Mechanical Beast (2022)

Overview

[Deep Into and Back Out of the Belly of a Huge] Mechanical Beast is a tile laying/manipulation puzzle, where you play as an exploration party of engineers who, together with your android helper, must explore the belly of a giant robot to find its control room and deactivate it. During the first part of the game, the maze will grow as you explore, until you find the off switch. The rest of the game the rooms are collapsing around you, and you must quickly make your way to the exit before the robot locks down, trapping you forever inside its bowels. You can change the layout of the rooms using the gears you find within, to help you find an exit. You win by getting everyone, including the people you find trapped within and your trusted android, out of the beast.

The game can be played solo, co-op, or competitively with up to 4 players.

—description from the designer

The creature was all humanity hoped for: a sentient robot, with the capacity to self-improve by building itself new modules to solve the needs of the population, big and small. It was an endless source of admiration and improvement of people’s lives. That is, until it started to go out of control. At this point no human had a detailed plan on how to fix it, or even shut it off. Due to the organic growth it had had, the original blueprints were useless, and nobody had thought of keeping logs outside of the machine’s system. There was no guide whatsoever on how it was structured now. Your team, as designers of the core system, must dive into the bowels of the beast, find its control room, activate the off switch, and then escape before it collapses entirely around you while self-disassembling. To aid in your quest you can send your reliable android to tinker with the gears and rooms, should you get stuck, or you can activate the gears yourself to create a path amongst the chaos.

—description from the rulebook