This game is a true masterpiece - one of the few in my excessive gaming career to give me multiple thousands of hours of incredibly rewarding play. In retrospect, for the enjoyment I have gotten, I would happily pay five times as much as I originally did for the game. I would frame Factorio primarily a logistics, puzzle, and building game. You work to build systems of systems of systems to achieve goals that, in many ways, are self-defined. I have worked with friends to build sprawling bases, worked with my (less-gaming) s/o to dive deep into optimization problems, and spent countless hours alone digging into the next innovation by which I can enable the factory to grow. (A current favorite modded mode is to focus on exploring, colonizing, and exploiting other solar systems with Space Exploration.) The customizability of Factorio, from the game settings to the incredibly robust modding community allows you to essentially define your own game. My friends and I have taken on incredibly difficult deathworld games where we were desperately fending off hordes of invading biters with every shred of explosives we could scrape together. But I've also played slow games using mods like Angels and Bobs where it was a very deep puzzle, searching for the next tier in my production chain. I have built up a library of extremely carefully craft recipes representing huge amounts of effort, but I also regularly throw wads of duct tape at a problem. The team responsible for creating this game has elevated video game development to an art form only rarely seen and has been obsessive in maintaining it. The only thing I could ask further from the Factorio team is that they take a vacation and stop pushing out bug fixes so quickly - it often takes a day or less to go from a community bug report to a deployed fix. (The low reviews for the GoG update system do not make sense to me. The game features an integrated update system, allowing me to keep up to date with all current releases.)
