Unmechanical: Extended (Xbox One)
Unmechanical: Extended is a game where you can only do two things. 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. 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.
As 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. 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. 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. 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. There are more puzzle types to be found that even find ways to push the limits of what simple object movement can achieve. One rather intricate puzzle involves moving around little orbs and turning mirrors to guide the path of laser beams to their proper destinations, the puzzle having many moving parts that can be altered so you can’t just bumble your way into a solution easily. It’s the thought that goes into solving these challenges that make them more than just the results of your control methods.
One reason Unmechanical: Extended manages to keep its strength throughout the whole of its experience is that it doesn’t repeat puzzle concepts very often. You may be using things from previous puzzles again, but it’s to solve new things like time-sensitive challenges or ones that make clever use of levers. Pulling a lever back and forth can lead to your abilities extending a bit further, able to do something that grabbing wouldn’t have been precise enough for otherwise. One puzzle has you guiding the aerial path of floating orb around dangerous pylons, but while it is repeated a few times, it’s done in quick succession as part of a greater puzzle solving effort making it less like repetition and more about tinkering with one idea to a suitably enjoyable limit. Once you’re done with that, you move onto the next section of the underground world and find something new to interact with… or some clever reincorporation. Although you are making forward progress, the area design can spit you out near an old area where something from before might find new usefulness. Unmechanical: Extended, despite the subtitle, is on the whole fairly short, but there’s still enough time spent solving puzzles that it’s nifty to see something return that had the proper time to slip from your current thoughts as you’re working on the latest obstacle. The overall game length is probably why each puzzle feels quite fresh as well, since there’s no needless fat on this little package.
As for the story, Unmechanical: Extended’s wordless nature can make it a bit hard to glean. You begin as a little robot flying around near what might be a city for living robots, but something underground pulls you down into it, the subterranean facility apparently processing many similar robots for unknown purposes. You manage to get free of the mechanisms before anything more can happen to you, and from there, the only goal is really to make your way back to the surface. While you see some interesting sights along the way, there’s not much active storytelling, just interesting background actions and characters to give you a vague idea what’s going on. It didn’t feel like it needed to come out and totally explain itself, but it does leave quite a few mysteries hanging, even when you play this extended version’s extra story. For the second tale told, you are now a different robot flying around a forest when you and your friend are both captured, the goal now being to get you both out safely. The strong and original puzzle design continues here, your companion sometimes getting involved as well, but there isn’t really anything new to contribute to understanding what is truly going on underground.
Much of what makes Unmechanical: Extended enjoyable is in the laser focus on puzzle design, but despite being an excellent example of making something work within its means, those means are also what keep your enjoyment of it simple. It puts out a nice concise batch of challenges to overcome that require some clever thinking to overcome, managing to remain intuitive despite being presented without words or other explanation. There is a hint system though despite that, the little robot having a thought bubble appear that can give you tiny visual representations of what you might want to do, although it doesn’t always update to match whatever part of a lengthy puzzle you might be working with. However, by limiting your options for interaction, getting stumped is less a question of what to do than how to do it, with more careful consideration of the puzzle’s parts encouraged by keeping the mechanics of the objects and your interaction with them straightforward. It’s generally a smooth experience with some interesting visual design to back it up, and while I am praising it for making its simplicity work so well, it still feels like its zenith is also quite low as a result. Freedom of movement and simple controls allows the puzzles to focus on the logic and orientation of objects rather than your character’s capabilities, but this means it can’t quite reach the heights of satisfaction that solving a puzzle with many variables or complex options hits.
THE VERDICT: Unmechanical: Extended does an incredible job of making the main robot’s simple abilities of flight and grabbing things with its tractor beam a good fit for a variety of challenging puzzles, but the same limitations that make it so intuitive and impressive mean that you can never really engage with the title on a deeper level. The world looks nice but holds onto its secrets so it doesn’t motivate you much story-wise, but the concise package that is this game, even in its extended form, doesn’t waste your time and keeps giving you new and interesting puzzle designs throughout. Unmechanical: Extended is both a game that overcomes it basic design by being surprisingly creative and inventive but lacks the complexity to make its puzzle-solving deeply satisfying.
And so, I give Unmechanical: Extended for Xbox One…
A GOOD rating. To use an art comparison, Unmechanical: Extended is like a detailed sketch when compared to an intricate mural. There is craftsmanship here and creativity, but like a sketch, it lacks the finer details and color that could help to deepen someone’s appreciation of the work. There are merits to both sketches and murals and both can be beautiful, so there’s not really anything wrong with Unmechanical: Extended going for its simple route and succeeding at it very well. It seems like a game that is aiming to be good rather than great or fantastic, and that’s okay, as it does nestle in quite well into a Good rating. The puzzles are interesting and fun to solve, and in some ways, that’s all you ask for in a puzzle game, with everything else on top being the gravy that has the potential elevate them to greatness.
Unmechanical: Extended didn’t need to be more. It sets out with a game plan and achieves it, delivering on a quick puzzle game experience that manages to make it’s simple controls work for challenging puzzles. A deeper experience with more mechanics or a clearer story could make it more engaging to be sure, but there’s not much wrong with what we were given. Unmechanical: Extended can be enjoyed quite easily, and having a nice little experience like this one isn’t a bad thing at all.