Backlash - A Gear Puzzle Game

IRONHAVEN, 1887.

The Sovereign — the great steam engine at the city's heart — is dying. A catastrophic backlash has spread through its gear train: microscopic gaps between teeth, compounding with every revolution. The city grows cold.

The engineers cannot reach the fault. Human hands are too large. Their tools too crude.

You are the Inventor. Build CASPAR — a Computational Automaton for Steam-Powered Analysis and Repair — precise enough to enter The Sovereign, find the flaw, and correct it from within.


BUILD THE MACHINE

Drag gears from the rack onto the empty sockets of a Victorian engineering plate. Fill them all and the machine tries to turn on its own, power spreading out from the drive gear through every shaft, chain and coupler you laid down. Get it right and the whole assembly moves as one.


NOTHING TO GUESS

Every board has exactly one logical solution. Gear sizes mesh by strict rules, so each socket can be reasoned out from the parts already around it — there is nothing to brute-force and no board that needs luck. The rack holds exactly what the machine ahead of you needs, so a part that cannot fit flashes and drops back into its bin, and a part already placed can be swapped with a tap.


SOLVE IT CLEAN

Full marks go to a section solved on the first run. Pull the machine apart and try as often as you like — nothing is ever lost — but a build that runs first time is worth more than one that got there eventually.


THE WORKSHOP

The story assembles CASPAR one system at a time, each with its own machine to finish. New Game+ replays the campaign with the training wheels off. Endless builds fresh machines forever, growing deeper the further in you get. Achievements track the milestones across all of them.


MADE TO BE PICKED UP ANYWHERE

No account. No sign-in. No timers, no lives, and nothing to wait for. Plays entirely offline. Sound, music, animation and haptics each toggle on their own, and you choose the artwork that hangs in your workshop.