Contraption Zack is an early nineties release that can be compared to a number of games such as Treasure Trap, Chip’s Challenge or the Incredible Machine. It successfully combines puzzle elements with action and strategy. It was released for play on the Amiga and MS-DOS bearing PC by Mindscape Incorporated after development by Presage Software Incorporated. It plays from the third person perspective.
The game centers around a bumbling young repair technician in Contraption Zack. He has been hired to work at the Gadget Company, but his first day on the job doesn’t really go so well.
Some of his older but less mature coworkers swipe his tools, leaving him in a difficult spot when it comes to repairs. Moreover, they have laid little traps and pranks all over the factory to hinder his recovery of his equipment.
Zack will go on a quest to find his tools and will have to fix some fairly complicated and interconnected machinery in the factory as he navigates through over sixty rooms. There will be some traps that are simply part of the factory situation and others that were placed in the way with malicious intent by the aforementioned nasty colleagues. To bypass the traps and also to fix the machinery (as well as find his tools
one by one) Contraption Zack will have to solve a variety of puzzles that offer a range of difficulty and direction. Some are very inventory based and just putting object A into object B solves it. Others are much more complex and require a logical thought process and multiple steps.
The only word of warning with Contraption Zack comes with the saving process. Unlike some games, you can actually save this game, but you will begin upon reload at the start of each area instead of the exact place where you left off. It is important that you host multiple save files. Once you bypass an area and move on to the next, it is impossible to return to that spot within the course of the game. You have to reload and start again from a different save if you want to go backwards. While this seems like no big deal or a useless tidbit of information, bear in mind that the game will not tell you if you are missing a vital piece of inventory or that you forgot to do something before it allows you to move on to the next level. You may HAVE to restart. The levels are fairly small, so there isn’t much to repeat, but intelligent saving will save you a lot of time in this fun and clever little strategy adventure.
