Like a true 100 year old hero Link, trying to face one of the guardians in Breath of the Wild, players face the Mechanical Beast. This beast consists of multiple chambers that together form a puzzle that players must escape. Do you know how to face the beast?
Background
You may know Side Room Games because of their commercial and professional prints of solo games that have their origins in the print and play scene. For example, Side Room Games has previously published Black Sonata, Maquis and Orchard. Three fantastic and unique solo games with distinctive themes for the solo players among us. Mechanical Beast can be done with multiple players, but the solo variant is probably the best way to experience this game and a big advantage, it plays the same regardless of the amount of players.
Players try to escape the titular mechanical beast in Mechanical Beast. The beast consists of several rooms that players must discover while searching for the exit. These rooms are represented by square tiles that slowly form a tableau on the table. Some of these rooms contain doors that may close irreversibly. Some rooms contain people who need to be rescued. And finally, some rooms contain gears that let players move, slide and rotate the rooms to puzzle their way to the exit.
Setup and gameplay
At the beginning of the game you create draw piles with the different tiles (rooms). Some of these tiles need to be shuffled through some part of the pile. A holder makes it easy to keep the large draw pile in place.
The entrance is placed in the center of the table and each player places a meeple in his color. In addition, a joint robot is also placed. Hopefully no cases of Bishop from Alien or HAL from 2001 – A Space Odyssey.
Each turn you can move (your own meeple or the joint robot) across all discovered tiles as long as there is an entrance and additionally do an action. You can place a new tile and move to it. Some tiles contain people and then you need to place a meeple. Some tiles have other effects.
You can also activate the gear of your room during your turn instead of exploring (if this room has a gear). There are different gears with different effects, but gears allow rooms to rotate, slide, switch, etc. This changes the mechanical beast and potentially unlocks new paths to escape.
At some point, you activate the Mechanical Beast’s kill switch by discovering a specific room. Now you need to escape as quickly as possible, because every time someone leaves an (otherwise) empty room, this room collapses. The beast succumbs and the chances of escape become smaller. Will you manage to escape in time? You need to escape with all the players and preferably also with the very expensive robot. You also have to rescue all the people in the room.
Verdict
Mechanical Beast is an interesting puzzle with a brain-cracking mechanism that requires a lot of spatial insight. The effects of the gears are interesting, but rather finicky because you have to rotate, move the tiles inside the beast, etc. The tiles are smaller and because of this you are sometimes fiddling a bit with grabbing the tiles and making sure you don’t knock over the various parts. I therefore recommend that players perhaps leave some space between the tiles.
The second half of the game (after the kill switch is discovered) is a challenging race against the clock. Relentless making you eager to endure the challenge. If you want the game to be even more challenging, there are even multiple difficulty levels.
