First Look: Unmess Co.: Rewind the Wreck Demo

I received an email from the two developers of “Unmess Co.: Rewind the Wreck” asking me to take a look at the demo if I liked. I did not receive any incentives for doing so! I often ignore such emails because the games suggested belong to genres I do not care about, but this one sounded really good: ” In Unmess Co.: Rewind the Wreck, a clumsy robot restores wrecked rooms by rewinding broken objects. The objects block one another, so the puzzle is finding the right order for the repairs.”

There was only one problem: it is in first-person view. I am extremely prone to motion sickness, but sometimes slow puzzle games like this work quite well and do not trigger it. So, I gave the game a try and I can report that it did not trigger my motion sickness at all.

“Inspect the wrecked room, work out what’s blocking what, and restore everything in the right order. Activate Rewind, piece broken things back together, and send every object home — preferably without another incident.”

Essentially, the game is a puzzle game where you just walk through the rooms and click on items that are broken, in the wrong place or tumbled over. Then, time rewinds for that single item and it gets restored to its previous position. However, this only works if there is no other item blocking it. The demo lets you play the first two scenarios. In general, this amounts to a “click an item and see if you can restore it; otherwise, click on another item and rinse and repeat” loop. Yet, even if that sounds boring on paper, it is actually quite fun! And for those who want a challenge, you can beat your own time record or get through with a perfect streak by not clicking on any blocked items. I assume both of these factor into the “Best Score” value, but I am not entirely sure.

As I mentioned, only the two first scenarios are unlocked. There is a little “help” feature that highlights items you can still click on and move, but it still took me a long time to see what I was missing on the second map.

The game is nice and it was satisfying seeing the two maps restored – one is an old manor, and the other a research space station. It makes me wonder if there will be “more” to the upcoming maps that isn’t present yet, though. If it stays exactly like this, map after map, I can imagine it getting a bit boring unless you are the kind of person who constantly chases a high score. But I am not that person.

However, the description of the maps hints towards something deeper: “Restore order and, if possible, find out what happened”. I did not find out anything, but I also wasn’t looking very closely (although, now that I think about it, I probably did! I just did not make the connection until now). Still, it was anything but a waste of time and I am glad I was pointed toward the game. I am curious to see where they are taking the game. There is a solid foundation so far.

My verdict: Another one for my wishlist.