Mashina (PC)
Mashina’s world is a grimy looking place, with the resident Bobots cobbled together from scrap, living in little towns that look like junkyards, and looking out from their islands to a sea of yellow slime… and they couldn’t be more delighted about it. Almost universally chipper and positive about their living situation, the robots love the only world they’ve ever known, and they get along just fine in it, simply wishing to learn more about the junk their world is built on. It’s a charming and friendly setting for a leisurely digging game, Mashina warming your heart again and again with its world that’s cheerier than it appears.
Mashina is the name of the game’s protagonist, one of the few Bobots incapable of speech, only making boops and beeps to talk with the others. Mashina is also perhaps one of the simplest robots in terms of appearance, the game’s use of hand-crafted models and stop-motion surprisingly robust for each character and object you encounter. Mashina’s ball-shaped body isn’t much of an eye-catcher, but finding a new Bobot and noticing the strange bits and bobs attached to them as well as the very simple smiley faces that contrast those intricate designs gives the game its gritty but cute look, and the aesthetic definitely helps with a few bits of how the animation is handled. When Mashina is walking about, her legs clearly don’t have traction on the ground, many character animations have few frames which can make them look appropriately robotic, and some objects don’t cleanly shift to how they’re meant to look from new angles. For the most part, any limitations caused by the stop motion art style feel almost at home in giving the game its own scrappy look and none truly harm the experience, meaning it’s more enjoyable to look around and consider that what you’re seeing was crafted in a real workshop. In fact, the game contains a 35 minute documentary chronicling its creation where you can see some models being created, it hard not to appreciate the tangible feeling of everything that gives the game its unique charm.
Mashina’s digging work is often done in service to others, and a delightful cast of supporting characters is happy to dole out little quests for you over the course of the game. Tungsten might just be a highlight though, the blacksmith who makes more powerful drills for you a big friendly sort who’s always eager to pursue his next idea. His voice in particular breathes a lot of life into him, the voice acting upping the personality of the other Bobots even when some of them only ever say a few lines in total. The game’s creators actually provided most of the voices, but you also have some surprising Youtuber cameos like Vinny Vinesauce and SuperBunnyHop that blend in seamlessly. Whether it’s the delightful southern accent of the little radio who provides you new stations to listen to while digging or the delightful strangeness of Time Challenge Tim who is written like an adrenaline junkie despite having a monotone voice, the robots are good mix of human accents and robotic voices to make them rather memorable. Perhaps only Mawa can start to overstay her welcome, although that’s because she ends up underground with you and calls out your name so often that her otherwise adorable voice start to wear at the nerves.
Mashina will mostly find herself doing favors, the player being sent down into one of a few large mining spaces to usually search for minerals or special items. Starting in a big circular base, you’ll carve out most of your way through the underground, your drilling really as simple as pointing in a direction and digging. You may need to make use of your jetpack to dig through higher areas, but the 2D area is fairly navigable with most of your pathways determined by how you choose to dig and whether or not you can crack through the type of earth ahead of you. Your main find will be sparkly little minerals of various shapes, the player needing to arrange them properly to get the most out of their inventory space before it’s eventually too full so you head back to base to turn them in before setting out again. Mashina does have a good few extras in place to help with your work, such as construction being a useful tool to keep the task manageable. You can set up conveyor belts to carry minerals from mining nodes back to base, you can establish ziplines to serve as quick travel about your tunnels, and you’ll even get more complex machines later on that let you break down and combine minerals into more valuable materials. The gradual rollout goes hand in hand with your own growth, the player able to purchase upgrades on level-up to increase things like movement speed and jetpack fuel or even gain extra help like little digging drones that work alongside you.
