Fantastic Contraption Classic 1 & 2

Played this game as a kid and started playing again recently, trying to complete the campaign levels I was unable to complete back then. It's still just as fun as it was. :)

As much as I *deeply* loved FC 1 & 2 back in the day, I just CAN NOT recommend a new player to buy this at the price of $10 (or even $5) unless it’s solely to support the devs. I’m glad the game didn’t disappear with Flash, but this Steam version is exclusively for archival or reliving your nostalgia. It lacks all functionality you’d expect from a PC game in the last decade, like really basic QoL stuff. No settings menu, the volume is literally on or off, the online functionality is essential to the game yet barely functional (and allegedly very insecure), the game resolution is small and can’t be changed, it seems to be stuck in a halloween mode and the sky is full of obnoxious ghost clouds, to switch between FC 1 and 2 you have to change your boot options, FC 1 is missing hotkeys for several functions, etc. Please still support Northway Games though, it seems they’ve made some fantastic games since FC back in 2008. They were very upfront about this just being for archival, I respect that!

The 2008 physics-puzzle game, preserved on Steam! I played this for hundreds, if not thousands of hours way back in the day. Fantastic Contraption is a deceptively simple game, but that simplicity leaves lots of room for users to create complicated solutions to levels if they need to, and complicated levels for others to solve if they want to. Sometimes it can be very fiddly, tedious, and frustrating to work on a solution, but once you finally get the goal pieces into the goal area, it all becomes worth it! So glad this game was ported to steam, so I can continue to spend hundreds, if not thousands of hours playing it!