Geareo is an extremely pleasing clockwork building game with pull-out model kits and flippable paper manuals
Many are the games that feature “clockwork” objects, and all of them are liars. “Clockwork” in most games is a brass-edged cube with some images of moving gears on it. You attach the cube to, for example, a huge scythe blade, and it makes the huge scythe blade spin, but I need you to understand that no kinetic energy transferral is taking place. You’ve just activated a line of code that reads something like “MOTOR POWER = YES”.
The whole thing is a mockery of physics! The only thing that scythe blade is slicing is your suspension of disbelief! Come now, don’t panic. Here is Geareo to set the world to rights, one perpendicular crown wheel at a time.
Created by Witweld, it’s a freeform sandbox builder defined by the spectacle of “real gears that transmit motion and force without slipping and with high RPM”. Players construct elaborate clockwork machines either for the sheer hell of it, or to complete challenges of the “drive over a cattlegrid without doing a backward somersault” variety. The one concession to unreality is that (as far as I can tell) no part of your machine will break under the immense amount of torque you’ve mistakenly applied to it. Nor will key components come unstuck.
Beyond that, it’s all very naturalistic, and you can build an absurd variety of Stuff: catapults, cars with sprung suspension, actual flying model airplanes, eerie walking machines with dozens of feet, cursed robot Pinnochios on tricycles. All of them powered by the correct and proper transmission of forces between meshed rotating objects.
It’s not wholly a game about clockwork, I must concede. There are also digital sensors, relays and logic gates, aimed at the perverts who like to build functioning computers inside their computers. I am slightly disappointed by this, given Geareo’s premise – why not just leave people to build actual ‘analog’ engines or mechanical calculators, of the kind that pre-dates the invention of microchips?
It seems likely you can also do it that way if you want to, mind, and I’m not really in a position to lecture. So far in the demo I have built: a wooden wall covered in mismatched spur gears that falls over immediately when I hit play. I shall name him Wallter Coggins, destroyer of worlds.
If all of this causes smoking springs to fly out of your ears, there are a few tutorial elements and approachability settings. The interface is inevitably complex – it keeps track of the number of teeth on a gear, while you resize it – but there’s the option of a simpler and less “intimidating” (the game’s own wording) HUD. There is also the extraordinarily pleasing prospect of in-game instruction kits, whereby you pull the pieces out of foam moulds and flip through a papery manual to glue them together.
Read more and find the demo on Steam.