Every gaming sub-genre has to grow up and develop angst some day, and for a lot of them, that means they go steampunk. Mechanism is like the brooding android teenager of the Splitter family, all full of rusty gears and melancholy. Even your cursor blade is some sort of clockwork pistol scalpel. After you're done solving over 40 physics puzzles, you can probably use it to hunt robotic tarantulas.
The goal is the same as in Splitter: get the circular object (in this case, a super-charming decrepit watch face) to the mystical portal to exit the level. You can't move anything directly, but you can slice up the environment pretty good with your pistol scalpel, either by reshaping blocks or by severing glowing bands of force (ropes).
The new trick is the gravity pickup, which sends everything hurtling toward the ceiling. It's a pretty good twist as twists go, but it does tend to hammer all your pre-planning to mush. Often better to just hack away, see what happens, and try again.
There are two difficulty paths, labeled "Easy" and "Hard" in the tutorial screens, but that must be a translation error from "Hard" and "You must be joking." It's a daring choice by the developer, to make the pre-requisite for completing the Red Path clairvoyance. That's a niche hardcore market, right there. My advice: take the Blue Path, Neo. Oh wait, that's cyberpunk.
To sum up: this isn't really groundbreaking at all, but if you're a fan of Splitter or Ice Breaker and you want some more levels, possibly a bunch of really obtuse and particular ones, here they are. They are here. In this game. Enjoy. Or you can wait for goth-punk Splitter or post-apocalyptic Splitter, which are bound to happen eventually.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I found mechanism to be MUCH harder than any of the Icebreaker or Splitter games (and I'm talking about the EASY levels, forget about the hard ones!)
It's not bad. But I had a little problem with
Blue path- level 3
on account of there's no way for me to solve it
I found this game a few days ago. It's fun but lot of the levels are pretty tough--some requiring dumb luck or just a lot of trial and error.
It would be nice if the parts of the scenery that you can cut were more obvious, especially on levels that start moving right away. Once or twice the level was over before I found out 'oh, I can cut that'.
I can't imagine what the red path is like.
Just not fun. Solving even the blue levels is mostly guesswork. Half of the 6 I solved were by randomly making cuts until things just went right, since trying to predict movement was impossible.
Looks OK, sounds nice, but the levels are not consistent enough to be fun for me. Also, there's no real progression - it's just easy, a couple a little harder, REALLY HARD, quit.
Pistol scalpel? I think that's just a fancy looking box cutter...
I enjoyed this more than I did Splitter. Is it the aesthetic? Probably. I never said I wasn't shallow. It's hard, sure, but I suppose you can look at Splitter as something to cut your teeth on before this. I wouldn't have wanted to play this if it had just been "All the same easy Splitter, but with gears!" It's not my "thing", but it was different enough to draw me in.
Frankly, I'm waiting for "Obvious Movie Tie-In Splitter", the sell-out of the family.
I HATE dumb luck games. This is just as much fun as playing a slot machine out in Vegas - only without any chance of winning anything.
Ugh. This was just too hard. The hardest levels required too much timing, or involved too many pieces moving -just right- to feel like I was on the right track, even if I was following the walkthrough.
The overall aesthetic is very nice. And I thought it was a clockwork pistol for the longest time, too.
Can't say I've enjoyed this. It is a really hard game but not in the good way. There isn't much thinking. You usually know what to do and what you want to achieve. But from there is just pure luck as a single pixel adjustments can totally change the outcome ... and I don't like pixel hunting (escape games *wink* *wink*) :)
But still the game has nice graphics.
Terrific game. I've noticed that lots of physics games get unfairly trashed here. I will admit that this game is super tough, but it's also really pretty and I don't think the level solutions rely on "dumb luck" as much as some of you seem to think.
Again with the stupid custom cursors! Those always slow the game down too much to be playable. Otherwise, this would be a really fun game.
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