UNMECHANICAL EXTENDED PSN FREE
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. 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. The overall game length is probably why each puzzle feels quite fresh as well, since there’s no needless fat on this little package.Īs for the story, Unmechanical: Extended’s wordless nature can make it a bit hard to glean. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
It’s the thought that goes into solving these challenges that make them more than just the results of your control methods. 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. There are more puzzle types to be found that even find ways to push the limits of what simple object movement can achieve. 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. 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. 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.
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.Īs 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. 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. Unmechanical: Extended is a game where you can only do two things.