Minerals are your main currency, the things you build, Tungsten’s quests, and shops all tied to it, so much of your time will be drilling around hunting for it. A radar that has a few charges before you need to head back to base will tell you where nearby materials are, but oftentimes you can drill in a direction and eventually uncover things, the radar better once you’ve upgraded it enough to find rarer treasures. Decorations like traffic cones, old bottles, and actual flowers can be found and used to decorate the islands or the areas certain characters stand in, some even requesting you brighten up their space however you like. It’s mostly a pleasant extra in the same way the sometimes quirky and rather varied radio stations are, but the digging also remains consistently rewarding because of the little surprises. You can use a telescope to see nearby points of interest, but often as you’re digging around you might suddenly unearth an object you didn’t expect that leads into some new quest line or an increase in the breadth of what your work can go towards. You can even find brief digging aids like dynamite to blow through minerals you might not be able to crack yet or the “disco ball” that lets you tear through nearby ground at speed for a limited time.
Mashina nails the appeal of a digging game, it easy to get swept up in the constantly productive work of finding new minerals, the minerals not too sparse or too abundant, and the quests and areas to dig towards give you many short term goals to work towards between the basic digging work. The game’s performance can be a touch uneven, my prerelease copy, even after an update, would sometimes have the conveyor belts not carry minerals properly, one quest didn’t flag as complete until I reset the game, and trying to exit the game from the main menu caused it to freeze up, but nothing of value was truly lost thanks to frequent enough autosaves. Little gets in the way of the work itself, but you’re also incentivized to head up overground now and again to turn in quests or engage with little activities up above, those nice breather moments helping to pull your headspace away from mineral hunting so it doesn’t get monotonous. Bits of automation and your character growth even mean things get simpler over time so it doesn’t drag, the whole adventure save a few leftover side quests taking me a bit over 10 hours. There are no true dangers or much of a time pressure in Mashina so a leisurely player could spend even more time pursuing their curiosity, the only real direct moments of pressure or impediment perhaps being little machines that fill in spots you dug up before you disable them and Time Challenge Tim’s “races” which really almost feel more like a reminder to set up your fast travel stations as you dig.
THE VERDICT: Mashina is a well built digging game despite its world looking so cobbled together, but that hand-crafted rough look is just a piece of what makes it so delightful. Down underground your digging work is well paced and rewarding with a good deal of surprises and the characters who point you in the direction of your next tasks are a memorable bunch with fun voices and chipper attitudes. You get swept up in their joyous outlook, the junk filled world one filled with simple treasures that are easy to appreciate on top of the nice gradual growth tied to your hunt for valuables across the different digging areas.
And so, I give Mashina for PC…
A GOOD rating. One big appeal of a digging game is seeing what lies below waiting to be unearthed, and while there are valuable finds and strange discoveries, the look of the world and the personalities of the characters also provide great rewards for your continued efforts. Even the simplest side quest will probably put you considerably closer to unlocking a new skill while others like Tungsten’s requests will make you more efficient and flexible, and even though the inventory system deliberately keeps you from heading out drilling for too long, it also grounds you and makes sure you remember to do more than just dig up minerals. Trips between the above ground and your growing tunnels aren’t so frequent they become annoying but they do give your drilling a bit more depth than heading forward and hoping for valuables, the bits of construction to make travel easier for example satisfying to utilize effectively while adding the extra layer of consideration that makes digging more than just a hunt for treasure. Mashina’s sometimes rickety coding does let it down a touch but it’s only gotten cleaner with each update, and the rough parts like limited animations just serve as reminders of the impressive feat that is the fact so much of what you’re seeing was made by hand. It’s hard to lose interest when you’re always a bit of work away from meeting a new potentially delightful character where you’ll want to look them over to figure out how they were made, and knowing the quests they give you will help you be a more efficient Bobot at least in some small way makes it easy to commit to the tasks they hand out.
Mashina doesn’t outgrow its concept, it perhaps easy to ask for more islands with additional digging sites or more to find down underground, but Mashina’s scope, likely limited somewhat by the need to handcraft so much of the world, also keeps its ambitions appropriately in check. You never need to make overcomplicated machinery to manage your digging work, your quests are easily understood and pursued, and most complications like the mucking machines or materials your drill can’t crack just require some elbow grease and time to overcome. It’s a digging game about the inherent joy of the task with the right supporting elements in place to keep it growing so it holds your interest, the player easily able to come to enjoy the world of Mashina just as much as the optimistic and amicable Bobots.