Spacing, weight, and object shape are common considerations when trying to overcome a puzzle, fitting it through certain sized gaps or using it to manipulate other environmental objects requiring you to have fairly good spacial awareness. Picking up objects is of course quite common, but sometimes you’ll need to hold them properly to move them into the right positions, put them in the right area with other objects to displace water or weigh down buttons, and many times you’ll need to bring a glowing orb to whatever device it is meant to power up. Despite only being able to grab things and move them around, these puzzles come up with new ways to test your ability to problem solve and move things around intelligently, sometimes the puzzle being to identify what you’re supposed to do in the first place in this wordless game. Despite this incredible simplicity though, Unmechanical: Extended stands as an excellent example of how controls don’t make a game, as with just two available actions it manages to creatively construct quite the challenging puzzle game.Īs you explore the subterranean cavern where Unmechanical: Extended takes place, you’ll find progress blocked by little puzzles, the robot you’re playing as needing to activate switches, power up devices, or otherwise create a path forward to move onward in its attempt to escape. Playing as a small flying robot, you can fly around freely in a sidescrolling view and you can pick up objects with a little tractor beam attached to your bottom. That said, there are plenty of worse ways to spend an afternoon than with Unmechanical: Extended.Unmechanical: Extended is a game where you can only do two things. The variety of puzzles found in the game don’t have much replay value, and even on the first go round, the more ambitious ones can certainly frustrate. The complete lack of context and non-existent story give you nothing to latch on to. Unmechanical: Extended’s presentation will please, and its puzzles will challenge you for a few hours, but don’t expect it to do much more. Overall though, the new content is familiar territory for those who played the original, and there’s not much of it. This adds a new twist to the gameplay that wasn’t seen in the original. After an accident in the early parts of the Extended content, your character only has the power to move for a few seconds. This portion of the game also adds a bit more difficulty by limiting your character’s already limited abilities. Sadly there are not, or at least not to the point where it feels like anything but a wasted opportunity.
When this secondary character is introduced, it appears that this will be a less lonely adventure, and that there may be some entirely new dynamics added to the game. Taken below, although this time with an AI controlled counterpart, who you’ll be working with to solve some puzzles. A separate experience from the original, seemingly taking place after the events of the first, the Extended portion of Unmechanical sees you captured again.
The Extended portion of the game tries to tie a bit more of a story into the mix, but it’s still entirely open for interpretation. The premise is pretty straight forward - you can fly around using the rotor on the robot’s head, and you can grab stuff with a tractor beam of sorts to open doors to further your progress. It doesn’t have a name, or a number of options to choose from when controlling it. Unmechanical: Extended is a puzzle game primarily, it doesn’t have much of a story to tell, despite putting the player in control of a cute little robot who’s been whisked from the surface world to a dark mechanical labyrinth.
Unmechanical has recently made its console debut with the “Extended” Edition, and is heading out to the Xbox One and PlayStation family of devices with some additional content added to the previous release. With minimalist story telling techniques, some thought provoking puzzles, and beautiful visuals, this game which started out as a student project arrived on PC, and then later on mobile devices. Back in 2012 Talawa Games’ surprised with their no frills puzzler in Unmechanical.