[Subtitles by danielsangeo] Hey, welcome to the Game Dungeon! Today,
we're looking at "Contraption Zack". This is a third-person puzzle game. Okay, now wait for it. AaaaAAAH...! I completely approve of having to throw some giant switch
in order to start your game. Now this game has a pretty good
intro so let's check it out. We open with Zack outside Gadget
Co. in a car like I used to have. And I didn't notice this the first time, but I think we're also witnessing either a
plane or Space Shuttle going down in flames. NARRATOR: Zack's first day on the job... ROSS: Maybe a meteor... Alright! On-the-job training! Off to a riveting start here. ZACK: WOAH! ROSS: Well, Zack is excited. Yep. ZACK: This is SERIOUS! ROSS: Can you handle the power
bestowed upon you, Zack? Gadget Co. is where heroes are forged. NARRATOR: Later that morning... ROSS: Or technically 31 hours and 45
minutes later if we're to trust the clocks. MAN #1: Did you see the new guy? MAN #2: YEAH! Heh heh! MAN #3: Heh heh, he don't look
too bright if ya ask me!! MAN #1: What a rube! You know what that means... MAN #2: YEAH! Har har! MAN #3: Ha! He'll never make it!!! [men laughing] ROSS: You're about to become popular, Zack. ZACK: Hey guys! How's it going?
My name's ZACK! MAN #4: Hi, Jack. MAN #1: Heyyya, ZACK! Could I
borrow your hammer? ZACK: Sure! MAN #3: Hey kid! I need yer tape! ZACK: Uhh... Okay! MAN #2: OOHOOH! I NEED YER WRENCH!!! ZACK: Well uh... okay! Just be
sure to bring everything back!! BOSS: ZACK! MAN #4: Uh oh. BOSS: ZACK! Plant #4 is experiencing
major system malfunctions and the suits are on their way!!! You've gotta get in there and
fix it before they get here!!!! ZACK: YESSIR, Mr. Flanagan! Right away, sir! ROSS: This seems like
a lot of responsibility being dumped on Zack for his first day. ZACK: Hey guys! I need my tools back!! MAN #4: You hurt your back?? MAN #1: Sorry, Zack! I lost your hammer! MAN #3: Sorry kid! I have racquetball!!! MAN #2: OOH YEAH! My uncle has it!!! ROSS: Welcome to Gadget Co., Zack. ZACK: Oh... I get it!! I'm the new guy! We'll just see who comes out on top!!! ROSS: And with that, we begin. We start off and there's a
jukebox blasting in the lobby because I guess that's a normal thing
in an industrial manufacturing company. Actually, I'm not sure what this
company does. More on that later. Now if you watched the "Nyet III" episode, you'll remember how I said that
game lulls you in with easy challenges and a happy atmosphere before moving in for the kill. Well, not Contraption Zack. This game is FAR more honest
with you about what it is. Right away, the first lesson you
learn is that you can screw yourself. Look. I hit the wrong button,
now I'm trapped by spikes. What am I supposed to do now? Nothing. I'm trapped in this
grid for the rest of my life. Welcome to 90s gaming. But the game is not
completely without mercy. One of your main options is to restart. Hey-hey, look! It's that jukebox again. Well, if you progress
past the second screen, then you get one of the more
annoying "puzzles" in the game. There's not much to this puzzle: You press
the button and that lowers the spike wall. Except, wait a minute. These buttons
are on a timer until they reset. Now's a great time to mention
that the controls to this game are sluggish and not very responsive. But this is a puzzle game, not
an action-platformer, so quick and fluid controls are not that
big a deal in the grand scheme of things. Or rather they wouldn't be if I didn't have
to pull of these split-second maneuvers before get shut off by spikes. And hey, if I screw up here, yep, that's right, back to the jukebox. I mentioned this before but I'm kind
of binary when it comes to puzzles. Either give me a puzzle and let
me take my time to figure it out, or give me something fast-paced
where I need to be responsive. Don't give me both at the same time. Combining split-second timing with
puzzles you need to think though for me is like having a timed quiz where the teacher rips the paper out of
your hand while you're trying to finish. Can't say I'm a fan. Not that there's much to figure
out on this one. It's mostly just throwing myself
at the buttons until the gates stay open long
enough for me to pull it off. In fact, the most effective way is to slip out of the gate JUST in time
before it closes on you again. However the timing on this is
so, SO borderline that I honestly can't tell if this is
how I'm actually supposed to solve this or if this is just an exploit. I can't pull this trick off reliably, even when I'm pressing the keys as
fast as I can down to the millisecond. This is why I say this game
doesn't hide its intentions. It's not your friend. It's here to trap you. But I eventually make it, due to
dumb luck more than anything else. Let's move on to the next area. [loud static]
WUAAHH! WAAAAH! AAAH! Okay... so that was an interesting
music choice for the beginning. I guess the game wants me to
talk about the music next. A few tracks are annoying-- [warbling trombone-like droning] --but most are pretty great and have exactly the sort of vibe I
would want to have for this sort of game. [jaunty industrial music] Kind of "Sim City"-ish. My only complaint is this old-school AdLib
music which I was never a huge fan of. Some of these tracks would absolutely
