Rube Goldberg machine in digital form!
The Incredible Machine is a different type of puzzler, one that asks you to arrange disparate elements in ways that are conducive to solving a puzzle each stage. But while other puzzles rarely allow you to build anything, well, this one is all about building intricate and unbelievably contrived thing of a gig type deals! The hard part, the puzzle bits, come from the generally reduced number of elements that you are give, thus keeping the focus both on tight design as well as on creative thinking. At any rate, after tinkering with a level's design for a bit and managing to make your machine do that which you wanted it to do, the satisfaction it gives you is really worth all the trouble! Graphically the game is a clean, very DOS like thing, so if you're pretentious or want a game that can manage a higher resolution, well, going for later iterations of the game is the way to do it. Thus, The Incredible machine no. 2 and no. 3 are way more detailed graphically and more diverse in the amount of bits they put at your disposal, but that is not to say that The Incredible Machine doesn't hold to its guns; quite on the contrary, it's a revolutionary puzzler and a joy to sink into. Try it out!
