Machina‘s unique art style sparked off a trip down the dusty streets of memory lane. Though I struggled to really place the feeling. On the one hand, it put me in mind of old school cartoons I watched as a kid. Things like The Clangers or the Morph segments from Art Attack. On the other, the deliberate scrappiness and off the wall humour makes me think of old flash cartoons. It’s charming stuff.
Machina coasts through on that charm. If the ‘making of’ video proves anything, it’s that a lot of love went into the development. The aim was relentless positivity. It pulls that off, for sure. A smile was never far from my lips. Though, while scrappiness works well for the art style, the question is: does it work well for the gameplay? Machina‘s dedication to relaxation is admirable, but it might be a little too relaxed.
Diggy Diggy Hole
At first glance, Machina looks like it might be quite depressing. We’re very clearly digging through a post-apocalyptic world, after all. There’s dangerous, green slime everywhere. You don’t use traffic cones as house decorations unless something has gone very wrong with the world. But once you start digging into, no pun intended, you find it’s a lot more positive than that. Machina, an egg-like robot, lives with her robot friends on an island in the middle of a bunch of green goo. They’re happy there, and they all like each other. It’s very ‘children’s cartoon’ and is honestly quite refreshing.
Once you’ve slipped into Machina‘s shoes, you’ll find your world split into two halves: the overworld and the underworld. The overworld is done in an over-the-shoulder 3D perspective, and is based around chatting with the residents and picking up side quests. The other characters are pleasant enough. A radio-esque character wants you to find radio stations for her, so she can sing. A big metal fella is obsessed with drills. It’s pleasant, but somewhat limited in what you can do. Outside of brief chats, all you can do is plonk down decorations. It’s lacking a bit in staying power.
The underground has more longevity to it. This is where all the digging happens. Machina‘s core loop is about digging through the earth to find minerals, which you then grind up to spend on better drills and special technology, like ziplines. The minerals come in different shapes and you have a limited inventory to slot them into, turning digging into a series of little puzzles. It’s quite relaxing – there are no enemies or challenges beyond the inventory. So you can peacefully dig until your inventory is full, without worrying about losing it.
Just Chillin’
There’s a build system in place too. As you dig, you’ll uncover big deposits of minerals, which you need to plonk a miner on top of. This will just spit out singular minerals. They need to be deposited in the right machine before you can spend them, so you can build a system of conveyor belts to move them to where they need to go. It’s quite basic, but it does the trick. As you progress and improve your drill, you’ll scout more of the biome and eventually move on to other islands in the overworld, which require stronger drills but reward you with rarer materials.
On the surface, it’s a pleasant loop. The ‘making of’ video makes a point of mentioning that if a game mechanic was at all stressful for the player, it wasn’t included. This seems to have gone a bit too far, though, as a lot of Machina feels, for lack of a better word, robotic. For one, rock where minerals are hiding looks identical to the surrounding rock. You have to use a limited-use radar to find them. So there’s no real feeling of discovery, you just sort of dig everywhere like a hyperactive earthworm. The only ‘challenge’ of Machina is meeting the mineral quota for the next drill level, so the late game becomes a slog of digging everywhere looking for materials.
There are moments of levity. When you find a new character, there’s a charming stop-motion cutscene introducing them. It’s cute. Unfortunately, I can’t help but feel the delightful graphics are setting a bar that the gameplay can’t meet. All the side quests are either basic fetch quests, or just an elongated tutorial for a new build item. While new minerals are introduced, they are essentially just new currency and aren’t dug up in interesting ways. So ‘stress free’ risks turning into ‘monotonous’ as we just dig in random directions until our mineral number is high enough.
Machina – A Bit Too Relaxed
There’s some mechanical clunkiness here too. Machina had a tendency to freeze up after an hour or two. Sometimes because I had alt-tabbed, other times because it just felt like it. There’s some slight control clunkiness too. Machina uses a jetpack while underground, which is great when you want to get somewhere distant, but if you just want to adjust yourself, it can be quite awkward. Machina is also rather short for this sort of genre, clocking in at less than seven hours for the main story.
I think there was scope to add a bit more flavour to the underground. Some intriguing caverns to explore, or more robust side quests to find. That said, Machina might have been restricted by its own selling point: the graphics. Making new models for every new character and object in the world means that adding more things is going to stretch out the budget and timeline. Still, I do very much love the stop-motion aesthetic. It does a lot to help Machina stand out, even if the gameplay is a little threadbare.
