Factory Balls is a digital puzzle game created by Bart Bonte in 2007. On Poki.com (where I played the game), it falls under several categories – brain games, funny games, intelligence games. Based on this, I would label its target audience as single players looking for a head-scratching pastime game, with very little narrative involved.
The “realistic” resources available to the player throughout Factory Balls require the player to broaden their original perceptions of those objects, encouraging a very outside-the-box attitude while walking the player through developing a sort of formulaic procedural mindset. However, it needs more game juice to move it from puzzle to game.
The primary resources in this game are the paint cans to dunk the balls in, while secondary resources (that are still vital – I call them ‘secondary’ because they switch out between levels based on situation-specific needs) include hard hats, goggles, belts, etc. Players are thankfully introduced appropriately to the practicality of these tools one by one, with a tutorial level demonstrating the purpose of the hard hat.
This scaffolding is a very intentional and player-facing choice that explains an otherwise unintuitive set of resources. As the puzzles become more complex, involving multiple types of tools, the game clearly reveals itself to rely on the dynamic of the player’s ability to judge an object’s shape to determine what impression it will leave on the ball when dunked in paint.
There are a few criticisms I have of this gameplay. While the ideas for resources are novel, the game is a linear process – there’s only one puzzle at a time. The learning curve between puzzles is supposed to be reasonable, but in the case where a player feels stumped, like I did in the puzzle above, there’s no escape, and this marks the end of the game. Once a player reaches this point, the puzzle dynamic shifts from logic and procedure to trial-and-error. There is still a right answer, but everything becomes too experimental.
Second, this game is abstract. That’s not a criticism itself, but abstract games that repeat the same mechanisms – select resource, dunk in paint, rinse, repeat – can produce a monotonous mechanical dynamic when the same process is being executed at every stage. After a point, what was a game at first because of its novelty and quirky nature becomes more of a problem-solving exercise or homework. That’s unfortunate – after all, didn’t Scott Kim say in “What is a Puzzle?” that his first of 2 rules for a puzzle is that it should be fun?
Following this criticism, I personally have a third one: lack of narrative. This game is centered around some ambiguous concept of producing and decorating (toy?) balls that are customized to specifications on the box. The player is given the chance to fill in the blanks of the story here: “where is this ball going?”, “who is it for?”, “why do I need to make a ball covered in grass and daisies?”
I know puzzle games aren’t required to have narratives, but in referencing other puzzle games that I have played or seen, and even request completion games, I’ve had more engaging experiences. Take one example from each of those categories: Monument Valley and Papa’s Pancakeria.
Both of these games have narratives (mostly enacting and evocative) supporting them underneath, regardless of whether they are fully puzzle-based or more mechanical and procedural. Factory Balls misses the mark on that.
Now, given that there are no other dynamics in this game besides the back and forth movement of the ball between resources and the paint cans, and no narrative to for the player to lean on through contextual recognition, does the game have a responsibility to offer an additional recovery mechanism to keep players engaged?
Consider the various New York Times puzzles:
Factory Balls sits side-by-side with these games in conceptual complexity. No fluff, just puzzles. Therefore, they currently have a hint-less single-solution puzzle game with no recovery mechanism that systematically excludes players who don’t already possess the specific spatial reasoning skills the game demands. As a result, it implicitly decides that players who think differently or need more scaffolding don’t deserve to finish. That’s not a game anymore, that’s unwarranted judgement.
Ultimately, Factory Balls is a nice brain teaser, but unsustainable in the long run. Puzzles are just not enough on their own, they need more forms of “oomph” to be interesting.
