This holiday season, I’m going to review a different module, game or supplement every day. I haven’t sought any of them out, they’ve been sent to me, so it’s all surprises, all the way. I haven’t planned or allocated time for this, so while I’m endeavouring to bring the same attention to these reviews, it might provide a challenge, but at least, I’ll be bringing attention to some cool stuff!

The Cog That Remains is a 28 page solo journaling game by Seamus Conneely, about being a mechanic that maintains mecha in a Gundam-y world.

This is a Wretched & Alone game, so you’ve got tokens, dice, a deck of cards and a jenga tower, which in basically every Wretched & Alone game is way too much for me; a grab-bag of props that feels like you couldn’t make up your mind. In this it feels perfect, reflecting the way a mechanics’ workshop is messy. For me, this is a goldilocks concept for the system. That’s nice for me, because now I can say “I don’t like Wretched & Alone games, because they have too much going on, except for the Cog That Remains”. For those not familiar, in this case the jenga tower is the mecha, and when it falls your pilot is killed in battle. On a mission, you roll a die, which determines how many cards you draw from a standard deck of cards, and those cards determine the prompts for your journal entries, and if it makes sense, instruct you to pull from your tower, bringing you closer to the end of the game. When your pilot dies: Write a eulogy. Get a new pilot. Play again.

I complained in earlier reviews of prompt-based games during Critique Navidad (Dead After Dinner and Hwæt!) that they don’t give me enough world-building and meat to want to play them. The prompts are often intended to be sparks, but are so vague as to not spark anything in me. This is a huge contrast to the more traditional games I’ve reviewed for Critique Navidad, which have leant hard into worldbuilding and lore. The first set of prompts in the Cog That Remains are pretty anaemic — these are the ones that help you create your mechanic — where they are the perfect moment to make them dynamic and evocative and help you build your very specific world. This reliance on my prior knowledge of Gundam is a huge flaw here and reliance on prior knowledge of genre is a huge flaw in prompt-driven games in general. Think about the specificity of Fiasco: The structure and mechanics beget the genre, not the fact that I’ve seen a Cohen Brothers movie. The card prompts are better, but still generic: They should be written like a Gundam episode, they should feature characters and impacts, in my opinion.

I think there’s a huge amount of unfulfilled potential in the “Veteran mechanic” section for campaign play, too, as your player gets wearier and wiser, to speak about the hopelessness of war, and to speak to the subtext in Gundam around how pilots are disposable resources and are often child soldiers. There’s something to be said in that context of aging past your dying peers, or the dynamics between mechanics who live until old age and the pilots who die young. But nothing here leans into those themes. To some degree it speaks to the increasing disposability of indie TTRPGs in the age of itch.io, where someone with resources can make a beautiful, complete product in a few weeks, but when it takes only a few weeks, the deeper consideration of the meaning of the text just isn’t there. Are we making products, here, or art? I think we should be making art, and to do that a little more introspection is required.

All of that said, you know what’s cool? Mecha. You know what’s fun? Pretending to a mecha mechanic, a new perspective on the genre. The mechanics (of the game, that is) here are spot on for the messiness of patching up a giant robot, the tower is analogous to a giant robot in a more literal, physical way than in other games of the same ilk. The Cog That Remains is a pretty cool game if you’re willing to bring your own deep knowledge of Mobile Suit Gundam to the party.

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