Zach Barth, the namesake of game studio Zachtronics, tends to make a certain kind of game.
Besides crafting the free browser game Infiniminer, which inspired the entire global Minecraft industry, Barth and his collaborators made SpaceChem, Infinifactory, TIS-100, Shenzen I/O, Opus Magnum, and Exapunks. Each one of them is some combination of puzzle game, light capitalism horror, and the most memorable introductory-level computer science, chemistry, or logistics class into which you unwittingly enrolled. Each game is its own thing, but they have a certain similar brain feel between them. It is summed up perhaps best by the Zachtronics team itself in a book: Zach-Like.
Barth and his crew have made other kinds of games, including a forward-looking visual novel about AI, Eliza, and multiplayer card battler Nerts!. And Barth himself told PC Gamer that he hates “saying Zach-like.” But fans of refining inputs, ordering operations, and working their way past constraints will thrill to learn that Zach is, in fact, back.
Kaizen: A Factory Story, from developer Coincidence and comprising “the original Zachtronics team,” puts you, an American neophyte business type, in charge of a factory making toys, tiny electronics, and other goods during the Japanese economic boom of the 1980s. You arrange the spacing and order of operations of the mechanical arms that snap the head onto a robot toy, or the battery onto a Walkman, for as little time, power, and financial cost as possible.
As Barth told PC Gamer, Kaizen aims to offer players a bit more help than prior puzzlers have in figuring out where they went wrong. When your electric toilet seat (a real challenge in the game) comes out wrong, you can move backward in time, step by step, to arrive at the change or decision you made that gummed up the works. When it goes beautifully right, you can export GIFs from the game to show your friends your progress (and slight madness).
Players of the team’s previous puzzlers can expect some thematically familiar things. You will gain knowledge and confidence as you slowly master new concepts and fuse together former ideas. You will question what, exactly, it is that you are making and for whom and if these are good products to make. And there will be a solitaire-based mini-game, in this case Pachi-Sol, a pachinko-flavored version.
There is no release date yet for Kaizen, not even a 2025 promise. If you want in on this journey into the time and place of the Walkman, you’ll need to wishlist it and wait for the continuous improvement to reach its conclusion.