This news story is as much a warning as it is a recommendation: The winner of PC Gamer's , Satisfactory, is currently as part of a new Steam sale following hot on the heels of the bigger summer sale.
I give Satisfactory my highest recommendation: as I wrote in our awards celebration last year, it "has the same endlessness as Minecraft, only trading the RPG-esque mechanics for the compulsive satisfaction of arranging conveyor belts at perfect 90 degree angles and building realistic supporting struts for factories that the game would let me leave floating in the air if I chose to thumb my nose at gravity." But I also want you to know what you're getting into, because if you're like me, playing Satisfactory could be signing up for a multi-year obsession with building more efficient assembly lines, cooler megastructures, and increasingly impractical but entertaining ways to thread train tracks across a giant open world.
Do you have hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours of your life to devote to such a pursuit? Then you can now do so for $28 (£23.45). The game's recent even added some exciting stuff, including controller support, an elevator, and a conveyor throughput monitor that will tell you exactly how many items are passing through each belt every minute.