benefit from a modern rendition. [horn music] But back to the game, it has
more lessons to teach us. The next one we learn here is,
everything you need to do, you do it in the longest way possible. If you think you see
a shortcut, it's a trap. This becomes really apparent
solving one of the first puzzles, where I have to loop all the way
around repeatedly. And it's not just THIS
puzzle--it's most of the game. Look at this sequence here. I need to
follow a path in order to press a switch. There's no puzzle here, this isn't the exit
to the level and they're building things up, I JUST need to press a switch. There's only one way to walk there,
then I have to walk all the way back. This takes two and a half minutes. Now that sounds tolerable, but remember:
if you make a mistake afterwards, you get to do it ALL OVER AGAIN. AND AGAIN. Despite his boss freaking out earlier,
Zack is not in a hurry. Oh no. Whatever Zack's job description
is, he is paid by the hour. There's no going home early because you
got all your work done at this company. Zack never runs or even walks at
a fast pace ever. Anyway, this level isn't too hard and I eventually start this conveyor
belt and get to proceed to the next area. And even though I found some of my tools
in last level, they're gone by the next. I guess my coworkers hit me in the
back of my head with a monkey wrench so they could re-steal them from me because they're positively ecstatic
about hiding them all over again. I almost feel bad taking them back;
they're enjoying this so much. Level 2 is much better. If you're observant and keep track of what
you're doing, all the puzzles here make sense and don't require TOO much in the
way of trying to outrun timers. It's still easy to screw yourself but
it's more your own fault this time. Although I'm impressed by this part: If you don't run towards the end there, that elevator goes down, then
that's it. It's gone. It's almost kind of
amazing for me to see this because just about every other game on the
planet has a way for a lift to come to you, either automatically, on a timer,
or pressing a button. Not this game. Level 3 is more of your basic antagonism by looping you around in the
longest way possible again. Also towards the end, they
introduce these gates that at first I thought were random. In a timespan of three minutes, they never
opened and shut in exactly the same sequence. Looking back at the video however, I can see that one of the gates
opens roughly every eight seconds, and the other one opens roughly
every fourteen seconds. Sometimes it's a little shorter,
sometimes a little longer. I didn't know that, so I just kept
trying to run through here like a maniac until I finally got it through raw
persistence. Although even if I HAD known this, I'm
not sure how much it would've helped. If you're someone who can count two
separate timers simultaneously in your head, then you're a greater player than I am. Level 4 is where the game really
comes to fruition. I must've tried this level
at least ten times. Normally, I like to think there's no logic
puzzle I can't solve given enough time, but this one is such a bastard. To begin with, the first five minutes of
this level is more of that back-looping crap where every single switch activates
some other switch in another room. So you have to wander around each room until
you figure out which one you triggered. Here's a spoiler of the BARE MINIMUM of
what you need to do just to start off. And this is if you know exactly what to do. In practice, it's going to take
someone a lot more steps than this because you're not going to have
every switch memorized. I don't even consider this part of a puzzle because it's just wandering
around hitting switches. Have you ever had to
fix an electrical socket and you need to figure out which circuit
breaker to turn off so you don't die? This is like that, except slower. But this isn't the real problem. Here is where we learn the final
lesson to Contraption Zack, and that's there is no
consistency to anything. There was a taste of this in level 3, but
here's where they really drive it home. See up until now, square buttons
change other devices permanently, circular buttons have been on a timer. Also colored buttons and switches only correspond to spikes or
gates of the same color. Not anymore. Look at this: I flip a yellow
switch, gray spikes go up also. Oops, I mean the gray button
makes the yellow spikes go up. ...wait... ...what? That purple switch controls purple spikes. The green switch controls a spring
platform. There are no green spikes. And of course, this orange switch also
triggers gray spikes which trap me in here. How can I have possibly known that? What's the point of having color
coding to your puzzles if you're just going to break
the rules as you go? Now rectangular buttons have timers,
circular buttons are permanent, colors can mean something else. Sometimes. Always sometimes. The logic is broken now. You never
truly know what you're doing anymore. The game starts descending into
chaos from here. See, a good puzzle game would have
this overly complex layout of pipes that you can trace along and the
pressure layout would make some sense if you really looked it and
figured it out. Not here. Just keep swapping pipes until
something does something you want it to. Or here, look at this. I hit a switch and...
