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Review
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?
