Way down in the underground rests the small golem Otto, almost but not quite fully shut down with only the smallest hint of energy left in its core. Whatever used to power it returns one day and with a shudder Otto comes back to life, albeit abandoned and alone in a deep, dark cavern. It revived near giant old machinery that, like Otto, was cold and unused but still functional, if only someone was still around to use it. With nothing better to do Otto sets out to discover what happened to its world, slowly transforming the empty caves into a bustling factory capable of supplying the crystal machine Apotheos with the needed components to expand the boundaries of its world towards some answers.
AutoForge is a 2D side-view adventure-automation game currentlyrunning on Kickstarterand it’s got a great demoavailable on Steamthat’s good for a couple hours worth of play. Starting with nothing but a helpful tutorial in the upper-left of the screen that breaks down the basic actions a couple at a time, the golem goes from being alone in the dark to processing a good number of resources in order to fix broken machines hidden in the cavern depths while upgrading the tech-tree. Think automation-Terraria to get a good idea of the basic gameplay, and then things expand from there.
Otto starts off with a useful selection of skills to get around with, from a double-jump and hover ability, the latter being handy for placing machinery in high-up areas, to being able to mine rock, dirt, and minerals and craft them into the necessary devices to bring the cave back to life. Exploring a bit in search of new resources turns up wandering slug enemies, easily dispatched with a few sword hits by switching from build to attack mode, but the main focus of AutoForge is setting up a network of miners, forges, and manufacturers sprawling through the caves. Patches of resources like wood, different types of metal, mana, stone, and more rest against the back wall of the cave and hanging a drill off one is the first step in the automation process as it starts producing a flow of necessary resources.
Each machine has an output that can be rotated one of four directions but the intake is automatic, up to two squares distant. What this means in practice is you may run a line of transport tubes carrying raw wood past a series of combustion drills, which need fuel to operate, and they’ll take care of themselves while still leaving space for the drills' output. Alternately you can run multiple transport tubes with different components in each above a row of assemblers, making for some fun production-chain setup. The demo doesn’t go too deep into exploring the tech tree and the production numbers aren’t overly-complicated to figure out, but it’s still satisfying to snake lines all over the caves and rip out entire production lines when you realize they can be built more effectively.
I’ll admit here it took me a couple of plays to find my way into the AutoForge demo, mostly due to not quite getting how some of its systems function. It’s got a good tutorial for most features, but it wasn’t all that clear that later research involves processing items with a specific machine rather than just holding them in inventory as had been the case up to that point. Additionally, the crank drills require regular attention to keep working so dumping them as quickly as possible in favor of combustion drills makes life much easier, even if it does involve breaking the order of the tutorial sequence. It’s an early alpha demo and has already gotten a major update since release, so a few rough edges while the game moves on through development are to be expected.
AutoForge iscurrently on Kickstarterwith a bit over a week left, and its demo isplayable through Steam. Both are worth taking a look at, but if you’re pressed on time the Kickstarter trailer below covers the high points.
