Have you ever started playing a game as a gremlin and looked at almost every interactable and wished you could eat it? WELL, do I have good news for you. If you can pick it up in Mother Machine, you can eat it, and that may be my favorite part of the game, trying to dodge small enemies attacks and grab them to gobble them up, or finding a glow slug on the ceiling and farting my way up to grab it, so I too can glow. Mother Machine is good fun with friends, and I definitely recommend trying to get a full party (up to 4). The more the better!
Mother Machine offers a lot of fun platforming and traversal mechanics. Depending on the mutation you choose before starting a level, you can drastically change how you play the level. Do you get hurt a lot? Bring a healing mutation, want to platform more easily, bring a movement mutation. Enemies giving you a hard time? There are plenty of attack mutations. The only drawback is you can only choose one mutation for a run, so depending on the level procedural generation and what particular mode you pick, hope you pick the best mutation. It is easier when you can coordinate with teammates, for someone to bring a heal and others to bring other focused role perks to conquer and divide. While the traversal is fun and generally interesting and rewarding for exploring, I find the combat to be frustrating at some points. Probably because I usually only play with two players and we generally pick heal/movement mutation combos. We’ve gotten into a few situations that seemed futile, and have to expend quite a few lives. It’s rare when that has happened and probably just part of the procedural generation. There are other types of areas (again probably part of the procedural generation or maybe even just some aspect we haven’t figured out otherwise) where we HAVE to take damage to proceed, which is why we run the heal mutation. Most of the time we throw whatever we can carry and break spikes or crystals we can’t get to, but occasionally we find ourselves in situations where we just can’t find anything. Again it’s rare, but worth noting. While you can only bring one mutation into a run there are upgrade stations where you get a selection of three random perks to upgrade, for the cost of ten crystal shards, if you choose to. Some of my favorites include the double crystals, health from eating, and stomach regeneration. It would be nice if playing alone or with two players you could bring in more than one mutation, but I can see why the developers made the decision to only allow one. Character creation is also great! I love the options that are there, but would love to have more! There are two parts of the customization that we can’t select, so hoping that’s part of future content. Would also love more colors like the last two options. It’s great to see what everyone chooses to unlock to customize their personal gremlin. We are always a colorful, rowdy, chaotic bunch!
A real highlight of Mother Machine is the visual beauty of the game. I love the lighting while moving through the caves, the subtle glow of the glow slugs or other tasty snacks that affect the lighting in the area. It’s easy to find the crystal shards needed, from their pink glow as well, adding nice ambient light throughout the traversal of the caves. The graphics and models really fit each other and immerse you into the alien world. Everything meshes well and really flows together. I love the little details when you walk into ‘goop’ and it gets on the gremlin bodies or you eat a particular ‘juicy’ fruit or bug and it covers your face. Really nice touches to the game and the visuals are a very notable part of the game.
When we get to the sounds for Mother Machine, I’m somewhat torn. While I felt the monsters and gremlins all had immersive sounds that tied into the visuals well, there was a rather lacking of background music. When I play games in my off time, many times I turn the background music pretty low or off as a personal choice. For this review I actually went to check the settings because I thought I had turned it off, but was surprised to find, there just wasn’t any at the point I was at. My personal preference unfortunately is not the common majority and I felt I had to keep the sound score at a 3 due to the lack of background music. The sounds are clean and clear when they are there, and the game doesn’t lack audio. It was a weird one to score personally. I did enjoy the voice acting for Mother and of course our little gremlin sounds and squishes.
I have really had a lot of fun with Mother Machine, and will definitely continue to dive into the caves of the Ashen Spores while burping, farting and eating everything in sight. I look forward to any update that comes along as well, especially for cosmetics (I’m a sucker for those). The multiple modes and procedural generation really make each mission feel unique and fresh with each play through. Definitely worth checking out!
