The Automatician Review

A short time ago, I found myself obsessively watching domino videos; there was something intensely satisfying watching a load of small plastic bricks knocking each other down in an intricate pattern, especially when they use small toys and contraptions. These Heath Robinson contraptions - also commonly known as Rube Goldberg machines for all you Americans out there - are definitely my favourite to watch, and I’d love to have the time and patience to set one up one day.

Until that time, I have The Automatician - a puzzle game where all of the solutions are Heath Robinson contraptions. Each puzzle consists of a grid of circles, a start point and an end point. All you need to do is send a signal from the start to the end using the oddly shaped pieces made out of childrens’ toys. Visually, these are really cool but mechanically Automatician boils down to little more than a pipe game. The only gameplay difference between the pieces is their shapes, and there are so few pieces once you’ve seen the animations a couple times they lose the epicness of a Heath Robinson contraption.

You play as Emma, a young girl who has fantasised about being an Automatician since she was very little. The game is scarce on the details of what an Automatician is, but I got the feeling that it was a mix between magician, engineer and alchemist - though the actual gameplay didn’t really reflect any of those themes. You travel to the mansion of the last Automatician and are greeted by weird creatures called Whodos; Sackboy-esque creations which seemingly serve as butlers, companions and test subjects to the occupants of the mansion. These Whodos guide you through a series of puzzles, and some have additional tasks for you to solve. These are really nothing more than short fetch quests, but they serve to break up the monotony of the main focus of the game rather well.

http://www.theautomatician.com/press/the_automatician/images/AutomaticianBlastingCannon.gif

That monotony is really my biggest complaint with the game. Even when the game suggests that the stakes have been raised, I didn’t find the game difficult. I found how it withholds some simple information from me endlessly frustrating. The pieces are marked with interaction points, which need to connect together for the chain to be complete, but the pieces only work in one direction and the game generally does an awful job of telling you what way round that is. Some are obvious, but others are ridiculously confusing and I still - even after seeing the animations play on multiple occasions - don’t understand why the piece has to be that way around.

I also don’t understand why I can’t return pieces I’ve moved to the board back into my inventory. Not every piece given to you is required for a solution, but once a piece is taken out onto the board it’s stuck there. This is a requirement usually because the inventory doesn’t really tell you what a piece looks like, but I found at least one of the maps difficulty came entirely from having pieces in the way.

Other than that, The Automatician is a fun little puzzle game from a student development team. It’s tightly designed for the most part, and I think most of the issues it has can be solved with a slightly better UI. Graphically it has a strong style that suits the game, and while the gameplay doesn’t necessarily fit the story, the narrative is little more than a framework to explain away the confusion of little sack men maintaining Heath Robinson contraptions. The Automatician doesn’t deliver on a fantasy of solving puzzles with the weird and wonderful, but that doesn’t stop it being a fun, short puzzle game.