The Universal Robot (Assembled By Hex)

This game reminded me a lot of the non-fighting parts in Chuk and the Arena by the same author (in a good way).

This game feels like a metaphor for over-implementation of AI in workforces. You are a lowly maintenance worker on a space station when your boss, the new Mr Green (who at the Old Mr Green) delivers a new robot that can literally do anything once its started up and trained (of course, after a few missing parts are implemented).

The map has a lot of things in it but is overall compact, with only 2 or 3 main locations each with a couple of side locations.

The game has quadratic complexity, with an inventory that can be used on any object present in the game world.

The main part of the game felt big at first and then fairly constrained and linear, which made it hard for me to see how 12 different endings could be achieved. After I found a few, though, I searched on the forums for some tips and saw that there were several creative things you could do hidden in the game, which I thought was awesome.

Overall, I liked the game and the sentiments in it.

Adapted from a SpringThing26 Review

Played: 4/9/26
Playtime: 1hr, endings 1,2,5,6,7,12

What a delight this Twinesformer work is. It checks so many boxes for me: cruel capitalism (and AI!) satire, wry humor, creative, multi-use puzzle gameplay. You play as an alien mechanic, working on a space-factory whose management is pursuing labor-elimination measures in the most literal way possible. Your task is to assemble the robot that will replace you, in service of an organization that is so dehumanized it can’t conceive why that might be unappealing.

Follows a domino-tumbling sequence of tasks to not only assemble the damned thing, but then to try and mitigate its grim purpose. The puzzles are a veritable showcase of well-cued lateral-thinking, multi-use, object combination posers. They are also charged with humor and pathos, making things zip along practically friction free. The UI is a tremendous asset here. Objects can be Examined, Combined, sometimes Read, and Used. Combining or Using items causes the text to be populated with gear icons on nouns that might apply. It is a very efficient UI, simultaneously cuing things to try and executing commands. There is enough variety in the noun space to not make things trivial, and enough clarity in the scenarios that lawn mowering is unlikely to be necessary. Even when the things that are asked of you are objectively bananas. The UI really strikes the sweet spot of efficient command execution and soft-guiding progress without being intrusive.

But really, who plays IF for the UI? Robot people whose humanity has been consumed by social media algorithms, that’s who! For the rest of us, a clumsy UI might damage a work beyond salvation, but the BEST it can hope for is to fade to invisibility and let our brains eddy along with the flow of the narrative. The fact that choice-select parser-play so often tilts former makes this accomplishment worth noting, but it will rarely be a work’s defining feature.

No, the showpiece here is the amusing puzzle play, married to pervasively winning, wry humor. The temptation to dip into the details runs the risk of breaking the dam on a deluge of spoilers, which I am loath to do. As a beleaguered blue-collar alien, you are at the mercy of mercurial management, aggressive security personnel, the implacable momentum of automated manufacturing and supercilious bureaucrats. And one friend. Just the one. All of this building to 12 possible endings, most of which are very fun variations on a theme.

And here is where I might call into question my credentials as player AND reviewer. None of the above is what excited me most about this work. No that credit goes to the tiniest of implementation details that spoke to really next-level game engineering by the author. Late in the game, once the titular assembly was in its final stage, it was clear the narrative was entering a ‘no return’ moment. An accomplished player, trained by years of consuming such games, would absolutely have saved their game at this point. Your humble servant? Drunk on endgame momentum, I plowed ahead without, got an ending, then was confronted with the unhappy consequences of that choice. Should I actually restart? The game was short enough to make it a possibility, but complex enough to promise unsatisfying, repetitive clicking.

So I peeked at the save screen. THE WORK HAD AUTOSAVED FOR ME, AT THE CRUCIAL DECISION POINT!!! I’m not sure what prompted me to look, whether the game had subtly indicated this would be true, or whether I discovered this design gem through providence. Either way, it had the same effect. I powered through five more endings, restoring each time, and each time getting giddier and giddier that the work made even this, the most transactional of IF tropes (collect the endings) smooth and friction free! What a gift for the impulsive, slave-to-the-moment player! The fact the game was so generous to its most incompetent players where it might justifiably punish them spoke to a kindness of spirit that was practically moving. Contrasting with the cold satire of its narrative in a way that threw the setting’s lack of empathy into high relief and was essentially a meta-statement showing an alternate, better path.

Yeah, I just said we can save ourselves from Exploitive Capitalism with… AUTOSAVE. Am I overreading this? Absolutely not. I mean, I would give ANYTHING to have an autosave that could restore to 2023.

