The new Zach-like from Coincidence Games’ team came out earlier this month, Kaizen: A Factory Story puts you into the shoes of David Sugimoto. He’s an American with Japanese roots who goes to Japan to take a sales job and gets involved in setting up assembly lines instead.
I’m about two hours in and so far it’s the most approachable Zach-like game from the folks who used to be at Zachtronics. There’s something really special about setting up the fabrication process with the most ideal path and this might also be the most polished gameplay from a Zachtronics game yet.
It’s been a little while since I’ve played a Zach-like game, but my recollection is that typically you have some kind of “play” button to move through the timeline in these kinds of games. However with Kaizen you go through the fabrication timeline one step at a time and it’s very straightforward to see where mistakes happen and additional steps need to be added. So, debugging the process you’ve built feels more like an integrated part of the experience instead of something to revisit later.
You can watch my first two hours with Kaizen on YouTube and see what I mean.
Kaizen: A Factory Story is $20 and available now for Windows, macOS, and Linux on Steam.
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