Brave New Wonders has no conveyor belts, just robots you command in plain language. It is slow to start, but CMoney got dangerously sucked in.
The Brave New Wonders team provided a copy of the game for this piece.
Verdict Play It Now
The title of my video says I got dangerously sucked in, and I meant it. Brave New Wonders is not the kind of game I usually play. It’s a factory builder, it’s slow to click, and for the first stretch I was lost. Then the systems started making sense, my little machines started running on their own, and I looked up and realized I did not want to stop. That’s the danger.
Watch the RAW IMPRESSIONS
Brave New Wonders RAW IMPRESSIONS: I Got Dangerously Sucked InIf I don't stop, I'm going to keep going.
CMoney, OnPoint 4 Gamers
What Brave New Wonders is
Brave New Wonders is a factory automation and base-building game from City From Naught, an indie studio out of Toronto, published by City From Naught and LoongGate. It hit 1.0 on Steam on September 21, and it’s PC only for now. You play Mira, a pioneer in a post-apocalyptic far future, rebuilding from the ruins of an old world that nobody quite understands anymore.
The big hook is right on the box: no conveyor belts. Instead of laying down belts from one building to the next, you’ve got a crew of little robots called automatons, and you tell them what to do in plain language. Mine this, carry that, drop it off over there. You type the job, and they go do it.
I’d actually played an earlier pre-release build of this a few months back, and I remember really liking it. This time the team sent over the full game. The cool part? It picked my old save right back up. The bad part? I did not remember a single thing about what I was doing.
The first hour is a fight with yourself
I’m not going to lie to you. The opening of my session was me clicking on everything asking “what is this?” Train station? No. Smelter? Maybe. Warehouse? Sure, I guess. Your mentor walks you through the basics, like using blueprint mode to clone whole sections of your production line, and relocating buildings without losing any resources. That’s a great idea, by the way. The game wants you to tear things down and rebuild them better, and it never punishes you for it.
The trick is that you can do a lot of the grunt work yourself. You can mine by hand, carry materials around in your backpack, and drop them off. But that’s not the point. The moment you hand a job to an automaton is the moment Brave New Wonders opens up.
Then it clicks
My turning point was the smart mover. You assign one of your robots that behavior, point it at a pickup spot and a drop-off spot, and it just goes. One guy grabbing refined crystal from one building and taking it to the next. Another guy carrying metal plates. All of a sudden I was standing there watching resources show up where I needed them, and I hadn’t touched a thing. We were cooking.
It’s also where you start learning the real lessons. I had too many robots on one job, and they were stepping on each other. I had miners walking way too far to the nearest deposit. So I’d dismantle one, rebuild it as a mover, and rearrange the line. That loop of watching, tweaking and watching again is the whole game, and once it gets its hooks in you, it’s hard to put down.
The house that recognized me
What I didn’t expect was a story with some real mystery to it. Out exploring the map, I found an abandoned house with a strange glowing container inside. As soon as I reached for it, the whole house collapsed, and when the dust cleared there was a passage that was way too clean and way too small for me to fit through. It was the perfect size for a robot.
That’s an Old World Trial. The house is basically an ancient machine asking you a question, and you have to answer it with automation. I loved that. It’s a puzzle, but the only way to solve it is to actually understand the systems the game has been teaching you.
Writing your own robot brains
Before the trial, the game sends you to a training ground to learn custom behaviors, and this is where it got really cool. You start simple: move between flag A and flag B. Then A, then B, then C, in order. Then it adds signals. Buildings can glow red or green or blue, and your robots can read those signals and react. Red light, green light. Move to one flag when the hub is red, the other when it’s green.
I got it wrong a couple of times. Okay, more than a couple. But when it worked, it felt like I had actually built something smart.
The trial nearly broke my brain, and I loved it
The trial itself was the real test. The house wants 10 metal plates and 10 refined crystals, one at a time. It glows red when it wants a plate and blue when it wants a crystal, and only automatons can get through that little passage to drop them off.
My first plan was a mess. One robot trying to do everything, walking from so far away that I joked he’d finish by next week. So I scrapped it and split the job. Two robots only listen for red and go get plates. Two robots only listen for blue and go get crystals. Then I sat back and watched them fall into a rhythm, one color waiting while the other delivered, back and forth, until the house opened up. I’m telling you, we crushed it. The reward was an old world relic that upgraded my backpack, and the game even gave me a little speed boost from parts I pulled off an ancient vehicle sitting on a road in the sky.
It's not just a peaceful builder
After that, the map starts pushing back. The way forward is blocked, so you have to research combat, build a weapons factory, make gunpowder in the smelter, and turn it into dynamite to blast a path open. It’s a whole new chain of factories just to clear one obstacle, which is very much this game’s style.
And then I blew open the next area and people started shooting at me. I did not see that coming. There are old world machines out there that don’t want you around, and there’s wreckage to salvage that, of course, needs its own robots and its own signals to deal with.
Built for a mouse and a long night
Would you play a factory game with no conveyor belts?
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I played on PC with my Xbox-themed mouse and keyboard, and with this much clicking, typing and menu work, that’s the way I’d go. It’s single-player only, and it’s $24.99 on Steam at full price. Just know going in that this is a game that eats evenings. Watching my little crew zip around the base, running jobs I wrote for them, never got old.
Verdict: Play It Now
Brave New Wonders asks for some patience up front. If factory games aren’t usually your thing, and they’re not usually mine, that first stretch is going to feel like work. But once the robots start running your base for you, and once you write your first set of signal rules and watch them actually work, it’s a great feeling. It’s deeper and a lot more complex than the earlier build I played, and it’s different from anything else in my rotation right now.
I had to stop because we had another game to get to, and honestly that’s the only reason I stopped. If I don’t stop, I’m going to keep going. That’s the best compliment I can give it. Shout out to the Brave New Wonders team for sending it over. If you’ve got a PC and you like the idea of programming your own little army of builders, go check it out.
What's working
- No conveyor belts: robots you command in plain language
- Signal-based logic that turns your base into a real system
- Old World Trials that are smart puzzles built on the game’s own mechanics
- A real mystery in the world, from collapsing houses to roads in the sky
- Blueprints and relocating that let you rebuild without losing anything
- Dynamite, a weapons factory and enemies that keep it from feeling sleepy
What needs work
- A slow, confusing first stretch, especially if you’re coming back to an old save
- It’s easy to build a robot job wrong and not know why it isn’t working
- PC only for now
Platform played: PC (Steam)
Screenshots captured by OnPoint 4 Gamers from gameplay. Featured image: OnPoint 4 Gamers, built on an official Brave New Wonders Steam screenshot (City From Naught Inc.).
Sources
- Steam store page (developer and publisher, single-player, Windows, plain-language automaton commands, no conveyor belts, blueprints, signals)
- PC Gamer (Sep 21 launch, turrets and dynamite, copy and paste layouts)
- Games Press (Toronto indie studio, out on PC Sep 21, 2026)
- City From Naught on Steam ($24.99 list price)
- CMoney's Brave New Wonders RAW IMPRESSIONS video, Oct 6 2026
- Frank's We Doin' It LIVE session, Sep 24 2026
