Sixty Four Review (PC)

How many black cubes are there in the underground of this otherwise empty universe? I’ve been running my initial extractor for more than two hours, augmented by a range of other industrial buildings, and that one’s now pushing out only reds. But the other four digging sites aren’t showing any signs of running out, although the shift toward other colors is on the way.

If only resources in the real world were as abundant and easily turned into useful materials. I’ve created a decent layout for my extraction sites, adding ventilation, required pumps, crackers, and entropy machines. I still have to click on some squares but I don’t mind that, mainly because it means I have something to do while resource numbers go up, accumulating before I splurge on another big purchase.

While I have a strong economy that mostly keeps up with the constantly rising costs of my industry, the green Hell cubes are too rare for my liking. The normal setup takes too long to get them out and the upgrade that speeds up the process is a little too expensive. I could simply alt-tab out of the game, let it run for 10 minutes, and see what resources I need to replace when I return. But it feels wrong to play a PC title like a mobile experience.

Sixty Four is developed by Oleg Danilov and published by Playsaurus. I played it on the PC via Steam. The game uses classic automation and clicker mechanics, challenging players to dig greedily and as deep as possible.

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Surprisingly, the game has a story that evolves alongside its gameplay. A player is chatting with a friend on the lower left side of the screen, initially trying to justify why he’s running late to a meeting. He mentions the new game he is playing, in a nice big of meta-commentary, and new dialogue sections unlock at certain points.

The writing gets a little unhinged, but I suspect most players will start to tune it out after half an hour or so. The focus of Sixty Four is on extracting resources in ever more efficient ways, unlocking a range of new blocky resources while also putting down the industrial buildings required to speed up the process and reach new thresholds. The title’s entire philosophy is about getting more, faster, all the time.

It all starts with one pump, which has to be manually pushed down to extract cubes from this white universe. The blocks turn black, and players have to click a few times to destroy them and extract resources. The process is repetitive and annoying enough that players will be glad to get access to a number of other buildings that automate it.

Digging deeper shifts the block types players get to use. Black is joined by yellow, blue, then red and green. They all have names, but I doubt anyone will talk about beta-pylene rather than the red stuff that at some point starts to feature those very hard-to-extract green Hell cubes. Special buildings will convert certain types into others, ensuring gamers can get all of them even as pure digging shifts towards red.

The cost of all new machinery and associate upgrades increases after each use, which makes it important to find and exploit synergies. All industry also needs cubes of certain colors to run and re-supplying each makes up much of the gameplay. The most annoying are the blue-powered entropy generators, which break blocks without requiring clicks from the player. They can be hard to see and require constant recharging.

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Once the green or Hell cubes make an appearance, Sixty Four presents options that will automate the re-supply cycle. But it is hard to get those resources and it becomes annoying to wait for them to stockpile and then invest in something new. This will be the moment when most players will be tempted to abandon the game.

It can be tempting to read the mechanics as a comment on modern capitalism, in general, or the big mining operations, specifically. This is a world with no people and no natural environment, and it still feels weird at times to spoil this white landscape with more buildings for the sole purpose of getting more blocks out of the ground.

But Sixty Four fails to do anything with this tension. It simply gives players the tools to dig, extract, transform, and then repeat the cycle. And everything is punctuated by the need to constantly watch buildings to make sure they have resources to run while also occasionally clicking on a block for faster resource extraction.

Sixty Four is a spartan-looking experience but it has a certain beauty. The world is a white void while buildings are all sleek and modern, defined mostly by the cube type that powers them. The game’s terrain grid isn’t visible, which can make it tricky to place everything in just the right spot. The list of unlocked buildings is always on the right, all of them greyed out until players get the resources required to place them.

The game’s sound design also does a lot with limited resources. There’s no voice acting but the various buildings create a sort of otherworldly orchestra that kind of works as a soundtrack. It’s possible to hear that some parts of the automation aren’t working well before seeing it. Once that gets boring, find some podcasts to replace the entire audio element.

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The Good

The Bad

Conclusion