Unmechanical Demo

Puzzle games have the liberty to come up with all sorts of wild ideas, as long as they can keep the players interested and provide you with a memorable experience. The challenge is important as well, because the puzzles shouldn’t be too difficult to solve and cause frustration, but not too easy either, to avoid boring the players with obvious answers that require no effort.

Unmechanical is not something unheard of and it certainly does not try to turn the world upside down with its ideas. However, it is cute enough to catch you in its spell and it comes pretty close to how a puzzle game should look and feel like in order to be good. Hence, regardless of how simple it might seem at a first glance, things get pretty hairy once you get into it.

To start off with, you play the role of a flying robot with a propeller on your head to help you move around. In fact, the head is actually your entire body, because the rest seems to have disappeared along the way. Thus, the main goal is to solve a variety of puzzles and explore a fascinating world, using nothing but your propeller and the ingenious physics engine to do so.

Most of the riddles ask you to make use of the realistic physics engine in order to unlock the way further. This can be achieved by moving items around, placing them in certain spots, or even combining them in various ways to obtain the answer. Intuition can come in handy most of the time, because the puzzles are not exactly complicated, even if they require a bit of thinking to get right.

The art style used to portray the main character and the environments is definitely special and well-chosen, because it makes the game memorable. Although it’s a bit reminiscent of Machinarium, there’s plenty of originality as well, not to mention quite a lot of weird things you might stumble into. The same goes for the music, even if it is a tad too repetitive at times.

Since some of the puzzles are time-based, you can go back and redo them as many times as you like, in case you want to score better. A lot of achievements are available as well, some of which are quite challenging to get, although not at all impossible and definitely fun to try.