oh, that only activates one set of spikes. I guess I have to go back around the
long way, but... wait, I can't go back. Did I just screw myself again? No, it turns out I didn't have to hit the
switch once; I had to hit it SEVEN times. Why? Then there's THIS area. I don't want to talk about this one
too much. A lot of bad memories. All I'll say is there are multiple layers
of how you can screw yourself on this one, not just the obvious ways. If you're looking at this and think
you have it figured out, you don't. But back to this level. I
couldn't figure it out. I got to the point where I
needed to fix THIS wire, although even then, I didn't
actually KNOW that. I just deduced it because there was
literally nothing else for me to fiddle with, except for one other button, but
we're coming to that. But lo and behold, if I fix this wire, then the lift drops down into
the lava here and I'm screwed. So I came to one of two conclusions: One-- Maybe THIS switch in the
next room does something because there are wires leading
from it to the lift. All it did earlier was control
spikes in yet another room, but maybe I need it here. Nope, still screwed. Can't be it. So my other theory was, "Hey, there
are orange spikes blocking me here. "And there's only one orange
button in this level... "that bear trap of a button from
earlier ready to box me in. "So I know that button screws me, but
hey, maybe because these spikes are up, "it's just inversing them, not
necessarily raising them." Well, that's a nice theory, but
it doesn't matter because I CAN'T EVEN WALK OVER THERE
WITHOUT LOWERING THEM! And don't forget,
for every theory like this, I have to go through that slow walk gauntlet of hitting half a dozen switches
across four rooms EVERY TIME BEFORE I CAN TEST ANYTHING! That's it. I'm stuck. There's
nothing more I can do here. I'm obviously not getting
something. What is it? Well I looked up a walkthrough; otherwise
the episode would've ended right here. And guess what?
I DID have to hit that switch, but THEN I had to run across the
lift with split-second timing before it dropped into the lava. Now before you say I should've
thought of that, I want to emphasize this game
LOVES to slam doors in your face. Aww, didn't make it. Too slow. Sucker. The game REVELS in letting you know
you did something the wrong way. I assumed this lift was more of the same. But I admit, I didn't notice the difference
between a fast death and a faster death. That was my mistake. So I had the right solution all along, but the game is so antagonistic, it
convinced me I was doing it wrong. That's something a super-villain would do. Looking at it now, I can see the puzzles
seem to follow a similar pattern. First you see switches and buttons where
you can frequently figure out what they do. Then you try to deduce what
switches and buttons you need to hit in order to achieve your goal.
The rest is madness. No consistency, no patterns, just
stumbling around in the dark, like the game forgot it was supposed
to be a puzzle and not a pit trap. It's usually in this order, too. The insanity tends to come towards the end. The things I have to do to solve
some of the puzzles astound me. Like this is obviously a grid-based
isometric game, but on multiple occasions, I've had to walk in-between the
grid in order to solve the puzzle. That's like leaving your piece
on the line in chess. I was already accepting that I
can straight-up climb a flat wall, but can't vault a pipe
or cross a simple rope, but this is something else. It's not just the puzzles, either. There's madness bleeding over
into the rest of the game. I mean, what, do we really think Zack's
coworkers haven't killed anyone before? What, you thought I wasn't going
to talk about the blood leaking out of the locker here?
