Factory of Favours has consistently been the lowest rated Exceptional Story since it's release. The only Fate-locked content rated lower is The Rubbery Murders, a story short enough that you're likely paying about $0.25 per paragraph, and which has probably been purchased more often accidentally by someone looking for Flute Street than by people who actually want to play it. I don't share the same level of vitriol for Factory that I've seen in other players, but I do understand why it's so poorly rated.
Factory of Favours was the closing story of the Season of Silver. The first story in the season was Steeped in Honey, which is generally well liked (and I adored). The second is Lamentation Lock, which is felt to be mediocre, but furthermore is very similar to Factory of Favours in mechanical structure and themes (at least probably, they're both fairly vague feeling to me). So after a great story, you've got 2 much more middling ones, but the third one feels like a rehash of the story immediately before it, but worse.
Lamentation Lock I said had too many characters sharing focus, to let them be developed enough to build on how interesting their concepts were. Factory of Favours has 3 characters. There's the man who hires you for the story. He doesn't care if you actually do the job or not, which might be interesting in another game, but is fairly common for ES quest givers. There's the factory manager, who is distinguished by the fact that she is not a rat or a clay man, and that you interact with her even less than the other characters. And then there's Boris. Put a pin in him for a minute.
Lamentation Lock had the three wards peopled by various "criminals" roughly categorized into Dangerous, Shadowy, and Watchful crimes. But while the ward leaders were the only named characters, other's didn't feel completely samey. When you were doing greased wrestling in the violent wards, it felt like you were talking to distinct groups than when you were comparing knife collections or gossiping about the Recidivist. In comparison in Factory of Favours there are rats and clay men at the factory, but aside from Boris, who we'll get to shortly, there's noting setting any of them apart. They are effectively indistinguishable.
Then there's Boris. The two main strikes against Boris are that we know nothing interesting about him, and he is constantly annoying. He is your antagonist, in that he does not want the factory to resume normal operations, but it's unclear why he doesn't want this. He may or may not be unfinished. I saw people in both camps in terms of guessing which was true, and trying to explain his actions through that, but there just wasn't much to go on. He never explains what he actually wants, or gives any kind of backstory.
In terms of the annoyance, Boris starts of on a bad foot by unexpectedly putting you in debt for asking a question that he insists it will be useful to know the answer to, but which has no mechanical benefit, and little narrative purpose. Through out the story, Boris is watching you, and will Dislike if you do things he does not approve of. While these may be obvious with some thought, they're usually not signposted, and sometimes this happens even on checks that you have succeeded at. This will eventually lock you out of some endings. It wouldn't be deal breakers, except that, again, it's never really clear why any of this is happening.
You're trying to get a factory working again. Why did it stop? it seems like people just took to pointless bartering, and it feels like this is meant to be a metaphor for capitalism or the like, but it just doesn't seem to have teeth. No one can explain the point, just give longer and longer but uninformative explanations of why any given transaction is profitable for them. It doesn't help that the rats and clay men are treated as undifferentiated masses. You try to ask the rats what's going on and it's as much as stated that they have no idea, they just sort of got caught up in things. The clay men just go along with it, in a way that makes it feel, moreso than really any other story, that the idea is that they're essentially factory robots that have gone wrong, following the wrong commands. If this kind of thing were personified in a character, it might help some (Boris doesn't count, not being heavily characterized, and lacking clear motiviations), but as the undifferentiated masses of species, it almost comes off as racist.
So you go to a random factory, play along with the workers for a while, fix a machine with no obvious purpose, and then fix things, save the workers from themselves, and then fix things, or don't.
This wasn't Graham Robertson's only ES, it was his fourth and last. I assume at least some of that was the very negative reception. While I liked some of his other work, his other stories are generally unpopular as well, though not to this extent, and I could see both Failbetter or Robertson lacking the interest in further collaborations after this reception. I do really wish I knew more about Robertson though. His Exceptional Stories are the only works listed on IFDB, but it seems hard to believe he'd be hired for Exceptional Stories without some kind of portfolio. And I'd like to see him playing to his strengths elsewhere, to maybe get a handle on where this one went so wrong.
