Principia gameplay review: a physics puzzle that keeps you challenged

Written by the same Bithack devs that did Apparatus, the $3.59 Principia follows in its footsteps by requiring you to build perplexing machinery, using a wide variety of tools and elements. You can satisfy your architectural calling by designing towers or bridges, or your engineering cravings by making cars or rockets, with the help of no less than 150 puzzle pieces. Some say the sheer quantity of elements you can use make the game too complex, but that's the whole point, we'd argue, as there's more than one way to skin a cat here, and in fact the number of combinations you can use is mind-boggling.

The basic premise is to lead a robot (no, not the green one) to an extraction point, and the tools and contraptions you must slap together in order to do this, will certainly challenge your imagination. You start small with the puzzle challenges, trying to guide the robot using planks, waypoints, trampolines and other paraphernalia. Sometimes you have to guide more than one robot, and they all go in different directions, encountering various dangers on the way you have to circumvent. 

The more you go further, the more demanding this game becomes, letting you build electronics like calculators or even other robots, in order to complete the task. There is an adventure mode, too, that lets you destroy things like an elephant in a souvenir store when the levels line up against you. In addition, Principia has a great community at the source link below, where you can preview and install people's homebrew adventures, and give them your thumbs up for ingenuity, ensuring much more game time than the developers planned originally.

If you want a challenging mobile game that will keep you always thinking, Principia will fit that need, and then some. The ever-increasing complexity of tasks, and the mind-boggling variety of solutions to finish them ensure that you won't get bored for a second during gameplay, and might even get frustrated a time or two, but that goes with the territory of a great gameplay.

Adventures screenshots courtesy of Principiagame.com