Talkin' 'Bout Tiny Games

Contraption: a Video Game Playlist

Video Game Playlists are a new style of game recommendation I’m experimenting with – in a similar yet more purposeful fashion to my double feature of NUTS and Alba: a Wildlife Adventure, a playlist will feature recommendations of some games I think complement each other well played consecutively and/or concurrently based on intersections of aesthetic, mechanics, genre, subject matter, and theme. Each playlist will start with a rundown of the games as a set, and then get into each’s individual quirks. With that out of the way, here’s the very first playlist, featuring two games in an oddly specific genre I wish there were more examples of.

The Playlist

Tactile and fiddly, these two games are based around the joy of having a some sort of contraption to mess about with in your hands. Featuring strong sound design that makes interaction pop, vibrant, playful aesthetics, and gameplay that centers discovery, the two games take the idea of a puzzle box and run with it in their own unique directions. GNOG has a fantastical and sometimes silly spin with themed lightly-narrative dioramas, while Automatoys works like a 12 set of interactive steel ball labyrinths that wouldn’t be too out of place in the real world.

GNOG

First off, GNOG is an adventure game (fight me over that assessment!) centered around exploring what are essentially exceptionally fanciful lunchbox dioramas in order to forward their narratives. Oh, also, each diorama is a head, and when you complete what you need to do, they sing. Surreal. They all have various themes – one is based around finding treasure deep in the sea using a submarine, another is themed around a candy shop. The aesthetic is vibrant, though often employing neon hues in order to underpin the weird dimensions each box exists in. In that way, it’s more like what toys looked like in one’s imagination as a child.

Like any good game based around recreating the tactility of physical objects, the sound design is intimate and bountiful – outside of the interactive mechanisms, a good lot of other things you can mouse over to make pleasant sounds, like shaking a rain stick. Admittedly, this can make figuring out which parts are actually important for progressing – GNOG, like many games,can sometimes fall into the difficulties of any game based around nonverbal communication. But it’s mostly sublimated by the simple joy of poking and prodding until you figure out what comes next.

Specifications

• Mac, Windows
• $9.99 USD
• ~2 hours

Automatoys

Though also puzzlebox-like and accompanied by a colorful aesthetic, Automatoys takes a kinetic spin, in the style of those spherical metal ball mazes you might have seen in a toy store somewhere. You’re presented with a contraption of mechanisms and automated parts, a happy little ball, and a single task: get it to the goal. Your method of doing this is via tapping (and sometimes touching-and-holding) the screen, which affects every mechanism in the level. Pegs jump, mazes tilt, hammers cock, the relative elevation of a segmented zig-zag path switches – simple. In terms of design, brilliantly so, in terms of gameplay, not a chance after the first few levels have eased you into the gist. For one, since there’s no instruction whatsoever as to how any of the mechanisms work, and you’ve got your eyes on the ball, you’ll usually find out what one does just as you’re approaching it – though you can always approximate a guess – many of the mechanism designs are things in real life, like mazes, or are iterated further in later levels, so you’re rarely completely in the dark. One can, of course, experiment with all the mechanisms before inserting the coin to drop the ball, but aside from ruining the delight in high-pressure discovery, it’s only half the picture without something moving through the level, and as things progress there are a great more things to memorize.

If you cock it up, your ball might be gently rolled back to an earlier part of the level, or it might fall off of the level entirely, obliging you to start from the beginning – though, no worries, your number of tries is infinite. But failure is never punishing or frustrating, partly because when you fail you can try again immediately, and mostly because it never stops being absolutely hilarious how much you can screw up in a game where the only mode of interaction is ‘tap the screen’. It keeps up the playful atmosphere well. And you will cock it up, because though the game has a cute, friendly aesthetic, and is marked as casual, that doesn’t mean it’s not challenging. In level 5, in the middle of fare following the lead of the four levels before is a section where you have to shoot the ball into a hole in plastic tube right when the bottom part of a spinning corkscrew passes by, and it is not easy. There’s a sharp upward incline to the shooting ramp, so you have to release the shot in advance, and the only real clue as to when the corkscrew path is coming around is seeing it around the bend, and by then it’s too late, so the way you time it is by feeling, by instinct, when enough time has passed. Having 100% completed Automatoys, I still fail this shot multiple times when replaying. Playing the first time, however, this is a message from the game: haha, okay, time to stop fucking around.

It’s not a difficulty spike, but after this point, you do have to be a lot more active when playing the game – there are easier ways to fail if you grow complacent, mechanisms and automation become more fine-grained, more intertwined. Often, in addition to having to mentally re-assign what tapping the screen does from section-to-section, what was needed in the preceding the section (tapping the screen, not tapping the screen) is what will fuck you up in the section you’re rolling into. As you get further and further into the game, going through a level becomes more and more of a mental-finger fumble, even when you’ve replayed a level several times.

Because, oh yeah, this game is so very replayable. It’s got a star system: one star for completing a level, two stars for completing it under a brisk timeframe, three stars for completing it under one even more stringent than that. Keeping with the tactile stylings, the timer is built onto the automatoy, too, and it’ll click once you’ve run out of time for a three or two star rating. But that’s only a fraction of the picture. Because while I did put in the work to get a three star rating for every level (except for #7, which, I realize I must have, but I only remembering failing to get above two stars many, many times), I have completed every level at least four or five times minimum simply for the fun of completing them. Replaying a level you know how to run (especially once you’ve gotten good enough to get three stars) feels like an interactive version of one of those ‘so satisfying’ videos that go viral. There were a great many times I procrastinated on writing this issue specifically to go play the game, or where my writing was cut short for the same.

This satisfaction is definitely helped by the game’s sound design, obviously. The rest of the game’s aesthetic, too. The matte-textured, vaguely* Monument Valley-inspired aesthetic in video games is getting pretty oversaturated in a certain stripe of indie game, but here it’s perfect, calling to mind a specific style of colorful plastic. And those colors, aside from (generally) being very full and eye-pleasing, serve a function, too. The main color is the static body of the level, and the two accent colors delineate the controllable mechanisms and the cycling automated parts.

*I say vaguely because the twice-mentioned comparison feels pretty spurious outside of Monument Valley being a famous indie game to compare to for the sake of prestige and/or because nobody’s played anything else that could be relevant.

(Also, it shouldn’t require spotlighting, but it’s one of the only mobile games I’ve seen that does in-app purchases ethically. It can be downloaded for free, which gives you the first three levels to play, and then you pay $2.99 to unlock the full game. How shockingly straightforward and non-insidious is that.)

It’s easy to say with most of the year behind me that Automatoys is was one of the best games I played this year, if not the best, but it is so good, I would’ve had the confidence to say that in January. It’s a game that won me over by being something both incredibly up my alley, and completely out of my way.

Specifications

• iOS, Android
• Free - $2.99 USD
• ~1.5 hours
  

Sum Specifications

• Mac/Windows & iOS/Android
• $9.99 USD - $12.98 USD
• ~3.5 hrs