Ignore these meddling hooligans, get back to work!
Top-left, clockwise:
Top-left, clockwise:
"what does this factory make? nobody knows!"
A vast factory complex or machine that can fill up a building, a city or even a whole planet. Its purpose may not be readily apparent, probably due to the sheer size of the thing. Pumping pistons act as elevators or crushers, conveyor belts cover half the floors, and you can expect something to try to squash you flat sooner or later. Needless to say, this would not be a fun place to work. The Eternal Engine may be the insides of the Forgotten Superweapon, an active factory, a huge vehicle, or a Polluted Wasteland for a technologically inclined Big Bad. In either case, you usually run into it as one of the final stages.
Enemies are usually Mooks, Mecha-Mooks, even more Mooks, sentry guns, and, probably more than any other level save Lethal Lava Land, the environment itself. Expect conveyor belts to end over Bottomless Pits, pipes leaking superheated steam if not fire, exposed electrical conduits, and huge vats and/or nasty spills of fluorescent green chemicals and toxic waste. Also expect a hall of giant alternating pistons. Expect hectic, intense and sometimes electronic music to match the level theme.
Not surprisingly, Eternal Engine often fills in for, or is combined with, Lethal Lava Land. In which case, either the machine runs on geothermal power, or it may have vast bodies and such of molten metal rather than lava. Expect Convection, Schmonvection to play out in full force either way. For other levels taking place in and around artificial structures, see Down in the Dumps, Down the Drain and Metropolis Level.
Named after a stage in Sonic Adventure 2 (which was actually in a giant space station if you want to get technical, but it sounds cooler, so be quiet). In games with space age settings, this level will likely take place on an Industrial World.
See also No OSHA Compliance, Nightmarish Factory. Also see Womb Level, the living version. If the player is responsible for the existence of the factory, see Factory-Building Game. You may also have been looking for Perpetual Motion Machine or Enormous Engine.
Examples:
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Video Games
Action
- Bounty Hunter: Over the course of the game's story, Jango must pursue an important bounty through an industrial district of Coruscant, on the trail of the Bando Gora and their death stick factory which is hidden amongst dizzyingly-massive meatpacking plants resulting in a Slaughterhouse Fight at one point.
- Journey to Silius: Stages 4 and 5, which include crushing pistons, falling crates, moving Spikes of Doom, pits of molten metal, and conveyor belts. And the latter is an auto scroller for some reason.
- Metal Warriors: Though all missions take place in stages themed around highly-advanced machinery, the third mission stands out the most for featuring elevators that are large and strong enough for you to use them while piloting your Mini-Mecha, as well as iron gates that have to be opened by activating switches you can only trigger when you're not piloting it.
- Rengoku: The 3rd floor in the second game is a factory level filled with rivers of liquid metal and flaming pipes.
Action-Adventure
- American McGee's Alice: The Mad Hatter's Realm is a massive, floating structure of Clock Punk machinery that mostly seems to be devoted to making Body Horror and tea.
- ANNO: Mutationem: The first area of The Consortium's Elaborate Underground Base occurs within a facility filled with machinery causing Floating Platforms to hover over a Lava Pit, coupled with lasers, Attack Drones, and Mooks equipped with advanced gear.
- Batman: Arkham City has the Steel Mill. A very realistic example, too. The only Lethal Lava Land type area is the furnace you go through when you start off. Everything else, well, the mill is just the base where Joker is hiding out and isn't running, making this a Subverted Trope. Batman has to make things run himself to get through it, hitting switches and getting (more like making) a gadget that lets him fire Remote Electric Charges to power devices. The conveyor belts are completely still, even, except for one secret area where you complete a batarang mini-game for a trophy.
- Ecco the Dolphin features Welcome to the Machine, a giant alien meat grinder and the Scrappy Level to end all Scrappy Levels. It makes a slightly less insane return in the sequel Tides of Time. Defender of the Future has about a quarter of the game be one of these due to the Man's Nightmare levels, which has you following the process of mining rocks for crystals to the end result down the factory line, over the span of multiple, multiple levels. Not half as annoying as it sounds because the place is designed so well.
- Epic Mickey: The Gremlin Village and the It's a Small World ride are filled with gears, steam-leaking pipes, and generic steampunk elements. Both cases are justified, since the Gremlins are all mechanics and most, if not all of the rides in the Cartoon Wasteland probably use outdated technology. (Except for Tomorrowland, of course.)
- Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine has a kind of ancient-stones version on several levels.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: The Great Bay Temple combines this with Down the Drain. It's a highly advanced cistern whose machinery works with the mechanical energy provided by the Great Bay's water. Link has to activate several color-coded engines to bring water onto certain parts, allowing him to reach places that wouldn't be accessible otherwise.
- The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword combines this with Shifting Sand Land and Tomorrowland with the Lanaryu Mining Facility. In the present time, the whole place fell into disuse since several years ago and is filled with sand pools; but when a Timeshift Stone is active, anything within its domain's radius will come back to an active state, including advanced gizmos like electric barriers, conveyor belts, and wind-operated platforms.
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild uses this theme for all four of the main dungeons, where you traverse the innards of one Humongous Mecha after another. You have to use the map to manipulate different components of the Divine Beasts to solve some of the puzzles, ranging from simply rendering new areas accessible to activating titanic waterwheels or completing giant electrical circuits. The Final Trial dungeon added by the Champions' Ballad DLC is designed very similarly, resembling the interior of a massive gearbox. Lastly, several Shrines, which serve as mini-dungeons, feature mechanical contraptions and hazards (such as lasers, spike traps and moving platforms) that have to be worked around to reach the guardian monks and receibe their Orbs.
