No moment in games is quite as special as the instance of the fingerpost. This is a rather precise term I once discovered for that exact point in time where something clicks. You suddenly get it. What was confused and difficult becomes immediate and comprehensible. The airplane blasts out of the clouds and sunlight floods the cabin.
Whatever it’s called, I suspect we spend a lot of our lives chasing this moment. A moment that in games is often accompanied by the crunch and twist of a key in a lock, unseen gears moving, unseen parts turning and clicking into place. Welcome, then, to Automatoys, which gives you this moment every few seconds, it seems, without the moment ever seeming cheap or unearned. The instance of the fingerpost? Here is a field of fingerposts, and each one of them matters.
Automatoys lets you lose on a selection of wonderful, complex, improbable machines. They’re little sculptures, really, characterful towers made of chunky plastic – I know the exact plastic, and after a few seconds playing so will you – and the objective is always the same. Put the coin in to release the little ball. Then move the ball from the start point to the exit, wherever start point and exit may be. How do you do this? You do this by understanding what the machine does, which means in these cases, understanding what the machine is doing at that moment.
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