Machizzle review: solve a puzzle in VR!

Today I want to talk with you about Machizzle, a VR puzzle game developed by iNFINITE Production (and my friend Jan Horsky). It is being released today, so discover with me how it is, so you can decide if buying it or not!

Machizzle – video + gameplay review!

If you don’t like reading too much text, I’ve made a video with my first impressions on Machizzle, plus my first 15 minutes of gameplay! There I describe to you what the game consists of, what I liked about it and what not, and I show you how you can play it. You can find my video here below:

Otherwise, keep reading for my usual textual review.

Gameplay

Machizzle is a puzzle game based on physics. There is a board in front of you and on the board there are some initial building blocks that may be standard (e.g. a marble cube) or special (e.g. a block that makes the gravity change). These blocks are there to form a path that can let a ball go from its initial position to a final position, where there is a lock. If the ball arrives at the lock, it opens it and you have won the level. The path that there is at the beginning of each level is of course incomplete, and you have at your disposal some building blocks in your inventory that you can use to complete it and make the ball arrive at its destination.

The ball will always start by being some centimeters over the first block and the force it gains falling down thanks to the gravity is the one that you must exploit to make it arrive at the final lock. To make things even more complicated, in almost all levels there are some keys that you have to gather to open the final lock. If the ball doesn’t collect all the keys by rolling over them, the final lock won’t be activated and so even if you reach it, the level will be considered lost.

Just to give you a sense of the dimension of everything, the board is quite little (maybe 80cm x 80cm or something like that) and it is divided into a certain number of cubic logic blocks (e.g. 8 x 8 x 8) inside which you can insert the elements that you have in your inventory. In every level, the board may have a different shape and a different number of blocks, but the overall dimension of the board is of the same order of magnitude across the levels (that is, it never happens that the board becomes 5m long) and the dimension o the basic logic block is always the same (around 10cm).

So basically every level requires you to see the initial configuration, then press the trigger button to see how the ball moves without you touching everything. Most probably, it will fall outside the board or block at some points without managing to arrive at the lock. At that point, you start grabbing the elements from your inventory (that is there next to the board) and physically inserting them into the current setup so that to change how the ball moves when it falls down. When you think you’re done, you can press again the trigger button to test the current configuration. If the ball arrives at the destination, you have won, otherwise, you have to test another possible configuration… and you go on until you have solved the puzzle. When you’ve solved a level, you can go to the next one.

In the beginning, the puzzles are quite simple and just require you to exploit the laws of physics to make the ball go from point A to point B by inserting slopes to make the ball fall in a certain direction or little quads to fill the holes in the path. But the more you will go on, the more the levels will become complicated, especially because there will start being at your disposal some new blocks that bend the laws of physics: portals that teleport the ball, or blocks that change the gravity (from up to down or vice-versa) that will require you to think a lot to understand how you can solve the riddle. These blocks will force you to become more creative because the ball won’t follow just a standard path anymore, but you have to think of how to use these special tools to bend the physics at your will.

Like in all puzzle games, some levels are easy, and some levels are very frustrating. Overall, I think that maybe the game should be rebalanced a bit, because I found the first 20 levels overly simple, and then after the 30th, I started finding every level very difficult because portals and gravity-changing blocks made me go crazy. If you play this game, my advice for you is not trying to play all the levels consecutively, but play some levels every day, so that you don’t spend too much time being frustrated on difficult levels. I have to remind you that anyway frustration is a common component of puzzle games: if a puzzle game isn’t challenging enough, it is boring, so the difficult levels in Machizzle are more than welcome.

In any case, if you find yourself stuck in a level, you can always ask for a “Hint” with a dedicated button. You have a total of 3 hints available for each level. And you don’t have to worry about learning how to play: the game mechanics are very simple, and the first levels are tutorial ones, so they teach you all the buttons and all the mechanics of the game in a very natural and intuitive way.

In total there are 80 levels, for an expected playtime of 10-15 hours according to the developers. I’ve solved the first 35 levels in one hour and a half (a very short time), but considering that the more I went on the more the levels became difficult, I wouldn’t be surprised if my final playtime were close to 10 hours.

