![]() ![]() The more time you spend with the game, the more you start to recognize patterns to how the puzzles are built. The objective is simple but the methods are abstract. It's more like experimentation in Contraption Maker. Solving these is normally called guesswork or trial and error, but those phrases carry a negative connotation to them. With Contraption Maker, you have all the pieces but you don't know how they fit together. Button on the wall? Up up down down left right left right B A? Once you figure out how, the rest is basically just going through the motions. ![]() You know you need to open that door, but you're just not sure how. Most puzzles in video games are of the missing pieces variety. The good news is that a single purchase of Contraption Maker comes with two copies of the game: one for you, and one for your old sandbox buddy in kindergarten. The game offers easy options to restrict rooms to a certain number of players or to toggle between public and private. Public rooms seem to be rare in the Contraption Maker world, but it's just as well since co-op is so much more fulfilling when you can play with a friend. People usually get a sense of what others are trying to accomplish and slowly merge their pieces of the puzzle to contribute to the final goal. It usually isn't as chaotic as it sounds, and thankfully trolls seem to be relatively uncommon. Public rooms can sometimes turn into the old saying of too many cooks spoiling the broth. If you want to actually get anything done, you'll need to master the art of communication. As many as eight players can join in to help turn ordinary machines into incredible ones. This is a community that takes its contraption making seriously!Ĭontraption Maker's co-op mode is essentially a multiplayer building room with a chat box. You might be surprised to learn that most of the user puzzles are genuinely entertaining. At the time of writing there are just over 550 user stages to check out, ranging from simple to insane to that one that's like a game of billiards. Tinker and build whatever you like, then upload your creation to the community so everyone else can scratch their heads. Everything is drag and drop, from the scenery options to the game board itself. In short, there's quite literally no end to this game, so prepare for some serious puzzle solving.Contraption Maker comes with a puzzle creation mode that's as easy to use as the game is to play. And that's one of the simpler puzzles.Ĭontraption Maker also includes a custom puzzle creator, so once you best the game's 140 official puzzles - which you might never accomplish, to be honest - you can try your luck at an endless number of community-created puzzles. ![]() For example, capturing a mouse in a case might be the end goal, but in order to accomplish it you'll need to launch a ball to scare a hamster, which runs on a treadmill that turns a gear and rotates a band, which turns another gear to power a generator, which turns on a light that focuses through a magnifying glass to burn a rope which drops the cage onto the mouse. There's a huge learning curve and you slowly reveal what each of the dozens of balls, platforms, tubes, plugs, and gadgets actually do, but once you've scaled this mountain you'll spend your time constructing machines to complete a specific task.Įach puzzle has a simple end goal, such as feeding a cat or lighting a bomb, but completing that task often requires an insane amount of planning and experimenting. Like its much older brother, Contraption Maker is a toolbox for puzzle solving. Now, the original team behind The Incredible Machine has evolved the concept with Contraption Maker, just released for OS X. The game spawned several sequels and even briefly found its way to the App Store. In the game, players had to perform simple tasks by building overly complex Rube Goldberg devices and experimenting with how each piece functioned through trial and error. ![]() If you're a seasoned, old-school Mac gamer, there's a good chance you remember a funky puzzle game called The Incredible Machine. ![]()
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