‘What if you could build Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory?’ is a question I’m surprised video games haven’t answered yet. It’s a natural next step for the factory-building genre, taking the fundamentals of a game like Satisfactory and theming it around the one fictional factory everyone knows about.
Chocolate Factory, developed by Tbjbu2 (who I presume was named by the developer’s cat walking across the keyboard), does exactly this. But it also asks a far less obvious, some might say unnecessary question, namely ‘What if Willy Wonka had a massive gun?’.
Watching the announcement trailer (which isn’t on YouTube for some reason, but it’s viewable on the game’s Steam page) Chocolate Factory is clearly heavily derived from Satisfactory. It has a similar visual style, building system, and blend of construction and survival to Coffee Stain’s massively successful game. The main difference is that it’s set in a fantastical candyland, with numerous biomes themed around different treats. There are chocolate mountains, candy-canes and swirly lollipops that grow like trees, and of course, hostile gingerbread men that you must shoot to death.
Wait, what was that last one?
The sickly-sweet violence occurs about 50 seconds into the trailer. What makes it especially amusing is that our nameless protagonist doesn’t just pop his biscuity foe with a pistol or some other small firearm. No, the gingerbread man gets blasted with a massive blue boomstick that appears to fire cannonball-sized jawbreakers. Later, the player-character brutally beats another gingerbread man to death with a stick of rock. It’s quite the change in tone, somewhat reminiscent of Palworld earlier this year, though Chocolate Factory’s trailer is less knowing about it.
Beyond its confectionary combat, Chocolate Factory looks like a sufficiently robust factory-builder. The full game is out in June, but there’s a free “Prologue” demo arriving in just over a week, which you can find here. It should also be noted that this isn’t the only Chocolate Factory game currently in development. Let me also introduce you to Chocolate Factory Simulator. Slated launch in December, this game has a more steampunk vibe, a friendly robot companion called Nougat, and as far as I can tell, no gingerbread murder whatsoever.