This is a bit of a milestone for me because it’s the last game on my Steam account…that I paid for. Sure, it’s not as grand as clearing the backlog completely, but now nobody can say I bought a bunch of Steam games I never played. Now all that’s left are the ones from free promotions (or raffle wins like Steamgifts), so you can look forward to me making posts about the games y’all played two years ago! ☺

• Crazy Maɔhines 3
  

  15 hours playtime

  20 of 41 achievements

This is a physics puzzle game. Most levels feature a Rube Goldberg machine that has certain pieces removed, with the goal being to figure out where each piece goes to make the thing function; once you’re ready, you push the play button at the bottom to see if your setup works. There are a few that deviate from this formula, though, like one that’s exclusively about reflecting laser beams or a few that are about setting up paths so marbles will collide with all the stars. Sometimes, you can hold the mouse over an inventory item to read about what it does, but other times, you only get told its name.

Objects in your inventory snap to a little grid when you place them on the board, but despite this, the game runs into the same problem as other physics puzzle games I’ve played: you can know what the solution is, but still fail because the physics didn’t line up perfectly with your placements. The game makes this obvious early on in level 6: there are three differently colored spheres, and you have to place paths to ensure they fall in the right canisters. After a bit of trial and error, you’ll figure out that the colors correspond to their sizes, and the smaller spheres will fall through paths in your inventory that are colored after the larger spheres. At that point, it doesn’t take long to figure out what setup you need, but then you’ll notice that two of the same size ball can clog a path of their same color, and if the game really doesn’t like your setup, it will sometimes toss the balls into the foreground or background, where they have no hope of making it into the canisters. At that point, it just becomes trial and error to figure out what specific setup makes the game happy.

By the way, not only is that the first time those paths appear, it’s also the last, which brings me to another issue I had: the game often relies on introducing new gimmicks rather than trying to build on what it has. Sure, I’ll admit that adding new gimmicks is often the last recourse that mediocre action games have to add variety due to their obstinate refusal to use level design at all, but for a puzzle game, it’s a death sentence, plain and simple. You’re no longer solving the puzzle because you don’t have enough information to solve it, and often, once you figure out what the new thing does and how it works, the “solution” becomes rather obvious. To use terms I’ve seen other people use about puzzle games, it’s less an “a-ha!” moment and more an “oh, I guess it worked that time” moment. The worst offender in this regard is level 57: it introduces automatically-moving buggies and horizontal steel girders, and you need to push a cart from one side of the screen to the other, over an unstable bridge. This was the only one I had to look up the solution for, and it turn out that if you put the girder over the side of the buggy so that the buggy pushes it while it leans on the buggy, then have two of the buggies push the two girders into each other with the aforementioned setup, the girders will stick to the ground and rotate vertically to hold the bridge up instead of just sliding back over the buggies upon collision. Plus, not only does it require prior knowledge of how game physics (not real physics) work, but as you might have guessed, this mechanic and those buggies never show up in the game again.

For the record, not only does this type of design result in an unfun individual level, it also ruins the experience for the few good levels that are also in the game, like level 67: this one is exclusively about reflecting lasers using weighted blocks, but due to the precedents set by the game, you can never be sure if you can win with what you have or if you need to set at least one of the blocks so that it falls down and rotates into a piece you didn’t have before (you don’t, at least not for that level).

To add insult to injury, the graphics don’t always make everything clear. Sometimes, you’ll need to start the sequence before placing any items down just so you can better see whether that horizontal piece will float or fall, or just so you can see how many moving objects are already on the board. Plus, background and foreground objects can be hard to distinguish from each other; chances are you won’t notice until after you place a piece down and see it flashing yellow, disabling the play button in the process. Sometimes, like with the gears in stage 4 of the Lost Levels, you know what you need to do, but there’s no way to know which particular setup the game expects, so you just have to keep rearranging them until they reach the end without flashing yellow.

Lastly, I should point out that level 6 isn’t the only one with physics idiosyncrasies: it isn’t uncommon for slightly changing the position one thing to have a reproducible effect on the results of a completely unrelated physics object. I think the worst physics bug would be in the fourth marble rail stage: you have three seemingly-equal 90-degree pieces, but if you put the wrong one in the wrong spot, the marble will be launched out of bounds in an unrelated part of the level.

So yeah, I don’t think I’d recommend this one. Sure, there are a few good puzzles here, but it isn’t worth going through all the nonsense the rest of the game has.