Crymachina

released on Jul 27, 2023

Crymachina is an action RPG where mechanical girls strive to survive in a post-apocalyptic world to become “Real Humans''. But what does it mean to be a “Real Human”?


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can women become human? crymachina seeks to answer this important question

Starts with an interesting plot, but quickly becomes redundant and with a repetitive gameplay. All the stages and enemies look the same, it was tedious to complete.

A really wonderful story with a lovable cast and an interesting high-concept worldview. The gameplay isn't stellar but it's good enough to not be a burden and it builds on what Crystar did in really fascinating ways.

Like its predecessor Crystar, Crymachina suffers from spotty combat, though it is a big step up from it: Good ideas and decent execution are dragged down by bloated visual effects that impair enemy move legibility; flashiness is prioritized over visual clarity and control over your character which, in a game in which you can easily get one-shotted by many attacks in its later stages, will often see you dying to bullshit. This is compounded by an unintuitive equipment and stat system that is not properly explained and some not-so-well though aspects of design (e.g, one of the characters immediately closes in for a big attack after a perfect evasion, so perfectly evading an attack that persists after its first hit will see you being automatically dropped in the second volley, usually resulting in death.) Still, the moment-to-moment combat, while not the best, is fairly enjoyable.

And once again, like its predecessor, Crymachina shines in its story; It's hard to speak about it without spoiling things, but Crymachina delivers an interesting SF story that intelligently utilizes its main concept (Robots trying to restore humanity) to instead turn social moral codes on their head and speak of the often arbitrary and oppresive ways in which we elaborate cultural and social dogmas. That said, the game would've definitely benefitted from being longer; at just about 15 hours it barely just manages to deliver its main thesis, and does this at the cost of sidelining the background lore and side characters (Trinity!). I would've liked the game to spend more time on these two aspects as I feel would've made what the game is trying to do all that much stronger, but at the same time this is the kind of game that is made on a shoestring budget with what I assume a not very long development process so I won't hold it against it too much.

Robot yuri saikou

i would fuck the seventh deus ex machina fr

Hard to think of another work in this medium that rallies so hard against the ideology of humanism. It also manages to do so without sounding like an edgy teen who just hates people.