Machine Yearning review - "A Memory Machine"

• Machine Yearning is a game for buffing the memory
• It's quick to play and makes you feel good about remembering your choices
• Think of it as an alternative to learning a language or looking at silly dances

The golbal attention span has dropped so much that there's a good chance you didn't notice that I spelled "global" incorrectly at the start of this sentence. But have no fear! There are ways to keep your mind sharp - and one of them is by testing your memory.

You may not remember what you had for breakfast nine days ago (because why would you need to), but Machine Yearning can help, possibly. Tiny Little Keys brings us a 2D-pixel game to challenge our memory with the twist that we are creating the memories to remember. If you're still with me, we can dive into why this could be a good thing.

What is Machine Yearning?

For some games, it's difficult to know if there's any lore or story taking place, so sometimes you have to fill in the blanks yourself. Machine Yearning is one of those games, and gives us the ripe opportunity to invent a whole plot for it.

In an unknown future on a planet where machines and organics live in harmony, the collective juicy brain is at risk of forgetting. To fix this problem, the Robotic Board of Education and Ethical Experimentation decided to create a program that would help strengthen memory. You are one such organic who has been called in to test the program and see whether it works.

Machine Yearning fulfilled

We spend so much of our time mindlessly scrolling and swiping through our devices that we need things to stop us in our tracks. Machine Yearning is one of those things, and it helps in several ways.

The first is its appealing presentation. Any form of feedback feels good if it's flashy and energetic, which is what this game does.

When you're playing, the screens quickly convey the information while the surroundings give a nice background to keep you focused. You want to reach the end of each level just to prove that you can do it and earn all the sweet fanfare.

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Then there's the fact that the challenge is created by you. The game works as such: you get a screen with a made-up word at the top and random shapes on the screen below. You need to assign a shape to that word and then remember it whenever the prompt asks you for it. It gives some insight into your ways of thinking and these essentially become your strategies.

Do you focus on letters or associate them with different words? Do you assign an idea based on the structure of the word and then pick a shape that matches? Do certain letters and shapes just GO together? That's on you with the challenge increasing with more shapes and even colours being thrown into the mix. You also get power-ups as a pick-me-up to keep the ride going, but it's more satisfying to see how far you can get on your abilities alone.

Missed Machine Yearning

This is another one of those games that is difficult to criticise because it walks the line between game and tool. At its core, it's an activity for testing and training your memory with several different modes to apply different limits that change it up in small ways. It does what it's meant to do and it encourages you to keep going.

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You get a lot of small cosmetic and gameplay rewards frequently until all you have to push for is the next milestone. There's nothing inherently wrong with such a model, but it does run the risk of feeling like a chore or a task that nags you from the vast library of your mobile device (*cough* Duolingo *cough*).

Yearning for Machine Yearning

Machine Yearning is a learning game about testing your memory by assigning shapes and colours to silly words and seeing if you can remember which is which. It's fast, simple, and effective as it makes you want to do just a little bit more.

It can start to feel more like an activity that is just asking to be put off, but can work as a nice alternative to mindlessly scrolling through videos of people making the same joke until the end of time. If you have any sort of yearning, you can look to the Robotic Board of Education and Ethical Experimentation for a machine to help you remember why.

Machine Yearning review - "A Memory Machine"

A chance to take time to play with weird words, and weirder shapes, to see if you can remember how you organized the weirdness within a small program.