Contraption Maker (2014)

This is a modern remake of The Incredible Machine (TIM) games, a puzzler where you create contraptions to accomplish arbitrary tasks. In each level, there's a bunch of preset objects, and you're given a pool of objects you have to place to complete the objective. You might own Bad Rats on Steam - TIM is the good version of that. When I was younger, I played the The Return of the Incredible Machine: Contraptions, and even played through it again as an adult (I found myself stumped at 20 on puzzles I solved when I was 10...). This game, though, somehow loses the sparkle of the originals. The games are ostensibly the same: all of the parts available in the originals are available here, so you can effectively port the old levels to CM and play them in the new engine. So what went wrong? I mentioned before that some of the old puzzles still stump me - that's not the case in Contraption Maker, I breezed through the hardest puzzles. Solving things in CM seem much more flexible than in TIM, since some things are more lenient. For example, the physics are floatier, allowing you to make some unlikely bounces and completely skip major parts of the intended solution. In addition, the interface is worse. In TIM, every object was designed to fit neatly in its rectangular collision box, which is logical for this game. In CM, the collision boxes are still there, but the models that fill them often bulge out or are rounded, which makes things harder to see. Maybe a nitpick, but I think it takes a lot away from readability. Or I just know the old stuff too well.

I was excited to see this, but you're better off playing the originals, available on GOG.