Autonauts

Autonauts asks for patience in the nicest possible way, because the whole point is to teach little robots how to do ordinary work for you. By our assessment, it is a automation and colony-management game for people who enjoy wiring routines together, gathering resources, and watching a system gradually run on its own. Its real strength is that loop of setting up tasks, seeing them repeat, and then improving the machine that does the repeating. The downside is that if micromanagement and repetitive setup do not sound fun, the game will feel more like homework than play. In practice it is calm, methodical, and often amusing in the way a machine turns simple chores into a chain of instructions. It sits between relaxed simulation and engineering puzzle, and it rewards planning more than speed.