Chocolate Factory Simulator Review (PC) – Oompa Floompa
A steampunk chocolate making game? Yeah, sign me up. That’s the stuff. When this one landed in our inbox I jumped at it, with the joy and excitement of Charlie visiting the factory with his grandpa. You know the one, he shares a bed with three other old people. It’s weird and we don’t talk about it enough. Anyway.
Chocolate Factory Simulator should somewhat create a similar feeling. We all love chocolate – don’t trust the ones who disagree – and the idea of running our own factory has probably crossed our mind at least once in our life. You know, one that’s actually feasible instead of murdering annoying children to death.
You play as a chocolatier then in a steampunk-esque universe. Throughout you’ll be receiving orders for your prizes cocoa creations, and work through them one at a time through the rather extensive process of measuring out ingredients, then melting the chocolate, pressing it into molds, designing the boxes and eventually sending them on their way to an excited buyer. It’s incredibly involved, and you will need the patience of a saint to see this one through to its bittersweet ending.
Each order is a specific chocolate so you’ll have to follow the recipe to the letter, ensuring you don’t overheat the chocolate or add too much sugar, flour etc. It’s rigorous and time consuming. Thankfully you have a robot pal called Nougat who is on hand to give you a little support throughout. Is he helpful though? Well, yes. And no. It’s complicated. You find out very quickly running a chocolate factory on your lonesome with a robot isn’t quite as thrilling as you were probably hoping and that’s where the problems arise.
Now you’re probably saying to yourself ‘mate, it’s a simulator. It will be explicitly detailed to the letter’ and yes, that isn’t my issue. I commend the game on going through the process step by step, ensuring nothing is missed throughout. The problem I have is that they haven’t really added anything to encourage you to enjoy this particular process. I’ve made chocolate various times in real life and it’s not the most exciting job, I’m struggling with myself to see why a simulation based on this exact undertaking would be any different. Perhaps I hoped I would be running the factory from a more director-ish level rather than having to single-handedly create the chocolate bars my factory are pushing out. Ugh.
And Nougat is just rubbish. When upgraded he’s a tiny bit helpful but you need to build up your own reputation in order to gain the upgrades needed to reach this. What? Why? It baffled me how the two processes were connected. Nougat is useless for a long time until you’ve upgraded him enough to do literally anything else but talk. It’s a laborious, arduous task that doesn’t make having to make every single chocolate bar by hand any more appealing.
See you’re not running a factory in the sense that you’ll be banging out millions of bars of chocolates to the supermarkets and off licenses of the world. Every order is for a single bar of chocolate which certainly lightens the load on you, but your treasured recipe book is going to get a damn good thumbing as you search for a recipe that correlates with each order.
You’re not making the same chocolate bar every time, at least. Sometimes you’ll have to add different ingredients, and have varying levels of grams of ingredients (you still there? OK) and mix up the designs somewhat (I did enjoy designing the chocolate bar wrappers, to be honest. It felt like the one part of the game that I felt like I could actually contribute in some way to the running of this factory).
And it got me thinking. Why have a factory at all if you’re only making one order at a time? The factory is huge, there’s plenty to uncover and walk around in but it all feels rather meaningless when the amount of chocolate you make at a time would just as easily be created in someone’s kitchen. It’s all very odd and everything is so spread out that you’ll be running around a whole lot. There’s plenty of space for everything in one room of this factory, so why place it all over? I struggled with the logistics of it all, but maybe that’s just me.
There’s a chance you can also completely halt your progress by accidentally throwing something out be it your pans, wrenches, spatulas. Nothing gets replaced, so keep a close eye on what you’re throwing down the garbage chutes because you’re never getting them back unless you start over.
Oh, and did I mention that if you get a single part of the process wrong leading up to designing the wrappers you have to start completely from scratch again? That’s, that’s really fun. A great addition to a game already stacked full of enough tedious jobs to fill a tub of Quality Street.
Chocolate Factory Simulator is available now on Steam (review platform).
Developer: Games Incubator
Publisher: PlayWay S.A. / Games Incubator
Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.
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