If you heard loud cursing in the Watford area last night, it could have been one of two things: 1) I swore at my (borrowed) Steam Deck while surreptitiously accessing the WiFi from outside a closed public library, as I did I don’t currently have broadband at home, or 2) I’ll next try to make heads or tails of Mech Engineer, in which you take control of a mobile undersea metropolis and send squads of carefully assembled robo-soldiers into semi-automated combat against squid-like alien fauna.
Building a mech is a Herculean task whose completion eludes today’s puny scientists, and Mech Engineer doesn’t aim to make life easier, regardless of its supposed status as a “means of fun.” Mech Engineer is honestly a game with an attitude problem. I realized this on day two of the game, when the interface coughed up a number of damage reports, presented as pieces of paper, which I then had to crumple up and throw away individually.