Mother Machine Harnesses The Power Of Weird Little Guys In Open Beta This Weekend
Listen to your mother.
Never underestimate the power of a weird little guy. Whether you just throw one or two in your game — like Honkai Star Rail’s Pom-Pom — or build an entire title around them, weird little guys are essential for a game’s vibes. Based on that enduring principle alone, I’ve had my eye on the multiplayer puzzle platformer Mother Machine for some time now, and an open beta this weekend gives everyone the chance to check it out for free on Steam.
The Mother Machine open beta runs from the morning of Friday, November 22 to Monday, November 25. All you need to do is head to the game’s Steam page and join the beta there. Several levels will be available during the open beta weekend, showcasing a few of the game’s biomes and the hub world where you can upgrade and customize your own weird little guy. A developer livestream is set for November 22 at 12 pm Eastern, where players can ask questions of the development team and into jump into the game with them.
Mother Machine is all about family, just like The Fast and the Furious.
Mother Machine takes place far in the future, on a world that was colonized then abandoned by humans. Left behind by its makers, an AI took to creating new life of its own to keep it running (and keep it company). You play as one of the little gremlins created by the AI, running through platforming levels with up to three other players to collect the resources your Mother needs — and eventually discover the story of the planet’s past and the mother machine’s objectives.
Developer Maschinen-Mensch is best known for the Curious Expedition games, a series of story-focused roguelikes that use procedural generation to create unique stories for each playthrough. Maschinen-Mensch is putting procedural generation to work once again in Mother Machine, building a unique level to explore every time you play.
Mother Machine’s gremlins are created to keep their robotic mom company.
While Mother Machine is playable solo, it’s clearly built for multiplayer. Completing missions for Mother rewards your gremlin with mutations, which offer skills that let you “fart your way out of caves into safety, barf up projectiles to throw at foes (and friends) or use your chameleon skin to avoid danger altogether,” according to Maschinen-Mensch. Like its procedurally generated levels, each gremlin will become unique through its choice of mutations. The core of its multiplayer mode seems to be earning upgrades that complement your party members’ skills, then combining your distinct abilities to tackle the game’s platforming and combat challenges. That should make getting a group of gremlins together both more effective and more fun than heading into the caves alone.
Even before you get into the mechanics, Mother Machine’s art style is more than enough to make an impression. Its creepy caves and characters alike are rendered in a style that looks a lot like stop-motion animation, which I’m frankly always excited to see.
Evolving new abilities to help your teammates is central to Mother Machine.
The developer has compared its creation to the likes of Spelunky, Deep Rock Galactic, and Oddworld, which all seem fair, and I’d also add KarmaZoo to that list. Published in late 2023, KarmaZoo is a co-op platformer that doesn’t just reward cooperation, but requires it. Mother Machine doesn’t look like it’s pushing quite as far in centering itself on players being nice to each other, but it’s playing in the same territory both with its multiplayer mechanics and its story, which Maschinen-Mensch says covers “the limits of technology, the nature of loneliness and the power of family.”
While competitive games continue to dominate the mainstream multiplayer scene, I’m excited to see games like Mother Machine focus on cooperation instead. Its mixture of cuteness and chaos seems right up my alley. With its free weekend beta up and running, now is the time to see if life as a weird little guy might be for you.
