As my longtime readers know, I'm a pitiful target for weird little game guys. I'm currently trying to figure out what the unnamed Master Machine in studio Maschinen-Mensch's upcoming co-op platformer The Curious Expedition is referring to. But if it's referring to the parental bonding that the game calls me with “chaos gremlins,” I'm way ahead of you.
Ah, the press release is talking! I probably should have read a bit more before I started yelling “Chaos Gremlins!” over and over again. Let it be an announcement trailer.
And here's the deep gremlin info:
Set thousands of years in the future, Mother Machine is set on a distant planet once colonized by humans but later abandoned. Left behind by its creators, the AI is faced with a problem: without a purpose, it must find a way to keep its digital mind from breaking under the burden of being alone forever. Its solution is to create a creature it can care for. True mischief-makers with a penchant for mischief and chaos, these little gremlins were bioengineered by their mother to withstand and survive in a harsh alien environment. 3D-printed from organic filament by their godlike Mother Machine, the creatures are tasked with collecting and exploring a vast network of caverns on a mysterious alien planet filled with biodiversity and strange lifeforms – but the further the gremlins travel, the more they learn about the dark secrets of the planet’s history and the true ambitions of their mechanical mother.
These are literally, canonically, emotional support Chaos Gremlins. Great. Mother Machine lets you sign up up to three friends to help you out in drop-in co-op. The more gremlins you have, the higher the “both chaos and competition” levels become. There also appears to be a dynamic difficulty system: “balanced co-op mechanics allow expert players to team up with novices.” Platforming seems to be at the forefront, but Maschinen-Mensch also refers to Mother Machine as an action RPG. This appears to manifest itself in the mutating skill trees that allow you to change and improve your gremlin's abilities.
The game also boasts “infinitely replayable generative levels,” but I'm not sure what that means in context. Despite all the fun in the trailer, I'm not sure how Mother Machine will be structured, or even what goals your horde of disaster lizards will be trying to achieve. The trailer above shows one gremlin farting at another. I'd love to ask about the practical applications of such an ability, but I think that's missing the point. It still looks good. I think it has a similar appeal to cooperative physics sandboxes, only with more intention and nerve holding it together — so much so that I'd probably still be interested in playing it solo. It's due out sometime in 2025.