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A Pleasant, Brisk Steampunk Adventure - Gear Enigmas Review

7K View2022-09-07

While it’s been dabbled with in games like Dishonored and BioShock Infinite, the steampunk aesthetic has been surprisingly underutilized in the world of games. Perhaps that’s partially due to some of the appeal of this visual style being its detailed nature. Steampunk blends the traditional fantasy style with Victorian-era industrial vibes. What that means in practice is lots of gears, pipes, levers, buttons, pulleys, and other tiny parts and pieces that can all make up an artist’s nightmare.

It is a great credit, then, to developer HunDong Studio that it has fearlessly taken on the steampunk mantle and delivered on it in a lovely fashion. Gear Enigmas is a gorgeously animated adventure game with a warm, good-hearted story and a bunch of brain-teasing puzzles.

The game sets you into the shoes of Carl, an up-and-coming machinist in a world that heavily depends on nuts-and-bolts machines. Carl has a prowess with these complex apparatuses that allows him to pull apart and repair things smoothly. Luckily, he’s taken a break from his machinist training and returned home just in time, as his mother and his blind sister, Liv, are in need of help. As the adventure progresses, Carl (and the player) will uncover more information about this strange world, as well as secrets related to Carl’s dead father and the genius machinist grandfather who seemingly abandoned the family.

Before you can get to digging into all that drama, though, you’ll need to start solving puzzles around the house. You may not expect your family’s home to be full of locked doors, keypads, and devices that require interpreting riddles to get through, but then your family’s home probably wasn’t built by a mad genius machinist. From delivering cookies to Liz to feeding the family dog, Anubis, to just unlocking the doors to the basement or the back yard, Carl isn’t able to do much without stumbling across a logic puzzle of one sort or another.

In terms of content, these puzzles vary greatly. Sometimes it’s as simple as finding a key that matches the symbol on the locked cabinet drawer you’re attempting to open. Other times, you’ll need to play little minigames, shifting chess pieces around on a game board, or swapping around Pipe Dream-style pathways until you’ve cleared a route for electricity to get to multiple fuses. Though they’re sort of goofy and intellectually questionable when you stop to think about them—why would this brilliant machinist make the lock to his secret safe match the number of color-coded books on his bookshelf?—I at least found these puzzles mostly solvable without needing to beg for hints too often.

Thankfully for those few moments where I did need help, Gear Enigmas includes a built-in hint system. Players are given a small number of hints at the start, as well as a bulk of thirty-five hints if you purchase the paid story chapter. Beyond that, you can purchase more hints at a rate of $1.99 for ten and $29.99 for three hundred, or you can earn a free hint by watching an ad. For what it’s worth, the starting hints plus those included in the paid chapter bundle were more than enough to last me through the end of the game, so I recommend going that route if you plan to stick with it to the end.

You’ll also want that paid bundle if you plan to stick around for long. The initial free chapter of Gear Enigmas is only about an hour or two in length, depending on how long it takes you to solve the puzzles and how much time you spend clicking around on the handful of environments in Carl’s home. As of the time of writing, the extra chapter bundle is on sale for $6.99 and adds approximately three to four more hours of content, continuing the story and introducing some surprising gameplay twists, such as a strange top-down maze segment.

Though pondering over puzzles takes up most of Gear Enigmas’s playtime, the real draw of the game is its lovely cartoon visuals, which match the gentle, engaging story and characters. Even with its short running time, I still found myself drawn into Carl’s tale, anxious for Liz’s well-being, and laughing at the antics of Anubis and the family’s aptly named cat, Sphinx. Each room you visit in the game is beautiful and detailed as well. In fact, my only issue was that they’re so detailed that I often had trouble discerning which items I could actually interact with and what was just background dressing.

If you find yourself drawn in by this story and these friendly characters, like I was, I’ll give one tiny warning: Gear Enigmas is a decidedly unfinished tales. This game does a lot of light world-building while introducing these core personalities, but it feels like things are just barely getting started by the end. One of the collectibles in the game has description text that mentions that HunDong Games is currently working on a follow-up titled Gear Enigmas: Aqua City. I’ll certainly be looking forward to checking that out; I just hope it’s a more complete story by that point.

Even in its half-finished state, though, it’s hard to be too upset at Gear Enigmas. Between the agreeable cast, the stylish visuals, and the engaging puzzles, there’s just very little to hate here. Even the monetization is perfectly reasonable. Gear Enigmas is about as charming and cheerful as games come, so unless you really hate steampunk or adventure games, it’s worth taking on the role of a machinist for a few hours and getting lost in this imaginative world.

SCORE: 4 STARS OUT OF 5

PLAY IF YOU LIKE:

• Layton Brothers Mystery Room. Level-5’s Professor Layton franchise shares a similar art style and a lightly steampunk aesthetic. Its puzzles tend more towards the pure logic side compared to Gear Enigmas, but it also has a very pleasant atmosphere. If you dig Layton, you’ll probably dig Gear Enigmas.

• This dude’s fashion sense. ’Nuff said.

💬 Have you tried out Gear Enigmas? Let me know what you think in the comments. And if not, tell me if the steampunk aesthetic appeals to you and why or why not. Leave a comment, and I’ll be sure to reply!

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