Chocolate Factory Simulator - Pain Au Chocolat
There are assumptions that go with a name. A man named Jeeves might be expected to be a Butler, a pet named Rex could be assumed to mean a Dog, and a game with the word Quest in the title would be some sort of adventure. There are other names and titles that sit outside the stereotype, referring to a wider gamut of meaning, such as a Simulator in the context of games. The scale slides from the dryer end of a Flight Simulator to the absurdity of Goat Simulator, with a myriad of balances lying between. There have been Simulators of all kinds; Farming, Speaking, Mechanic, Tabletop, Battle, Gas Station and more. Add to the list, Chocolate Factory Simulator.
More often with that title, it might be the Factory in the name that lends itself to a derived implication, setting aside the obviousness of the word Chocolate sitting fresh in first place. A game with Factory might be easily assumed to involve some aspect of automation, a particular style, even a shift toward chain reactions and interconnected pieces, creating an ever-more-complicated array of Rube Goldbergesque contraptions. The title as a whole invokes the most famous fictional factory for chocolate, the Wonka Factory visited by Charlie Bucket in the novel by Roald Dahl. The cover and screenshots show a world of whimsy, the trappings of a steampunk civilisation with deliveries sent by balloon and zeppelin, and a quirky robot rolling around the factory floor.
All of that is a lie. The whimsy in the wrapping is a ruse, and instead Chocolate Factory Simulator leans heavily to the dry, detailed side of the Simulator scale, and does not do much with the idea of a factory, with the only source of automation for any task coming at the hands of the robot assistant, who must be directed to each task in turn.
Making chocolate is famously a meticulous, difficult process, and that is true again in the case of Chocolate Factory Simulator. Precision is paramount in portioning out your ingredients, heating your mixes to the proper temperatures, and the overall process. Every recipe needs to be precise, and it is constantly a hands-on process. There are only two tasks that are fire-and-forget, which are stocking the vending machine, and wrapping the chocolate. Everything else requires your complete attention, and any haphazard collation of sugar, milk, cocoa and butter will result in unusable sludge instead of a viable product, and wasting all of the ingredients you used in the process. From the very first block you make, the game is explicit that you must be exact when pouring out ingredients, and while there are no particularly difficult steps in the process as you scale up in order size and complexity, the exactness required means you never truly get a handle on the process.
The game does try to ease you into the more complicated aspects of what types of chocolate you can create – mixed, filled, topped, decorated – and it does so by keeping most of the machines on the factory floor under literal covers until a new customer order requests that added element. Pouring out each ingredient into a mixture is done either at a slow trickle of one gram at a time, or faster with a heavy pour, which risks spoiling your portions. It might be more accurate to label your role as a chemist of confectionary, because that requirement of exact measures is there from the start of the game, and throughout all recipes that follow.
The new machines are accompanied by a brief tutorial, and are designed more for bulking up orders, but each also needs to be maintained, upgraded, adequately powered, and switched on or off directly so that neither machine status nor chocolate quality is negatively affected. There are also machines for different additions to the chocolate, and some customisation options for the packaging and block layout, with the majority geared toward more easily satisfying bulk orders, though the adherence to the process means the most tedious part of pouring out ingredients is a constant throughout.
After the first order you fulfill, when the chocolate is heated, poured, pressed, wrapped, and delivered, more orders will come in. Before long there will be a backlog of orders, and every completed order will be instantly replaced by another, meaning there will never be a moment where you don’t have an order in progress, or waiting. Some of the orders rise in complexity, at larger scale, or have other special conditions attached – some may be timed, while others are deemed special, and can affect your factory reputation at a larger scale. Reputation is required for rising through the three locality ladders against other game-run chocolatiers, and unlocking upgrades and decorations. Timed and special orders have stronger penalties associated, though as the orders are not started until you accept them (and can only have one order active at a time), it is possible to prepare your chocolate prior to accepting an order. The time that an order has been in the queue does not matter either, so you can pick and choose the easier ones, or the ones worth more reputation or money.
You can decorate your factory, adding knick-knacks, changing the floor and walls to add a little flavour, but the changes are minor and further down the progression chain. You also need to make sure your warehouse is well-stocked, and keep an eye out for supply chain issues that can affect ingredient cost and availability. The general environment of the game is probably the highlight, as the artwork for ingredients looks like stock images, the customers sending orders have limited variety, and the interface is chunky in the way you want your chocolate to be, but not your menus and buttons.
The recipe book is your only friend, providing you with a way to adjust your required portion of chocolate and scale it up or down, to make the required measures easier to calculate. It also contains the recipe for everything else you need to make, such as filling and additives. You still need to be sure you have accounted for the weight of other ingredients so that every block is a perfect 100g. Then you wrap it, and load the whole order into a large metal box on the balcony, sending the whole order off once it’s ready.
It feels as though the game has split loyalties between a near-whimsical setting, and a painfully realistic simulation of the chocolate making process. Although the next step of what to do is nearly always clear, there are so many shifting elements that it is a stressful game. It may even be more accurate to say this isn’t a game, but a simulator only, though one not fully grounded in reality. This is not so much an experience as Wonka, but a Wonka Experience. No unknowns are waiting around the corner, but mathematics, chemistry, and disappointment. It is Chocolate Pain, over pain au chocolat. If you have a yearning to be micromanaged, or want a process that has a meticulous set of steps that must be followed with precision, that you have to start over if you make a single mistake, this may be for you.
Player2 reviewed Chocolate Factory Simulator on PC using a code kindly provided by the publisher.
