- Reaction score
- 1,697
There haven't been many times in my life where I've wondered if this feeling I have is something that oil barons must have felt at the height of their Gilded Age powers.
But Sixty Four got me there. I'm still not sure I've ever played a $6 game that had me so fully engaged while also deeply disquieted about the nature of humanity.
Sixty Four (Windows and Mac, on Steam) has been running for more than seven hours on my computers. "Running" isn't quite right, though. Early on in Sixty Four, you're actively clicking, upgrading, and figuring out what's going on. As the game goes on, and you figure out some virtuous loops, you can technically leave it running in the background while you do other things, checking in occasionally to fuel a machine or start a conversion. I write "technically" because while the game is capable of working in the background, indifferent to the human need to build, refine, and expand, you very well may not be.
What are you building, and why? Where are you? It's not clear. Sixty Four starts you in a blank white space, with a single machine, an Extracting Channel. Push it down, and you'll see big black cubes emerge from the ground. Click on those cubes many times and they break into 64 smaller cubes, then eventually burst and collect in your inventory. With enough black cubes (Charonite) stashed, you can build machines that make cubes easier to break and faster to extract. Eventually, you can keep your extractor pressed down with a pressure pump and have an "Entropy resonator" click the cubes for you.
Sixty Four is a beautiful system design toy that reveals something rather dark
Please do not load up this game if you have real tasks to accomplish, I beg you.
