Crack open Kaizen like a disposable camera, and you’ll find the parts inside are very similar to a subgenre of puzzle game called Sokoban. Developed in the late 80s, these games put you in control of a worker shoving crates around a warehouse floor until they reached their designated position. These sliding puzzles in which you push objects around a space appear throughout gaming. Whenever you’re shoving a great stone block in Tomb Raider, you owe a small salute to Sokoban’s creator Hiroyuki Imabayashi. Though, make sure the block’s not on a slope when you do it, otherwise that’s a quick way to make a jar’s worth of Lara paste.
In Kaizen, it’s not crates in a warehouse or great stone blocks in an ancient temple you’re shoving around, but the component parts of cheap 80s commodities. You’re an American business graduate who, through a series of crossed wires, has ended up designing production lines for a Japanese manufacturing company, laying out the cutters, welders, and factory arms that turn lenses and hinges into binoculars, and buttons and screens into digital calculators. Each product presents a new brain-straining challenge where you must work out the order to cut, move, and weld the parts. Get it right and you’ll be looking at a toy robot; get it wrong and you’ll just have a plastic head with arms and legs instead of ears.
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While the developers’ name, Coincidence, may be new, the team is the same as the shuttered Zachtronics studio that made puzzle games Spacechem, Opus Magnum, and Shenzhen I/O. If you’ve played those games, then you may have an inkling of what you’re heading into. From puzzle to puzzle, the products you are asked to assemble will become more complex, your toolbox will expand, and your brain will need to keep up. I warn you, there may be a time when you are staring down at a workbench of rice cooker components and machine parts that refuse to work in concert. You may scream at the screen “Why won’t the little legs weld where I want them!?”. Your neighbours may come and check on you. They may leave shaking their heads and muttering something like “Damn that Zach Barth and his fiendish puzzle games.” But, get through that rough patch and in a moment of epiphany the solution will become clear.
This is all to say, don’t crack open Kaizen like a disposable camera. It may be that the parts are familiar, both in their roots back to 40-year-old puzzle mechanics and previous Zachtronics games, but to focus on the old innards would miss Kaizen’s heart. As your foreman tells you when you’re welding clocks together to make a device that can track two different timezones at once, “It’s important to come up with new product ideas with the components we already have”. In wrapping the mechanics of previous Zachtronics games in this new setting and threading its puzzles together with a story of an American lost in the manufacturing department of a Japanese company, all that is old feels new again.
But, I’m serious about that rice cooker puzzle, it will mess you up.
Head over to the RPS Advent Calendar 2025 to open another door!