F.A.R.M.S.: Chill Factory

Edit on August 29, 2026: I've put in 54 hours and have just a couple of achievements left. I am blocked from getting those achievements by a recipe bug that I just found. The real issue is that I can't get help with it. The developer apparently doesn't monitor Steam discussions, and doesn't provide any other means of getting help either. So now I'm stuck and I'm changing this to a definite non-recommend unless this issue gets resolved. If it gets resolved I'll change the review back to my original recommendation. Original review: In addition to the time shown, I played the demo for several hours. This starts off really slow, and the tutorial is a few screens of text explaining how to do things. I had pretty much given up on the game after about an hour, but decided to give it one more try. And I'm glad I did, I expect I'll be more than getting my money's worth with this one. There are a lot of resources and a lot of products. Additionally there are many ways to buff production (in addition to the more normal tech tree unlocks, which are also there). In the later parts of the game some of these synergies appear to get fairly complex, with even an RTS layer but without putting your factory at peril. There doesn't seem to be a real end goal to the game other than maybe hunting achievements. But I'm not far enough along to know that for sure. I usually like goal oriented games better, but I may be an achievement hunter instead with this one. I do have a few headaches with the UI. The most annoying is that using the escape key isn't consistent. Sometimes it closes windows, sometimes it doesn't and instead brings up the game menu. You can't remap keys either but it's less of an issue here than it is with most games. Bottom line, if the demo's still available, give it a try but give it at least a couple of hours to "click".

I have really enjoyed this game! This is exactly the type of automation game I have been wanting to play. The way the raw resources can be made into the same type of low level items is awesome. I am playing on a roughly 10 year old Dell laptop running Fedora Linux. It runs really well, although sometimes when a lot is going on in game chrome can lag a bit, not a complaint just an observation, it does not bother me at all. Highly recommended! I have played many automation and incremental games, excellent combo!!!

Gameplay felt tedious due to several compounding issues; the progression loop relies heavily on repetition. Unlock variations don't feel intuitive (keeping locked unlocks hidden might be better). Spaghetti routing due to I/O ports at peculiar angles, overloaded tech tree etc etc.