Techtonica is a new factory-building game on a terrifying (and beautiful) rogue planet
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It’s difficult to understand the appeal of setting up a factory if you’ve never fallen down that particular genre hole before. But few things in gaming are as satisfying as connecting together several interdependent machines into a massive supersystem. Developer Fire Hose Games knows the joys of that, which is why the studio is making the new first-person factory builder, Techtonica.
Early in the pandemic, Fire Hose cofounder and president Eitan Gilnert and his team played a lot of these kinds of games. Factorio and Satisfactory were especially influential to what would eventually become Techtonica. So expect to spend a lot of time gathering resources and then piecing together conveyor belts and pneumatic tubes. But with its game, Fire Hose saw an opportunity to fill in a gap left behind by other major entries in the genre.
“We wanted to see if we could marry that super compelling factory-automation gameplay with an exciting story and setting,” Gilnert told GamesBeat. “Hades was an inspiration for us — if Supergiant could tell a world-class story and marry it seamlessly with roguelike dungeon crawling, could we do the same with the factory building genre? That was the initial thinking that led to Techtonica.”
That also led to one of the scariest possible settings imaginable for the game. In Techtonica, players find themselves on a rogue planet. That is to say that the world does not orbit a star and exists in perpetual darkness. Or, at least, that is the case on the surface. Underground, players will find bioluminescent flora and fauna that makes life possible. That life probably just has a serious vitamin-D
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