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Genre: Adventure Developer & Publisher: Littlefield Studio/Dear Villagers Released: March 23, 2021 Requirements: OS: Windows 7or higher Processor: Minimum, 2.0 Ghtz dual core processor Memory: Minimum, 3 GB RAM Graphics: Video card with 512 MB VRAM DirectX: Version 11 Storage: 2 MB available space
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By flotsam Machinika Museum Littlefield Studio/Dear Villagers Much in the vein of the Houses of Tesla and Da Vinci, this museum offers an abundance of puzzling based around extra-terrestrial artifacts and machinery. As the Steam page says, “In a distant future, finding machines from alien civilizations is not unusual, especially in a museum dedicated to them. Your job is to receive these devices and to understand how to repair them.” To that end, each Chapter starts with a package, which once you figure out how to open it will reveal one of the said machines. Fiddle and probe and hope to move on. The interface is a bit unusual but not for these sorts of games. You click and hold to drag your perspective around, enabling you to zero in on features of possible interest. Double-click to zoom in, right click to back out. The curser doesn’t react to hotspots so if something looks interesting, double-click to perhaps check it out. You will come to recognise the sorts of things that warrant investigating. Once zoomed in you might have further room to drag the scene to get a better look at some aspect, but once engaged with a puzzle the screen will be fixed (i.e., it won’t move) but you might still be doing things within it. A single click will gather an item which will appear in a ribbon right of screen. Click and drag to try and use one in the game world, or click to have it highlighted centre of screen, from where you can examine it through 360 degrees which can be particularly important. There are five inventory slots which is the most different items you will have at any one time, although you might have multiple of the same item (these will be stored in the same slot). To my recollection none carry over to the next chapter. Left of screen is a ribbon containing three gadgets which you will deploy throughout your endeavours. The first is a printer used to duplicate items, the second a mini-camera which enables you to look inside bits and pieces, and an exotic screwdriver, which does what you would expect but not in the usual way. Whilst clicking and dragging are your stocks in trade, you will also mimic certain actions (e.g., twist, slide, pull etc.). I have mixed feelings about these types of interactions, but here I thought they worked well, helping you to be more tactilely engaged with the various mechanisms. There is a story developing which you can discover more about yourself, but the game really is all about the puzzles. There are quite a few, and they offer more than a decent challenge. Quite a few require you to work out what the puzzle is about in order to then be able to solve it. Whilst some elements repeat across the course of the game, there are so many different puzzles that you won’t mind having to occasionally revisit one aspect or another. Orienting the puzzle to access all its parts can be a little fiddly, frustrating even, and more likely to be the case in the last Chapters. So too, matching some patterns can be a tad precise. There is no doubting the game looks impressive. Sound effects and an intermittent soundtrack, along with some excellent little cutscenes when you trigger something on the machinery you are working on makes it a much more dynamic environment than it might otherwise be. I remember fiddling with stuff on a workbench in a location by myself, and it was never this entertaining. It's worth mentioning that none of the puzzles have reset buttons, but near as I could tell, backing out of a puzzle and then exiting to the menu will result in the puzzle being reset when you go back in. You won’t need it often, but there were a few puzzles where I wanted to start again. However, the only times I went from within the puzzle to the menu (as opposed to backing out of it first), coming back in locked me out of the particular mechanism and I had to start the Chapter again. I also encountered one glitch where the inventory item would not engage with where it was needed. Again, restarting the Chapter fixed the issue. The game exclusively saves when you exit, and just choose resume from the menu to pick up where you left off, or alternatively choose to restart a Chapter. Steam says its two to four hours, but it took me half as long again and that included accessing a walkthrough more than once. The game ends by setting you up for the sequel, which if you enjoy this is already available. I played on: OS: Windows 11, 64 Bit Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB
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