Maschien-Mensch has announced their new multiplayer roguelite platformer hybrid, Mother Machine. This indie developer from Berlin will be most known to fans for their previous titles Curious Expedition and Curious Expedition 2, Mother Machine takes their development journey in an entirely new direction.
A few weeks ago TechRaptor was invited to join the team for a behind-closed-doors reveal of their game including an extended live gameplay session run by members of the Maschien-Mensch team.
Mother Machine takes place in a distant future on an alien planet. Humans abandoned the titular AI supercomputer, Mother Machine, but existence alone is driving her insane. As a solution to this problem, Mother Machine creates life in the form of Chaos Gremlins and sets them to explore the world.
Mother Machine is a multiplayer roguelite where players take on the role of a Chaos Gremlin, created by the titular Mother Machine. As a Chaos Gremlin you and up to three of your friends get to explore a procedurally-generated tunnel system.
Each Gremlin has the base ability to run, jump, mine crystals, and climb so that they can make their way through each of the game’s levels. Along the way, the aim is to collect the crystals and bring them back to their base or spend them throughout the level for a variety of upgrades.
With these crystals, you can mutate your Chaos Gremlin. In our time watching the game in action, we saw that some Gremlins were able to create projectiles out of burps or secrete a substance to make climbing easier.
We got to see how each of these mutations would facilitate a different kind of playstyle. If you didn’t want enemies to bother you as much then making sure you were an offensive style Gremlin could mean you would need to worry less if enemies appeared, alternatively, if you want to make sure no rock goes unturned making sure you can climb anywhere can mean you might be able to come back to base with even more crystals.
The ability to specialize your Gremlins differently was also a key aspect of why playing this game is meant to be more fun with other players. With two or even three Gremlins suddenly roles begin to form with offensive Gremlins taking the lead while others explore for crystals when the coast is clear.
Watching the devs from Maschinen-Mensch play the game there were requests for assistance from one another for additional support in a variety of different activities. It was fun to see this kind of collaborative discussion, and also just how that collaboration paid off as the pack was able to move together.
The real star of what little we saw of the game was the alien landscape that the game is set in. The Gremlins alone are strange and alien but once you start to look at all of the different flora and fauna that appear during escalation you begin to understand just how weird this world is.
There were some moments where animations performed strangely at angles, and the spread of fluids like those from the projectiles spread onto the environments in a strange way but we were informed that with the release date still in 2025 there was still plenty of time to polish the game further.
Mother Machine Preview | Final Thoughts
What the team at Maschinen-Mensch is working on was a lot of fun to see for the short time we were able to see it. While it’s definitely a large departure in gameplay from their previous titles it looks like they’ve been able to take a lot about what they’ve learned in the realm of roguelite and procedurally generated gameplay and apply the formula here.
From the gameplay, we saw there’s definitely some rough around the edges going on, but the core gameplay loop seemed appealing especially as part of a group of friends.
Some elements that we didn’t get to learn much about were the underlying story and what Mother Machine’s true intentions are, or just how crazy you can get with the mutations on your Chaos Gremlins.
This will be a title to keep an eye on as we head into 2025.
Mother Machine was previewed at an online event hosted by the developer. All screenshots were provided by the developer.
