Spending dozens of hours on my personal favorites of the indie platformer genre, like Spelunky or Super Meat Boy has helped me understand the genre as a whole. These investments helped me realize what I enjoy and dislike when playing these types of games.

Mechanic Escape from Slak Games is a solid platformer with a visual style reminiscent to something we might see on a children’s cartoon. It is an enjoyable visual style, but we only really notice it on any of the playable protagonists.

Mechanic Escape isn’t a puzzler like Braid or story heavy like Thomas Was Alone was. The entire game seems to be focused around trial and error through speed running, which is where things begin to damage the game’s potential.

Once you finish the game’s tutorial area, each level of Mechanic Escape takes around a minute to complete. With no checkpoint system implemented and frequent deaths, these minutes can grow very long. This would not be a problem if the game wasn’t so picky about how the player made their way through the levels.

Mechanic Escape is what I have been calling a Simon Says platformer; covering the levels in collectibles that both encourage the player to keep moving, and show him exactly how to be moving. While there are a few nonlinear’ish levels through the game that don’t feel like the developers are pushing the player down a straight line, the overall ‘difficulty’ of the game came from trying to move exactly as the developers intended for the players.

The “Simon Says” aspects weren’t the only frustration in this game’s pacing. Every level also had at least one scripted sequence where some sort of insta-killing monster would chase the player through levels that would not only force him to move where the developers wanted, but at the exact speed.

Don’t mistake these complaints for me saying “the game was too difficult”. Mechanic Escape does have a nice challenge, but I never felt like my skills were improving over the course of the game. There were different obstacles I’d pass, but they required little change of strategy. Instead I always felt like I was just trying to press the buttons at the right time as if the game was some sort of Dance Dance Revolution platformer. Maybe this is exactly what speedrunners look for, but it isn’t what I consider a rewarding experience.

Though Mechanic Escape is not exactly a good platformer, it certainly isn’t a bad game. I had a decent time playing the game for this review, but not enough to recommend people spend five hard earned dollars on it. If you have a craving for a frustratingly simple platformer then go for it. Otherwise wait for a sale or a bundle including the game.

You can purchase Mechanic Escape on Steam for $4.99