Saturday Morning Gaming: Automachef

The “assembly line” genre is one of those games that is educational despite itself. It teaches stuff like order of operations and efficiency and it doesn’t even particularly feel like learning (though, yes, sometimes it does feel like math).

Factorio is the gold standard of these games but there are a ton of themed ones like Big Pharma where you make drugs (pardon me: “Pharmaceuticals”) or Satisfactory (a first-person version of Factorio) and there’s even a bare-bones stripped-down version of the game called Shapez.io that just has you make widgety shapes.

Well, this week’s free game from the Epic Game store is Automachef.

So let’s play through the tutorial together.

First things first, you get a factory floor and are told that you move around with WASD and can tilt the camera with X and C. Fair enough, standard.

Okay. You need to make a burger…

Simple enough. First thing you do is plop an assembler down… its job is what it says on the tin. It takes in the burger parts and puts them together.

A burger, we see, consists of a bun and a burger patty (cooked).

So next we need to put down a couple of dispensers… one machine that dispenses buns, one that dispenses raw patties… Oh, I know where *THIS* is going!

So we put down a grill and then we’re ready to put down our conveyor belts… but you can’t feed to a grill directly from a belt. So we have to put a robotic arm down that will move from the belt to the grill…

And one to take it from the grill to the assembler… hoo, boy. We need to program it to only move cooked patties…

Set it up to do that, press start and see how our kitchen works!

Cool, easy peasy.

From there, the game only gets more complicated. You need to not use too much power, you need to make sure that everything is assembled in the proper order, so on and so forth. Eventually they’ll have you do stuff like “work with spices” and “work with liquid ingredients” and the finished products are more and more and more complicated (one of the future levels is “Thanksgiving Dinner”).

Well, that’s Automachef.

The music for Automachef is fun music that feels lifted out of a bossa nova/samba enthusiast’s record collection from the 60’s and, as you can see in the screenies, the flavor text is a cute theme of robot domination via food production.

If you’re not into assembly line factory games, this one isn’t going to change your mind but if you’re looking to dip your toes into the genre, you can’t do much cheaper than “free”.

Check it out.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is a screenshot of Automachef’s splash screen. All screenshots taken by the author.)