Backlash: A Gear Puzzle Game

Every board has exactly one logical solution — no brute force, no luck. Build a Victorian automaton gear by gear until the whole machine turns as one.

Ironhaven, 1887. The Sovereign — the great steam engine at the heart of the city — is dying. A catastrophic backlash has spread through its gear train: microscopic gaps between teeth, compounding with every revolution. The city grows cold.

Human hands are too crude to reach the fault. So you build CASPAR — a Computational Automaton for Steam-Powered Analysis and Repair — assembled gear by gear and sent into the Sovereign to correct what no one else can reach.

BUILD ONE CONTINUOUS MACHINE Backlash isn't a stack of disconnected puzzles — it's one machine you assemble across four chapters. Every gear you place stays placed, becoming the foundation the next section meshes onto. Finish a chapter and the organ you built docks into CASPAR's growing body, spinning and driving the next.

FOUR SYSTEMS, ONE AUTOMATON

• The Drive Heart — CASPAR's power core, a radial gear-train heart
• The Timing Mind — a precision calculating mechanism of gears, belts, and chains
• The Iron Frame — a skeleton of shafts and gears, CASPAR's body and limbs
• First Light — the ocular core; the eyes open as every system turns as one

READ THE MACHINE, NOT THE HINTS Sockets don't tell you what fits. Gears mesh by size and geometry — small meets medium edge-on, medium meets large on the diagonal — and you work out which piece belongs where by reading how the machine wants to turn. Get it wrong and the mechanism jams; get it right and it locks in, running for good.

MORE THAN GEARS As CASPAR grows more intricate, so do the tools: rigid shafts couple gears that can't mesh directly, chains and belts carry motion — and drive — across open gaps, and couplers correct a gear spinning the wrong way. Every mechanic you learn keeps returning, woven deeper into later machines.

NEW GAME+ AND ENDLESS Finish the story and rebuild CASPAR from scratch on a harder New Game+ pass, with the training wheels off. Clear that and Endless mode opens: procedurally generated machines that grow larger and more elaborate the deeper you climb, layering in shafts, belts, and couplers as you go. Your best depth and lifetime solves are tracked, with dozens of in-app achievements to chase.

A QUIET, MECHANICAL PUZZLE GAME No timers, no combat, no fail states you can't undo — just gears, logic, and the satisfaction of watching a machine you built actually run. Free to play, with the occasional ad between chapters and Endless machines. Can you fix the backlash before Ironhaven runs out of steam?