Sixty Four: not your grandma's cookie clicker
Sixty Four is an addictive and weird clicker/idle/factory builder game.
Right off the bat, Sixty Four throws you in a weird little blank space. There’s only a single machine in the middle and a chat conversation in the corner of your screen. That’s where you’ll learn about some of the mechanics where your character will talk about the weirdness of it all and think out loud to your friend.
The machine it turns out is an excavator that can extract cubes from the spaces around it. As you might expect from an idle/factory builder game, the process is very manual at first, you need to click on the extracted cubes a bunch of times to break it down an extract 64 smaller cubes from it. Using the proceeds from a couple of those cubes, you can then buy a machine to reduce the number of clicks required, a machine to keep the extractor activated, etc.
As the game progresses, you’ll discover new machines to make extracting and breaking down faster. You’ll also discover new types of cubes that serve as some sort of currency for building those new machines. The conversation also becomes weirder and weirder as your character tries to figure out and explain what’s happening.
The game makes a good job at throwing wrenches into the works every now and then. As you dig deeper and deeper, some cubes will be significantly harder to extract which means you need to rethink how your little factory is built. There are quite a few cube types with properties that will challenge you into optimizing and re-optimizing your layout.
The game is not quite idle as it might look, you need to keep an eye on it quite often to make sure the machines are fed the cubes they need to operate and to keep expanding if you want to reach the end. There’s more idling near the end when you can automate a lot more, the last 10 or so hours were mostly spent idling and adding a machine now and then. In total, it took me a little over 30 hours to reach the credits.
If you’re into factory games, this is a great one.