Factory of Favours was the closing story of the Season of Silver. The first story in the season was Steeped in Honey, which is generally well liked (and I adored). The second is Lamentation Lock, which is felt to be mediocre, but furthermore is very similar to Factory of Favours in mechanical structure and themes (at least probably, they're both fairly vague feeling to me). So after a great story, you've got 2 much more middling ones, but the third one feels like a rehash of the story immediately before it, but worse.
Lamentation Lock I said had too many characters sharing focus, to let them be developed enough to build on how interesting their concepts were. Factory of Favours has 3 characters. There's the man who hires you for the story. He doesn't care if you actually do the job or not, which might be interesting in another game, but is fairly common for ES quest givers. There's the factory manager, who is distinguished by the fact that she is not a rat or a clay man, and that you interact with her even less than the other characters. And then there's Boris. Put a pin in him for a minute.
Lamentation Lock had the three wards peopled by various "criminals" roughly categorized into Dangerous, Shadowy, and Watchful crimes. But while the ward leaders were the only named characters, other's didn't feel completely samey. When you were doing greased wrestling in the violent wards, it felt like you were talking to distinct groups than when you were comparing knife collections or gossiping about the Recidivist. In comparison in Factory of Favours there are rats and clay men at the factory, but aside from Boris, who we'll get to shortly, there's noting setting any of them apart. They are effectively indistinguishable.
Then there's Boris. The two main strikes against Boris are that we know nothing interesting about him, and he is constantly annoying. He is your antagonist, in that he does not want the factory to resume normal operations, but it's unclear why he doesn't want this. He may or may not be unfinished. I saw people in both camps in terms of guessing which was true, and trying to explain his actions through that, but there just wasn't much to go on. He never explains what he actually wants, or gives any kind of backstory.
In terms of the annoyance, Boris starts of on a bad foot by unexpectedly putting you in debt for asking a question that he insists it will be useful to know the answer to, but which has no mechanical benefit, and little narrative purpose. Through out the story, Boris is watching you, and will Dislike if you do things he does not approve of. While these may be obvious with some thought, they're usually not signposted, and sometimes this happens even on checks that you have succeeded at. This will eventually lock you out of some endings. It wouldn't be deal breakers, except that, again, it's never really clear why any of this is happening.
You're trying to get a factory working again. Why did it stop? it seems like people just took to pointless bartering, and it feels like this is meant to be a metaphor for capitalism or the like, but it just doesn't seem to have teeth. No one can explain the point, just give longer and longer but uninformative explanations of why any given transaction is profitable for them. It doesn't help that the rats and clay men are treated as undifferentiated masses. You try to ask the rats what's going on and it's as much as stated that they have no idea, they just sort of got caught up in things. The clay men just go along with it, in a way that makes it feel, moreso than really any other story, that the idea is that they're essentially factory robots that have gone wrong, following the wrong commands. If this kind of thing were personified in a character, it might help some (Boris doesn't count, not being heavily characterized, and lacking clear motiviations), but as the undifferentiated masses of species, it almost comes off as racist.
So you go to a random factory, play along with the workers for a while, fix a machine with no obvious purpose, and then fix things, save the workers from themselves, and then fix things, or don't.
This wasn't Graham Robertson's only ES, it was his fourth and last. I assume at least some of that was the very negative reception. While I liked some of his other work, his other stories are generally unpopular as well, though not to this extent, and I could see both Failbetter or Robertson lacking the interest in further collaborations after this reception. I do really wish I knew more about Robertson though. His Exceptional Stories are the only works listed on IFDB, but it seems hard to believe he'd be hired for Exceptional Stories without some kind of portfolio. And I'd like to see him playing to his strengths elsewhere, to maybe get a handle on where this one went so wrong.