Spaceship: Heart of Gold
Vibe: Monkey Wrenching
Polish: Smooth
Gimme the Wheel! : This was such a complete package, I think the only thing I might tweak would be to cue the acid pool a little stronger. It really feels like crossing it is possible, but that was the one (thankfully optional) puzzle I didn’t tumble onto.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

There are few constants in this storm-tossed age, but it is nonetheless an iron law of IF that you will never have a bad time in an Agnieszka Trzaska game. The roguelike 4x4 series, the skeleton-and-mouse buddy act of the Rosalinda games, one-offs like the sci-fi shenanigans of Chuk and the Arena – for all the differences in setting and gameplay, you can expect a charming story with plucky characters and laugh-out-loud humor, undergirded by solid, satisfying mechanics. Universal Robot is no exception, and if the puzzles are a little less complex than usual, the almost sandbox-style climax and righteous social comment provide more than enough of a counterbalance.

The “Hex” of the title is the player-character – you’re a put-upon alien wage-slaving it up on a space-station owned by a megacorporation that’s figured out how to use tax loopholes to make pointless widget-production profitable regardless of the fact that they don’t get sold, and in fact get dumped out into space. Not content with this money-for-nothing scheme, they’re putting on pressure to cut costs further, which is where your manager gets the idea of replacing you with a robot. Adding insult to injury, you’re tasked with assembling and training the thing, and adding injury to the insult to the injury, you’re not so much going be laid off as jettisoned out the airlock alongside the station’s other refuse. Fortunately, you’ve got a tool-belt, a buddy who works in the station’s kitchens, and no compunctions whatsoever about using every shrink-ray, inversion module, and rubber snake you can lay your hands on to claw out a better ending to this story.

As the list of inventory items there suggests, we’re very clearly in comedy-point-and-click-game territory. The game revolves around a series of inventory puzzles, which are supported by a clean interface – there’s an always-accessible subscreen where you can examine, combine, or use the stuff you’re carrying on the items in the room you’re in, combined with a simple navigation system and simple dialogue trees. But for the graphics, it’s a pitch-perfect implementation of a late-period LucasArts game, and as with the best of those classics, puzzle solutions are logical without feeling too straightforward, prompting plenty of “wait I think this should work” moments.

In further keeping with that tradition, there are also jokes a-plenty. That manager scheming to replace you? He’s called Mr. Green, but as the game is quick to emphasize, “new”, not “old” Mr. Green, because he’s actually a giant red monster who ate your former, human boss, but absorbed some of his memories and expertise and therefore inherited the manager’s position because the company decided it would be a pain to train someone else up from scratch. And I guess it’s a dumb joke, but I laughed at the earnest prediction that adoption of robots “could lead to unemployment rates reaching 160% by the end of the decade, with some workers being forced to be unemployed at two or more companies at once.” The tragedy!

Per these examples, there’s definitely an anti-corporate, anti-LLM thread that runs through the game, but it’s largely used for jokes and to evoke sympathy for the working-class characters, so stays relatively restrained; as someone who can get annoyed if it feels like a game is getting too didactic even when I agree with the points it’s making, so I appreciated the light touch. And it does serve to add a note of dignity to proceedings that can often get quite slapstick.

The endings, in fact, are where things can become somewhat serious. The puzzles along the critical path are generally quite straightforward: see, the robot is missing a couple pieces, so you need to collect those before you can finish assembling it, and the obstacles to doing so are clearly flagged and don’t require too much brainpower to surmount. But if you just run through that path of least resistance, you’ll find yourself having created a perfectly-functioning robot trained to do everything you can do, which given the ruthlessness of your corporate overlords, is not a great idea.

But there are many, many ways you can undermine or subvert the robot, leading to radically different results; there are a dozen endings to find, and even after coming up with a variety of plans, I still missed almost half of them. Despite the small map and limited number of objects, there are lots of opportunities to mess about, and I was delighted to realize that I could implement just about every silly thought I had, from sabotaging the robot’s physical capacities to messing with its programming (I’ll drop into spoilers to relate my favorite ending: (Spoiler - click to show)it’s the one where you get yourself hopped up on a giant chocolate-chip cookie, cocoa being an intoxicant to your variety of alien, just before donning the training helmet, which leads to a drunkenly incompetent robot slurring its way through the initial interview with management). I was a little disappointed that it appears it’s possible to lock yourself out of some endings based on a decision that isn’t flagged as irrevocable (I’m talking about (Spoiler - click to show)downloading the finance podcasts to your terminal), but it feels churlish to complain based on how much fun I had with the ones I did find.

I’m not sure Universal Robot will wind up at the absolute top tier of Trzaska’s gameography – for all that I enjoyed the characters, there isn’t a relationship quite as winning as the one between Rosalinda and Piecrust, and the mechanics aren’t as intrinsically compelling as those in the more systems-driven games. But this is praising with faint damnation indeed; this is a fun, fleet game with something to say, solid gags, and an enjoyably farcical climax. What more could one want, or expect?