The Shapez Studio Is Selling an Editor That Takes Things Away

The Deep Dive

I gave this three sentences in Friday's Conveyor Belt and then spent the weekend thinking about it, which usually means the three sentences were wrong.

On September 7, tobspr Games announced puzzlez, a standalone puzzle game built out of the part of Shapez that was a DLC back in 2021. On October 2 the studio published a devlog on what the new game does differently from Shapez 2. I opened it expecting a feature list. It is a feature list, and nearly every item on it is a way to take something away from the player.

Here is the list. A puzzle designer can switch off up to two of the game's three build layers, the middle one included. A designer can weld buildings and blocks to a level so the player cannot move or remove them, although they keep working. A designer can forbid specific buildings outright. A designer draws the playing field itself, with gaps and islands instead of a fixed square. Even the new buildings follow the pattern: Ramps do exactly what a Lift does, move a shape one layer up or down, but they charge floor space for it, three squares for one layer and five for two. The one genuinely additive item is the Belt Portal, which has unlimited range and runs through buildings, and the devlog mentions in the same breath that designers decide whether a level allows them at all.

All of it is marked work in progress, repeatedly and clearly, so the specifics will move before launch. The posture will not, and the posture is the story.

Shapez 2 sells the exact opposite, in writing

Put the Shapez 2 store page next to that devlog. I am not paraphrasing here, this is the copy tobspr wrote to sell the game, calling it "the purest factory simulation game imaginable: all buildings are free, resources never run out and there are no enemies or time limits." You can delete, redesign and rebuild as much as you like "without penalties." Three interconnected layers. The absence of scarcity, any scarcity, stated as the headline feature. Shapez 2 is a good game in large part because that promise is kept for forty hours.

Now read the store page for the shapez Puzzle DLC, which shipped on June 22, 2021. Same studio, same franchise: "space and buildings are limited, there are no resources and you only get a given amount of shape types and colors to work with."

One studio, one franchise, two products whose sales pitches are negations of each other. That is not a contradiction. It is a studio that worked out five years ago what the rest of the genre keeps rediscovering by accident.

The machines were never the content

Here is the claim I will defend: in a factory game the buildings are not the content. The constraint is.

The sharpest line in the devlog is an admission, and I doubt I would have written it if I were them. Three build layers are Shapez 2's signature, the feature that made the sequel a sequel. In puzzlez, tobspr says, that much freedom "either makes the puzzle way too easy or makes it very difficult to create a challenging puzzle." So the first tool in the editor is a switch that turns two of them off.

Sit with what it costs to publish that. The flagship's headline feature is a liability in the new game, and the fix is a toggle that deletes it. They could have shipped the toggle and said nothing. Instead they explained it, then showed the interesting case, which is not switching off the top two layers to make a flat puzzle. It is switching off the middle one, so a shape has to get from layer one to layer three through a ramp or a lift, across a hole where the obvious road used to be.

That toggle is the whole genre in miniature. Freedom is what a factory sandbox sells, and scarcity is what makes a factory interesting. The stretch of Factorio people describe most fondly is the hour before construction robots. A Satisfactory starter area is memorable because you walk ore up a hill by hand. Nobody's favourite factory story is set at the moment the game ran out of ways to say no.

Why it had to leave Shapez 2

tobspr says this began as DLC for Shapez 2 and became standalone because they "had so many ideas." I believe that, and I also think there was no other option. A sandbox and a puzzle box cannot share an onboarding ramp. Shapez 2 spends its opening hours teaching you that nothing is scarce, that bulldozing a bad idea is free, that the answer to a hard problem is more room. A puzzle teaches the reverse in its opening minutes. Bolt the second mode onto the tutorial of the first and you get a puzzle mode players bounce off while blaming themselves, which is roughly the history of puzzle modes in building games.

Splitting it off also forces the honest version of the work. A DLC gets whatever editor the parent game can cheaply support. A standalone has to ship the editor as the product, which is how you get designer-drawn playing fields and a forbid list rather than a level select screen stapled to a sandbox.

The gate on community puzzles is the part I did not expect

Two details say this studio has been burned before. The announcement commits to 75 or more official puzzles at launch, the reason given as having listened and learned "from the past," which is about as close as a developer gets to saying the 2021 DLC shipped too thin. And in the devlog: a designer has to solve their own puzzle before it can be shared.

That second sentence is small and carries a lot. The failure mode of a community puzzle library is not bad puzzles, it is impossible ones, and the cost lands entirely on the player who spends forty minutes proving a level cannot be beaten. Solved-by-author does not promise a puzzle is good. It promises it is possible, which is the only guarantee a player needs before committing an evening. It is also the cheapest gate going, enforced by the editor rather than by a moderation queue nobody will staff in year three.

What I am taking from it

I build an idle RPG called Tideward, so weigh this accordingly. puzzlez is not in my genre and not a competitor, but the lesson transfers, and I needed it this month.

An idle RPG is a factory sandbox running in slow motion, and the temptation is always to add. Another trade, another tier, another thing for the bank. What players remember, though, is the gate. Bronze before iron before steel is not a restriction placed on the game. It is the game. Every hour of anticipation I have earned came from something being withheld, and every flat stretch came from handing over three systems at once because each was finished.

So here is the question I took out of a devlog about a puzzle game and wrote where I will see it every week: for each system I am about to add, what does it take away, and for how long? If the answer is nothing, I have added content, not design. tobspr just put that question on a Steam page and asked people to wishlist it.

puzzlez has no release date yet; the store page says so plainly. If you have ever finished a Shapez 2 blueprint and thought the hard part was the thinking rather than the belts, that is the game they are building.

puzzlez on Steam | The October 2 devlog | The September 7 announcement | The 2021 shapez Puzzle DLC

P.S. Tideward is up for pre-order on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV and Apple Vision Pro. Free to download, one $9.99 unlock, launching February 11, 2027. Pre-order it now.

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