Also on: PC, Xbox One, PS4, PS5
Publisher: Dolores Entertainment
Developer: Dolores Entertainment/Jamie Gavin
Medium: Digital
Players: 1
Online: No
ESRB: T
I?ve got to hand it to The Enigma Machine. In a year where I?ve played several games that felt like weird lost games from the PS1 era, it?s probably stranger than all of them put together.
It starts out so relatively normal, too. You read a bit of text from an AI computer trying to decontaminate itself, you enter a blocky, polygon-y world, you find a code, then you go back and enter the code into a terminal. Totally straightforward.
And then everything flies wildly off the rails…possibly in a good way? But possibly not. It?s kind of hard to tell.
What?s more, I can?t even ? and don?t want to ? fully explain why or how it flies off the rails: since it?s so short and so strange, it feels like it would be a spoiler to reveal much of anything about it. All I know is one moment you?re reading text and the next you?re walking through a world that?s literally falling apart and breaking up around you, and it gets so bad that you feel like you need to restart your Switch just to be sure it hasn?t actually broken. Whatever game you think you might be getting into based on its screenshots, I can assure you: it?s not that.
But The Enigma Machine is worth playing. You?ll need to be in the mood for something very short, and very weird, but in the end, you?ll be left with a game that leaves you thinking about it for a while afterwards.
Dolores Entertainment provided us with an Enigma Machine Switch code for review purposes.