Even if you finish the levels, the fun doesn’t stop. In the game, there is a level editor, that is very simple to be used (you just grab the blocks and put them on the board), which lets you create your custom levels and also share them with the community. This means that as long as the community is big enough, there will be an endless flow of new levels. I’ve tried the editor and I love its simplicity, even if at the current stage, I’ve found in it some bugs here and there (some texts were barely readable, it had problems connecting to the servers, etc…).

The last mention must be given to the story of the game campaign: the 80 official levels come with a little story that you can see in some animated comics at the beginning of the game. Honestly, I haven’t understood it very well (I think that the English dubbing may have been better), but it is something like that your dog hurt yourself and so you have entered a lonely house with a spirit inside to ask for help, and if you manage to solve all the riddles, your dog will be saved. In fact, during some of the levels, your character talks with the voice of the spirit. I’m not a big fan of this story, but I appreciate the willing of the developers to give you a purpose, a sense of why you are physically there in VR inside a haunted house solving riddles.

Audio & Graphics

The multimedia elements of Machizzle have the typical quality that you can expect from an indie game. The style is medieval/fantasy and everything from the initial menu to the environment is coherent with that.

I think that the graphical assets are generally good. Thanks to the use of Unreal Engine, the environment has a very good shading quality and the modeling is also quite nice. Again, it’s an indie game, so don’t expect the same details as Half-Life: Alyx… anyway, I think Infinite Production made a good job with the graphics. The only flaw is the font they used throughout the experience that in my opinion is not very readable.

The audio is nice, too, but honestly I have hated the background music. It is always the same, and after a while that you play the game, it becomes very annoying.

Input

You can play Machizzle very easily with your VR controllers: with the middle finger trigger you grab objects, when the index trigger you start the ball, and with the thumbstick, you can rotate the board to see it from various angles so that to evaluate better where to put the next block.

The interface is very intuitive and after just the first levels, that act also as tutorial, you will have learned how to play with it.

Comfort

Machizzle is a game that you play from a static position. You stay there, in front of the board, and you just move objects over it. You can also set the height at which the board stays, and it means that you can also play it by being seated (something that I strongly suggest). The comfort of this game is total, and no one should have any kind of nausea by playing it.

Immersion

Here comes the biggest Achille’s heel of Machizzle: the sense of presence and immersion. Because, honestly speaking, the whole game would be almost the same even if played on a standard PC. The game is very static, and you really had better playing it seated so that you can play it comfortably, otherwise standing seated always in the same position becomes tiring after a while. All the VR interactions happen by just dragging objects on the board and there is no physicality in the whole game. Nor there is anything truly emotional that gets enhanced by the sense of presence. There is no multiplayer, so there are no other players in the same space through which you can interact. So there is nothing to which the use of virtual reality provides true value.

I mean, the game is fine to be played in VR, but I think that the fact that is in virtual reality gives just the advantage of being able to put the various blocks on the board easily with your real hands. The game would be mostly the same if played on a desktop PC with a standard screen and a smart point-and-click mechanic, and in a certain sense, it could also be better regarding the comfort, because VR headsets on the head are uncomfortable in the long run and make the solving of the puzzles more difficult.

This can be a good opportunity for the game studio to make a Desktop-PC porting of the game, being able to target a wider audience of the gaming market.

Final impressions

I personally like puzzle games, and I think that Machizzle is a good puzzle game. It has a good graphic and offers an easy user experience. The first levels make the user comfortable, and then things become more challenging, that is what the typical players of puzzle games want to happen. I was very intrigued by some of its levels, especially because playing a puzzle that exploits all 3 dimensions is very interesting. Maybe I would tune a bit the level design to make the progression of the difficulty of the levels more linear, but apart from this, it’s great. I also appreciated the fact that there is a level editor that can not only increase the replayability of the game but also create a community around it.

The big problem of this game is that in my opinion, it doesn’t really exploit the power of virtual reality, because it is very static and it is not physical nor emotional. This can be taken by the developer as an opportunity to develop a PC version of the game, and so increase its user base.

In the end, I’ve found that Machizzle is a nice puzzle game. If you want to buy it, you can find it on Steam: it is compatible with all the most famous VR hardware. Have fun with it!

(Header Image by iNFINITE Production)