Oh no! I saw it. The best case scenario is that
one of the workers decided to go rabbit- or
turkey-hunting before work and instead of leaving it in his car, stuffed
it in his locker and the blood leaked out. I can't come up with a more
benign explanation. I mean I'm not even going to get into
the multiple stain patterns over here that suggest different causes, or
this numbering system in general. Oh, yeah, "racquetball". He's
got a machete inside that bag. He's going to go hack up some drifter. But this game mostly sidesteps everything
with this bright and happy presentation, Zack's chipper attitude, and upbeat music. This game is not nearly as dark
as it could be. It keeps the horror beneath the surface. Look at that. If you're standing
in front of the spikes, they stop. A darker game wouldn't hesitate
to impale Zack like a pincushion. So there's still that sense of
mercy buried in here. This game isn't Nyet III. It's just a
really friendly and approachable madness. And Zack's a part of this, too. Look at those glazed eyes. No one sane
works at this company and it shows. I've beaten this game and I still
don't know what's manufactured here or what this company's business model is. It's just there, and by God is
it busy doing... something. It doesn't matter. There's a lot
going on is the important part. I think this game hits on a larger theme. It's a combination of cheery presentation, overcomplicated industry, and a touch of madness. I've seen this elsewhere. On this show, "Construction Bob"
works at another manufacturing company where we're not sure what they're doing, but their business model involves
bouncing workers on trampolines in a really dangerous way and
grabbing parts to put them together. If you're a "Mystery Science
Theater 3000" fan, what does Gizmonic Institute actually do? Sending the janitor into space
so he can watch bad movies was the side-project of one
division at the company. While it lacks the industrial element,
I almost see this game taking place in the same universe as "ToeJam & Earl". In that game, two aliens
crash land on "Earth" and find parts to put their ship
back together. Never mind that Earth is apparently
suspended islands floating in space. Who cares? People still need to
mow their lawns. I really like this atmosphere of
endless puzzles to perform basic tasks mixed an upbeat atmosphere and
insanity lurking in the shadows. I'd love to see something like
on the scale of an MMO, where you activate the belt
machine to get your mail, fire up the industrial generator
so you can heat up your coffee, get the cutting machine running
so you can clip your toenails, and that would all be before you even
leave your house to go somewhere. The entire world could be this condensed
mechanical jungle of endless puzzles. Because that's really not what
Contraption Zack is. For all its complications, this
game only has six levels. And when you consider how much they
padded out THOSE, this is short. If all the puzzles
had some logic behind them, I could've maybe finished this
game in a little over an hour. They don't though, so it takes a
lot longer in a bad way. Even though I'll cover a lot of old games
here, I don't give points for nostalgia. You DO have to be able to look
past graphics fidelity, but if a game was good in the
past, it should still be good now. Well, by that standard, I like
everything about Contraption Zack, and I think it holds up great, except the gameplay. If they could divorce the madness
from the puzzle-solving itself, and keep it to the rest of the game, this would be a winning formula
and very addictive. Contraption Zack is a good universe, and this or something like it
could make a comeback. I mean look at his hair. That's
a cosplay challenge right there. Okay, I promised a good ending
last episode so let's see it. We activate the last piece of machinery--
some water-baling pump thing--and hey! Here's the... backdoor entrance
to the factory or... something. Hi Zack! Okay, now watch the background. BOOM! Power golf! Alright, time to get this party
started. Hit it, Zack. Yeah! Now we're cooking. Skydiver! Okay, looks like we've passed the exosphere. Hey, maybe this is how all those floating
islands ended up in space in ToeJam & Earl. And now we're... cutting colored
paper and processing it. Although we of course have no way of
knowing if that's ALL this machine does. Oh hey, did you see that? Gadget Co. is doing contracting
work for Target. That's their logo. Oh, okay, so we're printing spam mail. Shop at Target. Whoo-hoo! NARRATOR: Congratulations! You have
successfully repaired Plant #4. ROSS: I like the enthusiasm
being portrayed here. And we get the same sequence again, but this time, we get to see letters printed
along with portraits of all the staff while Maple Leaf Rag plays. I'm going to abridge this because
hey, the ending isn't quite done yet. [music] BOSS: Alright you knuckleheads,
Plant #5 is malfunctioning AGAIN!!! MAN #1: But we fixed that that last week-- BOSS: Well, it's broken again! Get to work!! ROSS: You're all going to
replaced by robots in 20 years. NARRATOR: Meanwhile... ROSS: Well, you did a good job
for your first day, Zack. ZACK: Hmmmmm... Look who left their tools!! ROSS: Uh oh. It's like that
quote from "Batman": You either die a hero or live long enough
to see yourself become the villain. NARRATOR: The end. ROSS: I've always thought that's
just something villains say to justify and themselves, but I
guess in this case, it's true. You're one of them now, Zack. And that's the game. It kicks you out
to DOS afterwards. Get out of here. Okay, that wraps it up. Stay tuned for the next episode
for something spooky for Halloween. I'm going to have a game I've
never played before so even I don't know what I'm in store for. It's going to get interesting. Okay, ready? [jaunty industrial music] [bonging sound] No... NO! Save! SAVE! I'm hitting every key! You're going
to make me re-do this whole level?! SAVE! RAAAAAAAA--!
I so do love Ross's ability to dig up these old games that almost no one has ever heard of. Then record them pretty much in their entirety and still find something good to say about them. Every time after watching one of his videos I feel so hopeful about the games industry. There is so much unexplored and even if something is not really that good someone like Ross could play the game and still find value in it.
I love the man.
Reminds me of D Generation. That game was pretty dark. You had to guide fellow employees around a building with traps and weird creatures. When I first played it I immediately got one of them electrocuted. Probably not as frustrating as this though. There's actually a remake of it that no-one cares about. Might work for a Game Dungeon episode.
I hoped it would be Mankind Divided this time, but still was not disappointed. Very entertaining video.