You’ll Spend More Time Filling Notebooks Than Actually Playing It
We reviewed Mech Shelf in a kind of double-bill with Pay to Path. While they’re very different games, they share a great deal. They’re both from Afil Games, which is the obvious connection, but they also take established puzzle games and fling them in interesting new directions. And the result is much the same: they’re both admirable, but they’re missing vital features that would actually make these new directions fly further. I can’t help feeling that they both need a sequel or two before they can meet their potential.
Mech Shelf looks and plays like a shape-sorting game. There’s a chance you’ve played them on Xbox, likely from Afil Games. The games in this genre are pretty simple: you get given a grid and some shapes. Your job is to fill the grid completely – not a single square can be left over. But you’re limited to the shapes that you were given, and they might include some big, awkward ones to make the task challenging.
Throwing Shapes On The Dancefloor
We’ve reviewed oodles of these on the Xbox (Lucha Align being one of them), and we tend to have the same criticism: there are too many winning permutations. When you’ve got a hundred different ways of solving a puzzle, then solving them stops being rewarding. You could blindly chuck bricks onto a grid and complete it half the time.
Mech Shelf has a solution, borrowed from the back of your favourite newspaper. It cross-breeds the shape-placing genre with Picross, nonogram puzzles. And the result makes utter sense, while also making you wish that you were doing it on paper rather than with a controller in hand.
Picross/nonogram puzzles traditionally give you a grid, and then attributes numbers to the columns and rows. A ‘1,1’ in a column means that, within that column, there is a coloured in 1-block, separated from another coloured-in 1 block. You don’t know where those 1 blocks are placed, necessarily, or how distant they are from each other, but you have a clue that will combine with the other clues to form a picture.
We Were Tessel-Late To The Party
Customarily, these puzzles have been done with pencil and paper. You scribble notes and colour in squares, watching the picture grow over time. There certainly aren’t any pre-made blocks to deal with. And this is where Mech Shelf starts getting interesting.
You’re not scribbling in the squares in Mech Shelf. You have a toybox of shapes that replace the scribbling. Where you would have scribbled two blocks into a row, you will be placing a two-block instead. Part 1 of the puzzle is to work out which squares need ‘filling in’; part 2 of the puzzle is rummaging throughout your collection of shapes and wondering how you can tessellate them together to make the required shape.
I’m a big fan of Picross games – I have completed far, far too many of them on my Nintendo Switch – so I was all over this mash-up. Initially, it made sense (even if I was thoroughly confused by the numbers having different colours when they didn’t need different colours). Picross and shape-sorting games share a grid. They share a desire to fill a grid, but not necessarily every square. They’re a decent marriage.
After the first five levels or so, though, I knew something was up. As the puzzles became more complicated, I realised that Mech Shelf wasn’t going to give me tools to solve it.
Pencils Are – Unfortunately – Not Supplied
Normally, in a Picross game, your solution grows over time. You make a series of deductions, scribbling in black squares, and a number of eliminations, too. You put dots or similar in squares where you know nothing can be placed. Through these deductions and eliminations, you slowly form a complete puzzle.
In Mech Shelf, you can’t do this. You can’t stub in the odd black square for a correct square or a dot for an empty square. You can’t make notes on the grid at all. You can only place your blocks, fully-formed as they are, onto the grid as a substitute for those two things.
Blocks don’t do a good enough job. It soon became clear, at least to me, that I was going to have to draw the grids onto paper, solve them there first and only THEN move the bricks into the correct placement. Because that second step is just as hard as the first: you need to work out which blocks, rotated into which orientation, will satisfy the puzzle. And I would challenge anyone to be able to do both steps in their heads. The average person can’t do that.
We Began To Feel A Little Pi-Cross
Mech Shelf desperately needed to crib some of the features from Picross games. With the ability to scribble onto the grid, to make notes, Mech Shelf would have been a delight. It would have elevated the Picross genre to new heights: where solving the puzzle is only the half of it. Using shapes to fill the grid would have been a satisfying next step.
It meant that roughly 75% of my time playing Mech Shelf was, well, technically not spent playing it. I’d be in my notebook, drawing grids and solving them, only returning to the game once I had a plan. And I couldn’t help thinking that the 75% where I wasn’t playing the video game should really have been spent in the video game.
I’ve got a huge amount of appreciation and admiration for Mech Shelf. Holding a shape-sorting game in one hand and Picross in the other, then smooshing them together, is pocket genius. But Afil are masters of shape-sorting games, not Picross games, and it shows. Afil Games needed to pilfer the mechanics and tools that make Picross games work with a controller in hand, because what they have in Mech Shelf simply doesn’t cut it.
Important Links
Mech Shelf Wants You To Put Every Piece In Its Place – https://www.thexboxhub.com/mech-shelf-wants-you-to-put-every-piece-in-its-place/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/mech-shelf-xbox-series/9njwq8p6xnb7
Buy for Xbox One – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/mech-shelf-xbox-one/9p4ktn53dk3m
Buy for Windows PC – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/mech-shelf-windows/9nbmzt5mrj6l
