Archer Maclean’s Mercury

Archer Maclean has been making video games since the early 1980s, and mostly has a reputation for building extremely realistic pool and snooker simulations. His latest game, Archer Maclean’s Mercury, bears a vague family resemblance to those games; they’re all about physics, geometry, and the weirdly pleasing experience of seeing little objects roll across a flat surface. Mercury, however, is also about maintaining equilibrium — both within the game and within yourself — while solving a series of frustratingly difficult puzzles.

Mercury is a descendant of those old wooden labyrinth toys, the ones in which you tilt a platform by twiddling two knobs, attempting to steer a little marble towards the exit without falling into one of the many holes that riddle the field. Here Maclean replaced the marble with a blob of liquefied metal and the simple wooden platform with a series of increasingly elaborate structures. In the early stages, these structures are relatively simple platforms with only a couple of chunky obstacles to stand in your way. As you progress to the more advanced stages, though, they become more and more complex, adding multiple floors, removing guard rails, and imposing additional requirements on you in order to pass. These requirements can be as straightforward as hitting a couple of targets placed at opposite ends of a maze, or they can be maddeningly complex, involving things like splitting your blob into multiple, smaller blobs, steering both blobs simultaneously through filters that change their colors, and recombining them to form a blob of a third color before hitting the target.

The game’s Rube Goldberg-like setups aren’t made any easier by the control scheme. As with those old labyrinth puzzles, you aren’t in direct control of the object that you are trying to manipulate, but instead control the field that it moves across. And as with those old labyrinth puzzles, it’s extremely difficult to control things with the kind of precision necessary to get your poor blob past all those pitfalls and traps. It’s awfully easy to over-steer in one direction (sending your blob careening down a too-steep grade) and then to overcompensate (giving the poor blob whiplash as it tumbles back). On top of everything else, each level has a time limit, and when time starts getting low, the ensuing panic can cause you to start whipping the platform around in desperation, sending droplets of liquid metal flying all over the place and making a terrible mess.

The messiness — or at least the potential for it — is one of the draws of Mercury. Your blob rolls, bumps, and wobbles convincingly, as if you had actually broken open a thermometer and scattered its contents across a flat surface (a video game, however, carries slightly less risk of poisoning). The temptation is to play with Mercury as you would with a stray bit of quicksilver: the blob’s sinuous, flowing motion is almost hypnotic, and quite a bit of enjoyment can be had by simply rolling it around and watching it move. If we make a distinction between games (which have rules and goals and players and such) and toys (which are more freeform objects of amusement), Mercury would seem to have the makings of a pretty neat toy.

So it’s perhaps unfortunate that the game is so strict about being a game. Every level is meticulously designed to provide only what is needed to get you from point A to point B, or to obstruct you in a very specific way; there’s very little room in the levels for the kind of spontaneous play that the system seems so well-suited for. In addition to the omnipresent time limit that prevents any kind of extended goofing off, there are strict limits on the amount of mercury you can lose without having to stop and start the whole thing over. The developer’s message here seems to be clear: spaces in Mercury are puzzles to be solved rather than fields to be played in.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a game staying focused on its goals and trying to keep the player focused on them as well. What’s truly frustrating about Mercury isn’t that it lacks opportunities for freeform play, but that it builds up such a need for it. Controlling the platform to move the blob around is tricky; when combined with the time limit, it’s very difficult; when you get to later stages with their huge layouts, steep ramps, crazy drop-offs, and strict requirements, the game can be downright maddening. After the umpteenth time you fall off the side of the board because your fingers just weren’t steady enough to navigate that narrow ramp, you tend to start looking for a way to blow off some steam, but Mercury offers no relief to the frustrated player.

In fact, it’s a little odd that a game that requires a surgeon’s touch and a saint’s patience would be released on a portable game system like the PSP. The level of concentration that the game demands isn’t necessarily the level that a person has when playing on an airplane or at a bus stop. It’s a bit awkward to be squinting over your screen in public, and one good bump is liable to send your blob rolling off into the ether. At home, you can give Mercury the proper care it requires to be fully enjoyed. But on the road? You might want to play something a little less taxing.