This is a combination of factory building and incremental games that will take up a lot of your time.

This week, a cheap little indie combines two genres that are notorious for consuming a lot of time into one monstrous game. Widget Inc has a production-matching flow similar to a factory game, but the gameplay is more like an incremental. You can build up successive layers of industries in order to create ever more complex technologies over 12 tiers and associated upgrades. By utilizing machine adjacency and terrain bonuses, you can increase production numbers to unlock new tech and research at a rapid pace.

It has a demo which takes a few hours to complete and gives you an idea of how the simple first few levels of tech work as you unlock optimizations for your growing industrial complex. It's really cool stuff and hasn't yet shown any of the bog-down points other incremental games rely on in order to extend their playtime.

Here's how developer Leaping Turtle describes Widget Inc:

"A hybrid factory-builder/incremental clicker game. Master the various crafting processes to expand your factory. Then, with your newly automated production you can unlock new technology to get closer to your goal to spread to the stars."

This first part is a very concise description of the game. Each building has a button to click, or a minigame to play to get its product. This gets automated as you purchase upgrades for the building. In a capacitor plant, for instance, you have to add up numbers in order to reach a certain goal, while at a power station, you simply hold the valve open to let oil in.

Widget Inc is available on Steam for just $5. It's also 10% off until November 7th. It's the most cool game I've seen in a while, since last year's The Gnorp Apologue.