Introduction
Nightwater is a factory automation game with a simple playstyle, calm, meditative vibes, and a nice hand drawn art style. I initially spotted it on a Steam demofest, and even though factory games have started becoming a dime a dozen, this one stood out to me a little. The hand drawn art is a nice change from the more alien, industrial looks of similar games, so I gave it a shot. What I found was an enjoyable little bite-sized factory game.
Game Summary
Gathering
The game starts off very simple, and doesn't get that much more complicated as time goes on. After some brief Words, the game puts you in a stone building with a nice tutorial to get you rolling. Go outside, collect some wood, and make a workbench. Easy! You collect everything in the game with the left mouse button (or Right Trigger! I just learned it has gamepad support. You should play it with a mouse and keyboard!) In this regard, it's almost more like an idle game. You walk up to trees, hold click, get the tree. Walk up to rock, hold click, get the rock. Walk up to plant, click the plant, get the plant, and so on and so forth.
Handcrafting is just as easy as automated crafting, except you'll have to stand at your workbench. Click the thing you want to craft, click Craft, and wait while a progress bar fills in over and over. No need to hold down the button, no setting a specific number of items to build, it just goes until you stop it or you run out of resources. And you have a seemingly unlimited inventory, so no need to worry about running out of space.
Crafting
As you gather the basic resources you'll unlock milestones. These milestones give you new crafting recipes and buildings which kick off the automation aspect of the game.
You'll build harvesters which magically gather resources from nearby trees, rocks, and plants without destroying them. Then you'll use pipes to move the resources to Assemblers which turn them into better resources, and then you'll pipe them into containers to store your goods until you come by to collect them. One of the things you can build is an auto-collector which pulls all the items from nearby buildings and containers and dumps them into your inventory when you press E on it. Resources collected from buildings will still count towards you milestones, but only the raw, unprocessed resources, so it's helpful to have a couple collectors dumping logs and stones into boxes until you've unlocked everything you need (and even then some recipes may use them so you'll probably want a buffer chest or a collector on the side just dumping unprocessed stuff into a box).
Expanding
Once you've gathered enough and learned how to make enough stuff, the game will direct to towards the Manifester.
Using this table will show you a small map which you use to gradually unlock new parts of the world.
Unlocking new areas will give you access to new resources with new milestones to unlock, which in turn will give you new tech that lets you automate more and progress further. Again, very simple and straightforward. There's no "research" to figure out, no enemies to battle, and little to no time constraints to worry about. You will eventually be able to build a Tinker station which you can use to craft equipment such as a toolbelt, which lets you craft anywhere without the need for a workbench, or better harvesting tools lets you destroy things faster and collect more resources per harvest.
Minigames
To break up some of the monotony, there are minigames. Minigames are completely optional, but they can help pass time while you're waiting for your factory to work, and they can also unlock some the fastest buildings in the game.
The first one you'll come across is Dark Thicket, which is a run-based tree-chopping game. You'll get resources exclusive to the minigame, which can be spent on upgrades that help you perform better, and eventually unlock upgrades that can be used outside of the minigame.
And that is the gist of what you'll be doing in Nightwater. Get stuff, turn stuff into other stuff, automate collecting and transforming of stuff, go play games while your stuff does stuff, and expand the world so you can get more different stuff. You'll mine ore, smelt the ore into ingots, and use the ingots to build faster machines.
Critique
I found the simplicity of this game to be a welcome break from the more popular, complex factory automation games like Factorio and Satisfactory, and also a bit more compelling than the free form games like shapez and Modulus. The world is small enough and the stakes are low enough that "efficiency" is not much of a concern. If you want to make more of something faster, just upgrade your buildings to newer ones or build a few more. With unlimited inventory and the toolbelt upgrade you can just handcraft most of what you need at any time or zip over to one of your auto collectors and grab what you need.
This game definitely has a "vibe." There's calm music playing all the time, and if you stop and look around you'll occasionally just see some pretty scenery. There's not a ton of "story" per se. As you progress you will collect Memories which cause more Words to appear, but I found it all pretty ignorable. If you're into art and poetry it may have more of an impact on you, but to me it was just less pretentious than the quotes in The Witness.
My main criticism of Nightwater is the UI. In a game where you are constantly building things, having to go into the Build menu for every single buildable can become very annoying over time. There's no hotbar to put things on, so for every pipe you need to build you're hitting B, locating it in the giant list of buildings, and double-clicking on it to place it in the world. Just make sure you have the right amount of resources though, or you'll have to hit B again, find the item again, and single click on it to see what you're missing. You can pin one(1)(ONE) recipe to your screen, which I found most helpful for keeping track of which items I needed for the Manifester, but my ADHD brain needed to constantly go into the Building and Crafting menus to remember what I needed to make different things, so that was annoying. You also cannot build from very far away, so when you trying to find a spot to place a harvester where it will work the fastest you will sometimes just have a big floating blob in front of you while you move around looking for the highest number to appear.
I managed to complete Nightwater in a weekend, although I am a person with no job and no social life so I probably blitzed through it quicker than most. I have just under 20 hours on Steam, with a few achievements left to unlock. Apparently there are multiple endings to unlock, though I don't see much purpose in going back for them. If I want to replay this game I'll probably start from the beginning again. I found most of the fun to be in just slapping little factories together, and if running pipes over long distances was a little easier, I'd probably have spent more time automating some of the more complex parts at the end. To me, this is a good game if you're into factory automation, but you're not "good" at factory automation or just don't want to use your brain that heavily. Give it a shot if you're up for something bite-sized.