Cogs Message Board

Hey, Mountain Lion users -- thanks for your patience while we worked around some bugs in the OSX 10.8 graphics drivers. With the newest changes, I've fixed the flickering borders that could sometimes show up in fullscreen mode. I also modified shadow rendering to bypass a graphics driver bug that was causing a really tragic crash.

Independent developer Lazy 8 launched steampunk puzzler Cogs on PC in 2009; that same year Cogs was an IndieCade finalist. In 2010, the game snagged an IGF nod and won $100,000 in the Indie Game Challenge, and in 2011, Cogs was released for Mac gamers. Three years later, Cogs is still picking up steam and its quality is the reason Irrational Games approached Lazy 8 to assemble BioShock Infinite: Industrial Revolution.

"The BioShock Infinite team at Irrational was already aware of Cogs, the award-winning puzzle game that we launched in 2009," Lazy 8 founder Rob Jagnow tells Joystiq. "They knew they wanted to create something similar - challenging puzzles in a steampunk style - so they approached Lazy 8 Studios in the hope that we could help design a puzzle game with the same level of polish."

Turns out Lazy 8 could do just that. Industrial Revolution is available now, for free, with pre-orders of BioShock Infinite. It's a flash puzzle game that has players fight on the side of BioShock Infinite's warring factions Vox Populi or the Founders, and generates in-game goods for next year's full Infinite release. Industrial Revolution comes with its own innate depth, however: The choices players make on the first playthrough are permanent and the game can't be replayed with different allegiances.

"It's true that Industrial Revolution is designed to be played only once, and while you're playing, you'll be offered choices about which factions you want to support. Not every player may realize it, but the choices you make will impact how the story is told to you. And once those choices are made, you can't go back and make them again. They're permanent. While that may not make everyone happy, I think it makes for a really compelling player experience. It gives a lot more weight to your actions and their consequences."

Updates to Cogs have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

By popular demand, we just patched in Steam Cloud support for Cogs! This means that your progress will be tied to your Steam account and transfer automatically between computers, even if you're switching between Mac and PC.

A potentially habitable planet has been discovered outside our solar system and, right now, the eXoplanetary Research Institute is looking for volunteers to explore the surface. You’d be controlling a rover and gathering data on the planet and its inhabitants, whether flora or fauna. Sound good? That’s the premise of the new game from Lazy 8 Studios, makers of Cogs. It’s called Extrasolar and it’s nigh on impossible to figure out how it’ll play at the moment since the marketing takes the form of a fictional website for a fictional company. We’re promised a narrative experience and it sounds like players will work together to unveil the planet’s mysteries over time. The website is a good read and there’s at least a polite nod toward actual space science history. Hopefully that will carry through to the game. Trailer/recruitment video below.

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A new puzzle game to twist your gears.

The popular PC puzzler goes mobile with the iPhone and iPod Touch.