Bitburner, programming-based incremental game (opens in new tab)

I've played both Factorio and Bitburner extensively (both >1000h, but that's unfair wrt bitburner, because you let it run in the background sometimes), but I don't find they compare that well. Factorio can be played without any optimization and completely mechanically if you wanted (i.e. no "programming" of circuits). It's visual style also makes interfacing with the game more like most games you encounter.

In bitburner, you literally have sort of editor (or terminal), which is also the world (you can use an external editor though). The whole game is about programming your way to destroy a BitNode.

I guess they're comparable because they are both about optimization of bottlenecks. In my experience though, having played Factorio for hundreds of hours with software engineer friends, BitBurner with its text only interface is far more niche, and only the thought of playing it reminds some of them of work (so they don't try) ;).

I see a lot of praise heaped on Factorio but I was underwhelmed when I played it, the game doesn't really capture what makes industrial engineering interesting for me, it seems more like software engineering wearing the face of traditional mech/chem/ind engineering. The way pollution is handled is also kind of insane (red overlay makes nodes mad now use gun kill...) and reflects more of the creator of the game and not any kind of objective reality for engineering.

Yep, the game has a fun offline idle mechanic as well as just leaving it running. However you should rarely need idle, if ever.

There’s probably some new mechanics in there since years ago which would give some more fun.

oog -- I do programming for work, don't really want to delve deep into it in a game ;-(

Yep. It’s like Act 3 of Baldurs Gate 3, you feel the pressure from the world around you to go fast even though you could take as long as you want

Oh no