Nova Lands
I played the demo for Nova Lands (then called Nova Islands?) in the recent Steam fest and loved it. They put a lot of care and attention into that; even making a specific quest for the demo to let you finish something (which isn't in the full game). It's very similar to Forager in many ways, but with a little more emphasis on factory building. You produce resources, turn them into other resources, and build up and up until you've got (very simple) supply chains making computers. Each time you discover a new island there's something interesting to do, and it's full of animal and alien NPCs that give you quests. It lacks the proper tools for a scalable factory game, but is great fun.
Pros
- Beautiful aesthetic
- Lots of attention to detail
- Has a skill point system that lets you focus early game on different progression areas
- You can upgrade your abilities and tools via NPCs
- There's a research tree for new technology
- Each Island is interesting and unique
- You can pin milestones for whatever you're working on
- You can have a personal bot to mine and carry stuff
- Has museum collections
- You can ride some creatures
- 3 bosses
- There's a space station with a whole load of extra gameplay like new stores and housing
Cons
- As production chains get longer and you progress, it's difficult to tell if you have a bottleneck and aren't producing enough of something. There's no production overview, and I had to check the wiki to work out the (actually very simple) production ratios
- Until you get a specific ability, objects spawn so quickly that on my landing island I barely have time to clear the objects and select something to build before they come back again
- Space is at a premium, which is fine - but it's quite difficult to tell which building you're interacting with when they're all close together
- There's a Mysterious Tower island, with 5 altars. You can find the solution online, but I can't see any way in-game to work it out
- The only way to see where an item is made is to check each machine type
- Towards the endgame, there's a lot of just sitting around. There's not really any optimising to do like Factorio, so once you've plonked down as many machines as you can fit, you just wait for it to produce the last item in the chain about once every 10 minutes
- The production timers on items are ridiculous. After suspecting that they were taking even longer than I thought, I went and looked it up on the wiki and sure enough, the last item in the chain takes 40 minutes to produce.
- I have a gem machine which is meant to increase production speed by 1.5x. The wiki says an item takes 19 minutes to produce. I timed it. Also takes me 19 minutes to produce, so presumably the gem machine does nothing.