Sixty Four | PC Review

I was intrigued! Sixty Four was a strange concept for me. You start with nothing, then there is one machine, then there are blocks to break. You break the blocks and collect the goods in a Minecraft style. New machines become available to you as you make and break more blocks. But what does it all mean? Is it an allegory for the Big Bang and the beginning of life? Is it a gaming developer who was having an existential crisis and used creating this game as a means to work out his internal struggles?

We Just Don’t Know

Your friend wants you to come hang out, but you have found this machine. You have to activate it. We’ve all walked down the seasonal aisle and felt the urge to “Try Me.” It feels similar here. You just activate the machine, it builds eight sets of blocks which you click with your mouse to break apart. The broken pieces get automatically collected and stored, and the number of pieces of different elements are tracked in the upper left. You use these elements to unlock and purchase new machines. As automation becomes part of the game, you can also use these elements to power those machines.

You chat with your friend via a text style interaction but you have no ability to initiate conversation. This text chat is purely game driven and the conversations are automatically triggered by certain milestones within the game. It does very little to drive the actual story, though. I found it to be more along the lines of a “Why are we here?” rhetorical philosophical musing.

At the beginning of Sixty Four, this uncertainty was welcome. A plethora of possibilities awaited me. As the game continued, and the text conversations were quiet for extended periods of time, it began to feel like a grind. In the game Roller Coaster Tycoon, the opinion of the park’s patrons would reduce if the conditions of the park, meaning the amount of puke along the walking paths, were poor. I enjoyed moving the employees around to the messy areas to clean up and keep the patrons happy. At first, I felt the same way here in Sixty-Four. It was fun going around to all of my machines to make sure they had the materials loaded to continue functioning on their own. I enjoyed checking on my inventory of elements to see how far I was from being able to “purchase” my next machine. But it became a chore that I wasn’t getting any positive reinforcement for doing. The gap to the next machine was gigantic. I spent hours just reloading machines to build up enough currency for that purchase. The payoff wasn’t worth the effort.

Full disclosure, I might have been playing the game incorrectly. Perhaps there was a better way to position the machines so that they would be more productive. 

Simple Game Means Simple Controls

Sixty Four is a management sim style of game at heart. From the isometric view to the game currency requirements to build the next machine, it is a massively scaled down Sim City. You break blocks to make more machines and you don’t know why you’re doing it. While the graphics are crisp and clean and the game offers the “Alt” button to enable seeing through machines so you can see what’s behind them, I inevitably found it difficult to see every machine after creating more than 10 of them. 

I highly recommend a mouse. If you’re a pro with hammering a touchpad, that might also do the trick. My hands did not feel very well after playing the game for an hour using the laptop “mouse” button. As the game progresses, it takes more clicks to break the blocks. There were times when I didn’t have enough automation equipment or elements to power them and had to continue manually breaking the blocks. It’s hard work for the hands.

Meanwhile, you move around your environment using WASD. As of the version that I played, you could not edit the controls. But, that is all you need: four directional buttons and a mouse to click things. 

So Much Potential, Not Enough Payoff

I was in love with Sixty Four for about 6 hours. Then the grind set in. I was lonely. Why wasn’t my “friend” talking to me? At one point, when the friend finally reached out, it was to say, “You know something funny? I don’t know my own name.” I understood why I didn’t know my name, but this friend was a lifeline to reality. Now we find out that the friend is just as confusing as everything else. As mentioned above, there just was not enough progress. The game is incredibly lengthy. Easily a minimum of twenty hours. However, since most of the game is passive and all I was doing was making sure my machines had the fuel-element present, it could have been a lot more and I just wasn’t paying attention. Even during the dreadful grind, I was so intrigued by the possibilities that I was desperate to learn what was going to come next. I kept going and going.

Sixty Four needed something to indicate that I was doing things properly. I plan on revisiting this game after giving myself some distance so that I can see if I can do things differently and pick up the pace. If the machines WERE optimal in the way that I built things, then the pacing is terribly sub-optimal. I hope my retry will bring with it an updated review of pacing happiness

To hear me talk more about Sixty Four, be sure to listen to the February 28 episode of The Gaming Outsider podcast.

This review is based on a PC copy of Sixty Four provided by Jesus Fabre for coverage purposes. It is exclusive to this platform.