Chopping Block: September 24th 2025
Alan’s Automaton Workshop
Alan’s Automaton Workshop is a mechanical programming gem. It started out strong with an interesting take on the programming puzzle game. There’s above average detail in all of the different mechanics, no pun intended. The turn of the century steampunk machinery present in every puzzle and user interface is a feast for the eyes. The puzzles don’t hold the players hand, once you’re past the basic tutorials of Chapter One all pretense of this being a casual puzzle game disappear. Unfortunately pretense is the problem. The visuals are great but noisy and sacrifice substance for style. U.I elements slip out of frame to focus on irrelevant components. The puzzles quickly become too laborious to be fun comprising mostly of drag n’ drop marathons.
The story is actually good if long winded. There’s a loose plot to justify each puzzle, adding context while world building. It was fun for a few hours but the next few didn’t move the needle at all as I brute forced just a few stages of progress. I’m not the biggest programming puzzle fan to begin with but Alan's Automation Workshop felt like it has a core of substance and a shell of style with a void in-between where fun gameplay was supposed to go.
Alan's Automation Workshop lacked fundamental U.X staples to keep players engaged. The genre has better entries in terms of basic programming puzzles games and puzzles games like Opus Magnum and while True: learn()
Ixion
I went into Ixion hoping for a sci-fi take on Frostpunk; cleaver city building, solid story, difficult gameplay, and a complex moral choice system, the works. On the surface Ixion had all of that but nothing seemed to gel together the way the mechanics in Frostpunk did.
There was a lack of cohesion across the board, that dragged down the whole experience. Maybe I was spoiled by Frostpunk's polished design but the basic city building of Ixion was too finicky. Random events tended to be unbalanced make the game susceptible to anarchy as any random event could create a cascade failure. With Frostpunk you had one city to look after at a time. While Ixion ties together six sections each requiring logistics consideration and introduce more points of failure. This adds a good deal of repetition and compelled me to be constantly save scrumming. I also found many buried mechanics late into the game prompting multiple full restarts of the game. These weren't hidden mechanics but rather critical systems that had simple not been properly showcased by tutorials or framed by the user interfaces.
The story was interesting, not enthralling by any means. Between the longer singular campaign and a more linear experience, Ixion's story had significant down side: if you didn't like the campaign your kind of stuck. There are no other game modes, story lines, or anything to draw you in.
The difficulty was an issue. With the structure of the game your beholden to mistakes you may have made hours earlier. Indeed Frospunk had scripted campaigns that benefited from foreknowledge, but Ixion's campaign is split up into chapters where you continually inherit mistakes. Maybe it was a problem with my play style but I suspect this is more of a design issue. The punishing gameplay is less about skill or a learning curve on mechanics but rather rote memorization of events. Thus the game difficulty is more in line with an arcade game, which clashes with virtually every other aspect of the game.
It wasn't all bad, the sound track was stellar; pun very much intended. Much like the OST of Kerbal Space Program Ixion's soundtrack understood the assignment; be incredible easy to listen to while playing. No notes. The graphics where also great, the models especially the main ship are amazing, the U.I is clean and despite the aforementioned issues, is easy to use and has great density with important information available at a glance. The cutscenes are also a feast for the eyes and for me they cutscenes deserved a better game.
Kingdom Incremental
I was blessed with a bountiful harvest of incremental clicker games of late and Kingdom Incremental was one of them. This charming pixel art fantasy game blends Clicker mechanics with simple city building in a novel way. Players built farms and various medieval industries; mining, tanning, smiting, and then you upgrade them to increase production. Opening new territory in which to expand your kingdom and locate new resources is a clever mechanic. The inclusion of the dragon was also intriguing, it periodically arrives and starts destroying things with fire.
The charm and novelty makes Kingdom Incremental an appealing entry to the Clicker genre. The fault lies with me, I played a glut of Clicker games in a short period and unfortunately someone had to come in last and Kingdom Incremental had several flaws that put it behind Cookie Clicker and Finn Dorset's Institute For Livestock Replication.so that was tough competition.
The game had some interesting concepts. The spatial nature of a kingdom is interesting for a clicker game. Combined with the cost of revealing new territory it let players expand independently of upgrades. This divorces growth from production, embracing the best aspects of clicker and incremental games. Now I played this game some time ago and it was still in Early Access and it was a buggy mess with incomplete features and two years on little has changed. Given how many intriguing mechanics a hybrid like this has and could have explored I do hope developers manage to forge ahead to a worthwhile full release I'm just not optimistic it will happen.
