Unmechanical Extended Review | Gaming Nexus

GN:
I don’t want to live in whatever nightmare universe Unmechanical takes place in. 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. 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. Unfortunately, to me, it happened some uncountable number of years before the events in Unmechanical. In the intervening time, some catastrophe has befallen society and broken the chain of forward progress. Time has fallen backwards. Our triumphant conscious machines have become little more than barely functional blobs held aloft with cobbled together parts. They’re surrounded by the ruins of technology they barely understand. In some cases, it’s broken. In others it’s dangerous. Their lives, such as they are, have become meaningless and dreary. 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. 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’re just gone. It’s very different if you’re the one who has been swallowed. You are deposited into an environment filled with obstacles you must bypass using your wits and simple energy magnet.