Automaton Lung has this compelling, unknowable mystique about. All the expected essentials of a classic game adventure are here – the platforming challenges, the collectibles, the power-ups, the exploration. And yet there’s always a sense of missing context, an intentional emptiness. That search for greater meaning bolsters the already liminal atmosphere. As a player you are made tensely aware of the role context and narrative play in feeling purpose and achievement. In their absence, the mind cannot help but attempt to create them. It’s role play in the wake of abstraction. In the game’s final moments that search takes on even greater weight – “if I leave this mortal coil I deserve to feel some pride”.
The hollow disposition within Automaton Lung is best appreciated on its native platform, the 3DS, as navigating its unnatural, abstract terrain mirrored the uncanny emptiness which came with navigating the 3DS eShop in its dying days, a barren landscape which felt deserted well before its final twilight. But even blown up onto a high definition monitor, it’s a great jaunt through alien landscapes.
The architecture is artificial, the terrain laid out in ways which are decidedly navigable only in a video game space, where double jumps and hover boards propel you past human limitation. The environments play with verticality in some really interesting and uncommon ways for a collectathon. Even for a video game, movement is strange, with that double jump really part of a boost action, and the hover board sports pitiful acceleration and turning while also boasting a slow fall and a high speed ceiling; it all makes for peculiar but potent navigation options. Combat is unwieldy, either brain-dead with the aggressive lock-on, or clumsy without it. Enemies, sparse as they are, are easy to ignore, only adding to the desolate feeling throughout the world. There are multiple weapons to find, but they’re underutilized, in part because the game inadvertently leads you away from finding them until you’re well along into your adventure. The weapons also have no exploratory utility – the most obvious example: There’s no cracked wall to blow up with the explosive gun, sadly.
The core goal is to amass collectibles to eventually unlock the gate to the finale. Automaton Lung does a great job of distilling the essence of gratification – it’s a video game, and it feels good to see the number go up. So too does it delight to pick up lots of speed and soar across a level with the hover board. And I still feel such wonder when exiting the elevator at the bottom floor and entering a ship to wander that wide open overworld, free to explore numerous new locales, teeming as they are with far more collectibles than those earlier, smaller areas.
Exploring Automaton Lung is such a delightful experience. The rooms are memorably unique, and the world feels like the husk of an unfinished game, but in a liminal way that feels intentional and realized. It became one of my favorite 3DS games in its last days, and it remains a compelling adventure even when divorced of that meta-context.
