The Mobius Machine

Review

Your job is transporting cargo from planet to planet all over the Galaxy. Halfway through your journey, your communication system captures a faint distress call from someone needing help on the deserted colony, Isolaria Moon. You find this very odd, but your assistant reminds you that all such calls must be investigated by vessels nearby. As you go down to the moon's surface, something goes wrong with your engines, and you unfortunately crash-land, destroying your spaceship. Now you are stranded on an unknown planet, looking for a way to return home. It's going to be a tough one, in The Mobius Machine.

The Mobius Machine is an action-adventure platformer game developed and self-published by Madruga Works on the 1^st of March 2024 on the Steam platform. The game is also available on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.

As I write this review, I have been playing this excellent game for around 16 hours and have completed just over 65% of the game. As a good Metroidvania, you have a large map that, as far as I can see, interconnects seven areas in this particular game, but I can't be 100% sure.

But let's start from the beginning. Before launching your first playthrough, you'll have to select between two levels of difficulty, which are standard or retro. Standard will allow you to keep items and a couple of other things, but if you choose to play on the retro difficulty, you'll lose all your progress and items when you die and respawn where you last saved.

After selecting the difficulty level, you'll go through a small tutorial before crash landing on Isolaria Moon. My first impression was how good the graphics are.  Then there’s the main character, this little fellow wearing an astronaut suit, and I must admit that I really like him. However, his only ability at the start is jumping, and he has a gun to shoot at the enemies. Two gauges on the top of the screen indicate your character's health and energy, and you also have the number of scraps he has in his coffin. The energy gauge is crucial as it's how you boost the health of your character; you’d better keep that gauge as full as possible as you'll use it constantly. Yes, enemies and obstacles never stop here. It is so much fun and tricky at times. As you kill enemies, they will drop scraps and sparkling blue dots (energy). Larger enemies will drop more scraps and more energy than the smaller ones. Scraps can be used in the workbench room to upgrade your weapons along with your health and energy gauges if you find the blueprints for them. Also, there are two screens you can access at any time through the interface: the inventory and the map.

The map will be useless until you find the communication centre within each area. That's right, you'll be walking solo on a big black screen when accessing the map at the start. So, make sure to look for signage everywhere. The signs with the capsule icon will indicate where to save your progress and receive your total health back. The spanner is where the workbenches are based. The circular swirling signs are for the teleporting machines and the rectanglular signs are for the communication centres. You must activate the mainframe to download the map of the area, but you will only see what you have explored on the way to the communication centre. I strongly recommend making your way to any new capsule location, especially if you haven't discovered the communication centre for the area.  

The areas are well-designed, and each has its own theme and enemies. And as I mentioned above, you encounter enemies everywhere. You also have scrap cases and shiny, larger blue dots. But these items are either placed within areas that are hard to reach, require that you activate a terminal to open a door, or are guarded by a larger enemy. When opened, the case will give you more scrap, and the shiny blue dots are either a blueprint or a new ability. After finding the climbing axe, you can climb rock faces and go underwater with the weight belt. There are a few others to discover, and you will go back and forth from one area to another as you access new places that were previously unreachable.

There are 80 different enemies in this game, including some fun and challenging bosses. Somewhere within each area, you'll either fall or arrive in a large square zone, where bosses are. Out of the five I have already met, I found two of them average and three challenging in terms of difficulty. I must mention that I died more often while discovering areas than fighting against these five bosses. Maybe the last two or more of these bosses will give me more grief.

That brings me to the control aspect of the game, for which I was using a gamepad. In a nutshell, they are excellent. However, getting used to the aiming system took me quite a while, not because of the accuracy but because when you stop shooting, the system holds the direction in which your character was previously aiming, which took me some time to adjust to.

I did encounter a few crashes to the desktop, all of which occurred after leaving a saving capsule. It was not ideal, but on the good side, it did save, and I didn’t lose my progression or my items.

Stunning graphics and the musical ambience suits the game brilliantly. The controls are tight, but like me, it might take you a while to adjust to them. However, you can still use your mouse and keyboard if you prefer. The game has been translated into ten languages and has full controller support for Xbox and PlayStation gamepads.

Review written by THE CPT FROGGY for Zeepond.com

The Mobius Machine Steam Store Page