All the while you’ll be negotiating a wide variety of environmental and auditory puzzles. Occasionally you’ll venture back outside only to be presented with horribly alien vistas. So, you’ve been ripped from your sad surface life and cast into this strange underground world where you’re watched by who knows what and forced to cast you imaging sensors onto a disturbing amalgam of the technological, biological, and mineralogical. If all of this is not sad enough to put you off entirely, then you’re in for a fairly delightful gaming experience. It’s already out on many other platforms, but it’s making its console debut with this year’s Unmechanical Extended that features modern graphics and a bonus episode that takes the horrible scenario I painted for you earlier in this review and adds the responsibility of helping your own offspring navigate the dark and scary Unmechanical underworld. Unmechanical started life several years ago as a student project. It’s robo-Alice in techno-nightmareland and we’re all the way down the robot hole. You are deposited into an environment filled with obstacles you must bypass using your wits and simple energy magnet.
It’s very different if you’re the one who has been swallowed. If that’s not bad enough, occasionally the surface opens up and swallows a son or daughter, a parent, a best friend and you have no recourse. They flit around the surface of their homeworld in small family units driven by some half-forgotten memory of a past where something other than survival was important. Their lives, such as they are, have become meaningless and dreary. They’re surrounded by the ruins of technology they barely understand. Our triumphant conscious machines have become little more than barely functional blobs held aloft with cobbled together parts. In the intervening time, some catastrophe has befallen society and broken the chain of forward progress. Unfortunately, to me, it happened some uncountable number of years before the events in Unmechanical. In my attempt to seek meaning in the game’s events or, at the very least, fit the setting and circumstances into some nice neat box that reflects 21st century America’s social, political, and technological values, I am imagining a future where humans have transferred their all consciousness into machines. It’s a dark and scary place filled with unknowable hazards, beings with completely opaque motivations, and it exists in some technological stone age that I find profoundly disturbing. I don’t want to live in whatever nightmare universe Unmechanical takes place in.
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