Forget AAA: this year, all I wanted to do was optimize my conveyor belts in Satisfactory

I'm lost in the conveyor belts again. There are scores of them going in every direction, carrying concrete, steel and copper parts to other parts of my growing empire. I'm in the guts of my first factory in Satisfactory, trying to optimizse a production line in the hope that I can finally get my hands on a jetpack.

Satisfactory starts like every other survival game. You land on a planet, decide to exploit it mercilessly, and start pulling resources out of the ground. Then it veers in a different direction. An industrial direction. See, while you can technically craft just about everything in Satisfactory with your own two hands, making stuff yourself is ridiculous. Real engineers build machines to do all of that assembling for them.

This feels intimidating, but Satisfactory's onboarding is some of the best out there. From your first miner all the way to installing power lines, setting up a drone factory or even just straight up adopting nuclear power, Satisfactory slowly guides you through the process.

Thinking with pulleys

20 hours after landing, I'm installing six huge batteries as an off-site power backup just in case the wrong wire is cut and my power fails. These batteries will give me 30 minutes of spare power in case of emergency. After this, I'm going to start making AI limiters, after that I need to refill my supply of explosive Nobelisk charges.

There's always something big that needs to be done in Satisfactory, and because I'm a fairly chaotic person, my work is imperfect, ready to be tweaked, refined and optimized again and again. Outside of the horrifying spiders, the scariest enemy you'll face in this factory building craft-'em-up is an empty stretch of conveyor belt or an efficiency meter floating around the 50 per cent mark.

This is the real meat of Satisfactory, and in addition to the scores of hours I've spent prodding and pulling at conveyor belts and production lines, I've spent more hours than I can count doodling factory designs down on waste paper in the hope of finally making the perfect factory design. I haven't cracked it yet, so often when something goes wrong I venture down into the conveyor belts to see what's gone wrong.

But that's not the reason that Satisfactory is my favorite game this year, in a year filled with bombastic AAA games, breakout hit Helldivers 2, and even interesting indie shooters like I Am Your Beast, Echo Point Nova and Straftat. No, the reason Satisfactory is my favorite game is how much joy is infused into every part of the game. Even just moving is wonderful: movement feels similar to Apex Legends, except you're bouncing around the factory you and your friends have built.

The perfect example of this is the slide: there's no reason for Satisfactory to have a slide that feels this good, and despite the fact there's no mechanical purpose, you can feel the craftsmanship. People who have thought a whole lot about first-person kinesthetics are behind this slide. It makes you slightly faster if you time it right, but the best part is that if you build your conveyor belts at the normal height, when you slide you'll go cleanly under them.

Later, emboldened by Blade Runners – a new pair of shoes that increase your running speed by 50 percent and double your jumping height (while also mitigating a lot of fall damage) – I started to think of my factory as a 3D space rather than a series of buildings. A door here, a wall-mounted conveyor belt there and suddenly I could get from end to end of my factory without touching the ground. Later abilities let me ride my powerlines like a zipline, and then you can even build little sucky transport tubes like in Futurama to get around, but there's an elegance to getting around that meant I always wanted to go manual – whether it's the bodge-job watchtowers chained together to scale a nearby cliff, or the giant gel-filled pad I built to shield myself when I tumbled from the nearby mountain.

As technology gets more and more advanced, stomping around instead of using the technological shortcuts to get about feels more and more like a hipster that bores people at parties by patiently but intensely explaining vinyl is better than listening to people on Spotify. But I don't care.

Of course, while J.R.R Tolkien once suggested that not all who wander are lost, there's an important caveat: those who wander around for long enough are sure to get just a tiny bit confused about their location, at least. Which is how I've ended up here. Ostensibly I'm trying to fix an efficiency problem, but really, I'm just here for the journey. Considering I like clear structure and defined goals, that seems like Satisfactory's biggest achievement. If I were Coffee Stain, I'd rename the game Exceptional - puns be damned.

See where Satisfactory ranked on our best games of 2024