be: my desire to build and upgrade the perfect factory is regularly impeded by having to wait around for money to flow in, yet once enough has been produced, I simply buy one more tile and end the level, wiping all memory of my meticulously-designed factory in the process.  I understand that Coin Factory is meant to be more arcadey and reward clever factory layouts that get you a victory quickly; there’s even an achievement for winning a level in under five minutes, which I can’t even fathom.  What’s important is whether I look at such an achievement and think, “Yeah, but I think I can learn how to do that, or at least I want to try,” and in the case of Coin Factory, I simply don’t.

6/10