Two brothers from Cornwall have mashed Factorio into a roguelike tower defense game where one run can rack up a million dead bugs. It hit 200,000 Steam wishlists in under a month, and Hooded Horse just signed it.
Factory games have a dirty secret too: most of us never see the endgame. You spend 40 hours untangling spaghetti belts, life gets in the way, and the rocket never launches. BELTFED crams the whole arc, from your first conveyor belt to a screen full of lasers and mortars, into a single roguelike run. Then it throws a planet’s worth of bugs at you while you do it.
It’s the debut game from Hello World Studios, which is two brothers, Troy and Toby Atkinson, from Cornwall in the UK. They’ve been building it since 2023, and when the Steam page and trailer went up in mid-September it went off. It passed 100,000 wishlists 11 days after the trailer dropped, and on 9 October it hit 200,000 wishlists on the same day Hooded Horse announced it’s publishing the game.
You’re a rogue AI with one directive: “AUTOMATE DEATH”. Every run drops your Nexus (your core and your storage) onto a hostile planet. From there you lay belts, wire up smelters and assemblers, and balance a power grid to turn raw ore into ammunition. Your guns, flamethrowers, rocket launchers, mortars, lasers, drones and mines all eat what your production lines make. If supply can’t keep up, the turrets go quiet and the swarm walks in.
The bugs come in the hundreds of thousands, and the devs say kill counts in a single run reach the millions. Lose the Nexus and the run’s over. Everything else, as the Steam page puts it, is expendable.
As you expand into the fog for richer ore, you pick run-defining upgrade cards. The examples so far include buildings that explode and cannons that fire black holes. Between runs you unlock new weapons, buildings, cards, Nexus cores and modules, and you can tune your loadout before each deployment. There are multiple planets, each with its own rules and hazards.
The pitch, in the devs’ own words, is a game for people who like the idea of factory games but don’t have the time for a traditional one, and for factory veterans who want “a crazy change in pace”. Toby’s line in the announcement press release is a good one: “We’ve spent our careers building things that have to work at scale, whether that’s game systems or backend infrastructure handling tens of thousands of requests a second. BELTFED is what happens when we point that experience at a factory full of guns instead.”
Hooded Horse has the best strategy-indie track record going right now: Manor Lords, Against the Storm, 9 Kings, Sandustry and Empires of the Undergrowth are all on its list. “We played BELTFED, and it’s incredibly fun,” CEO Tim Bender said. “The trailer rocks and has got people excited, but the game itself is going to knock their socks off.”
The devs have also confirmed Mac and Linux at launch after two successful benchmarks, alongside Windows. They’ve added blueprints, copy-paste and moving buildings (the community asked for all three), and they’re working on a revamped tutorial with an optional advisor for new players. Plus a giant buildable bubble shield that blocks ranged attacks but chews through “A LOT of power”.
Steam lists the release as 2027. A public demo is the next big milestone. The devs say it’s their main focus, and the announcement press release said a playable demo would land later this year. There’s no date for it yet. Steam’s current specs are friendly for a game that throws this many bugs around: a GTX 960 and 8 GB of RAM minimum, and a GTX 1660 and 16 GB recommended.
Factorio, a tower defense game and a roguelike walk into a bar, and the bar gets overrun by space bugs. We’re in. The “whole factory arc in one sitting” idea fixes the genre’s biggest problem: most Factorio saves end up as a graveyard of half-finished main buses. The trailer looks amazing, but trailers always do. The real test is whether the runs still feel fresh after a dozen planets, and whether a two-person team can keep it running smoothly with that many bugs on screen. Hooded Horse doesn’t sign duds though, and 200K wishlists in under a month says plenty of you agree. Wishlist it, and we’ll be all over the demo when it drops.
Factory brain or tower defense brain? Tell us in the comments or come argue about belt layouts in the GetRekt Discord.
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