Automatoys review – complex brilliance made tactile and delightful
No moment in games is quite as special as the instance of the fingerpost. This is a rather precise term I once discovered for that exact point in time where something clicks. You suddenly get it. What was confused and difficult becomes immediate and comprehensible. The airplane blasts out of the clouds and sunlight floods the cabin.
Automatoys reviewDeveloper: Idle FridayPublisher: Idle FridayPlatform: Played on iOSAvailability: Out now on iOS, Android TBA.
Whatever it’s called, I suspect we spend a lot of our lives chasing this moment. A moment that in games is often accompanied by the crunch and twist of a key in a lock, unseen gears moving, unseen parts turning and clicking into place. Welcome, then, to Automatoys, which gives you this moment every few seconds, it seems, without the moment ever seeming cheap or unearned. The instance of the fingerpost? Here is a field of fingerposts, and each one of them matters.
Automatoys lets you lose on a selection of wonderful, complex, improbable machines. They’re little sculptures, really, characterful towers made of chunky plastic – I know the exact plastic, and after a few seconds playing so will you – and the objective is always the same. Put the coin in to release the little ball. Then move the ball from the start point to the exit, wherever start point and exit may be. How do you do this? You do this by understanding what the machine does, which means in these cases, understanding what the machine is doing at that moment.
This is because these machines do a lot of things. You start down low, say, and a magnet swings by. You can attach yourself to the magnet, but what then? Stay on too long and you’re knocked off into the abyss. But maybe you can encourage something to knock you off earlier. Maybe you land near a sort of Archimedes screw. Can you tilt the ground to slide you into that, and to get the screw turning and lifting you higher? Then seesaws? A grabbing hand? The flipper from a pinball table? Who knows.
