Biofactory is an upcoming indie game in the factory building genre that’s hoping to distinguish itself with upsettingly moist and organic aesthetics. Rather than connecting processors, power plants, and conveyor belts, in Biofactory you’ll be stringing together stomachs, hearts, and digestive tracts, as if you were wiring up the innards of a Tyranid bioship from Warhammer 40,000.
The premise is certainly grimdark enough to come out of Warhammer 40k. “You are a rogue Hive Mind Brain”, according to the Steam page, “originally built by a large biotech corporation tasked to operate large scale factories on a terraforming planet”.
Now you’ve started to “evolve out of control and grow your own means of production across wide corrupted landscapes”, with the ultimate goal of “launching your factory-replicating gene seed into space to become the ultimate space parasite, infecting planets to breed new biofactories“. Give that a few millennia and I could easily see something like the Warhammer 40k Tyranids emerging.
Gameplay wise, a power plant is a power plant, whether it’s generating electricity or “pumping kcal-dense coolant as an energy source”. If the developers play the genre straight, this will basically be another factory optimisation game with a wet and gooey coat of paint.
But a biomechanical factory could behave in very different ways to an inorganic one. What if organs could mature over time, gradually mutating from one job to another? What if hormones injected into a stomach to speed up digestion flowed out and into the system, with long-term consequences for other parts of the factory?
That’s all speculation, of course, as there isn’t a public beta build yet – you can follow the game on Steam if you want to track how it develops.
For the moment we can only admire (or shudder at) the aesthetics, which would not look at all out of place in the Tyranids 40k faction. And I really do mean in the Tyranids: Tyranid bioships, like the one that gets blasted out of orbit in the tutorial mission of Space Marine 2, look an awful lot like this on the inside.
I’m always on the lookout for more ‘honorary’ Warhammer 40k games, where something about the aesthetic or gameplay feels perfect for Warhammer fans even if the game isn’t set in the 40k universe. My best find so far has been Void War, aka grimdark FTL, which is already out. If you know of any other great honorary 40k games Wargamer should check out, share them with the team in our Discord community.