You're a better pilot than I if you can get this Mechwarrior meets HighFleet indie’s mech to do literally anything

Stairs, the mech's natural foe

We do love a good diegetic interface here at the treehouse, whether that’s the analogue radar twisties of HighFleet, or the myriad hefty flickables of PVKK (Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant. Duh.) The fifth mech jam is currently happening over at Itch.io, and the clear standout for me thus far is Armored Shell Nightjar. It’s a first person pilot-em-up that puts you in the cockpit of a grasshoppery rust-bucket carrying out a critical mission on an industrial desert planet. The more the intro text stresses the importance of this mission, the more guiltily useless I feel, because I cannot get this beautifully run-down mech to do anything of note, unless you count violently hopping into walls to be notable.

Image credit: Warkus/Modus Interactive

Peek the interface above. The pull-a-magig in the top right lets you hover for a few seconds. The big shiny button makes you hop, and as far as I can tell, the dial on the far right tunes the speed and height of these hops, but also makes you reverse sometimes? The screen on the far left lets you tune your hover, but maybe also your jump? The second-to-far left widget that looks like a coffee grinder moves your horizontal view, and the arrows to the right of the screen tweaks your vertical. Unless my useless brain deceives me, there aren’t any shortcut keys, so you’re doing all this twisting and clicking manually.

I am left both utterly smitten and deeply unsure of how to make any progress up the winding set of steps that appear to be my only means of progress. Oh, clunky boy. Please, reveal to me your inner workings.

I should make clear than none of this is a criticism. I love how esoteric this all is, the place where medieval obtuseness meets futuristic technology being the mech experience. Also, if my application for King Of Games is successful, every videogame will be legally required to use cutscenes that look like this. I think I’d most readily class Armored Shell Nightjar as a puzzle game, then. There’s very little story, but even beyond the diegetic interface, there’s a plucky kind of mechanical poetry to the way this mech operates, clearly not meant for frontline warfare. It feels like a relic even within its own time. Perhaps cobbled together by some desperate resistance from parts of much sleeker and more powerful mechs from ages long past?

Or perhaps the mech actually houses an extremely advanced autopilot that makes all the interface wrangling unnecessary, and it's having a grand old time trolling me. Either way, I’m a fan. This is one sided relationship, sure, but I'll endure it.

Armored Shell Nightjar is made by Warkus and Modus Interactive, both of whose catalogues I’m keen to dive into. Warkus especially has a tasty selection of vibrant retro oddities, like this creature collecting RPG inspired by Dragon Quest and Monster Rancher, my beloved.