- Metroid Prime Trilogy:
- Metroid Prime: Magmoor Caverns falls into the "combined with Lethal Lava Land" variety, and the Phazon Mines have their fair share of machinery obstacles.
- Metroid Prime 2: Echoes features the technologically-themed Sanctuary Fortress.
- Metroid Prime: Hunters has Vesper Defense Outpost, Celestial Archives, and a section in Alinos where Samus has to navigate the interior of a boiler in Morph Ball form and dodge its internal workings while trying to find an artifact.
- Metroid Prime 3: Corruption has the Steampunk-inspired region Skytown on the planet Elysia (complete with enemies with names like "Tinbots", "Steambots", and "Steam Lords"), and the Pirate Homeworld (a planet shrouded in acid rain, and the biggest base of operations of the Space Pirates).
- No More Heroes III: The Rank 1 stage takes place inside Damon Tower, a highly advanced building whose main corridor is illuminated with yellow neon lights in the sides, and in which many white fluorescent lamps and orange Tron Lines can be seen in the ceiling. Not much is seen from this location, since the path to the Final Boss is straightforward.
- Tomb Raider has loads. Natla's Mines, Offshore Rig, Fool's Gold, Lud's Gate, Shakespeare Cliffs and Kazakhstan's Project Karbonek.
Adventure
- Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors had a recreation of the ship Gigantic/Brittanic's engine. Of course, it's only as imposing as the Real Life one is.
- Lighthouse: The Dark Being has the Volcano Lair of the titular Dark Being. It has a fully functioning mining facility and a massive geothermal steam system, though the sprawling maze of tracks inside the place is questionable. It's also polluting the surrounding environment, which is partly why you're sent there in the first place. If you've gathered enough items, you can also blow it all up with a Time Bomb.
- Obsidian: In the "Metal" segment of the Spider Realm, a factory involves freshly created robots mining a piece of ore, throwing it onto the conveyor belt to make more robots, and then jumping off a cliff, presumably to their deaths. For good measure, when you first enter this level, the process stops, and your goal is to start it again. At least this example has an excuse of being based in a dream world.
Fighting Games
- Super Smash Bros.:
- Super Smash Bros. Brawl: The Island of the Ancients in the Subspace Emissary. It's a large floating landmass where the local advanced technology is being used by the Ancient Minister's army of R.O.Bs. to mass-produce Subspace Bombs.
- Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: The Power Plant in World of Light is an electrical power plant, powered by Zapfish from the Splatoon series. In order to proceed through the plant, you have to solve puzzles involving using said Zapfish to power bridges throughout the facility. The area is home to the spirits of electrical and robotic videogame characters, and completing it unlocks the Electric-type Pokèmon Pichu as a fighter.
Licensed Games
- Atlantis: The Lost Empire: The Ulysses, the second level in the game, takes you through the lower decks and mechanisms of the eponymous submarine as the Leviathan attacks it, contending with hazards such as loose electrical currents and gouts of flames from destroyed machinery, and deep submerged tunnels with deadly propeller blades.
- The Cat in the Hat has two: a Clock Punk level called Grandfather Clock, and a Diesel Punk level called Mechanical Madness.
- The Fairly OddParents: Shadow Showdown: "Take It on the Chin" has the Chincinatti Waterworks, which is where the second half of the level takes place. The first half is dedicated to getting into the waterworks.
- The Flintstones: The Rescue Of Dino & Hoppy: Much of the final level is taken in up in the 30th century, complete with The Jetsons' theme song as the background music, and a Crossover Cameo by George Jetson himself. The final boss of the game is Dr. Butler, who has captured Dino and Hoppy.
- Home Alone (Sega): The Licensed Game for the Sega Genesis has the Ultra Modern House, a futuristic-looking house with a robot security guard that shocks Kevin, Harry, or Marv if it catches them.
- Looney Tunes:
- Bugs Bunny: Rabbit Rampage: Level [really long math formula] takes place in an ACME factory. Here, Bugs has to deal with robot enemies, smashing mallets, and Wile E. Coyote, who serves as the end-of-level boss.
- Taz-Mania (Sega) has a robot factory as its second world. Various hazards include spinning blades, furnaces, hammers, laser cannons, tunnels that shock you which you have to find the right switch to temporarily turn them off with, and decoy switches that shock you when you pull them.
- Cheese Cat Astrophe Starring Speedy Gonzales: The fourth and final world, "Inside Sylvester's Lair" takes place in Sylvester's cheese factory. Speedy has to run across the power lines while avoiding being shocked, and robotic mice and electric monsters serve as enemies. There are two incarnations of Sylvester. The penultimate one rides an exercise bike and tries to shock Speedy, while the final one operates a crane suspended above a vat of molten cheese.
- Tiny Toon Adventures games:
- Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster's Hidden Treasure has a factory as its final world, complete with various robot enemies, spikes, electric reactors, a lava-filled floor in the third act, and various spinning gears, wrecking balls, and platforms Buster must maneuver across to get past them.
- Tiny Toon Adventures 2 Montanas Movie Madness: The third stage is entitled "Future Flick", and takes place in a movie of a futuristic utopia. Enemies include robots resembling Roderick Rat, and midway through the stage is a Nintendo Hard hovercar driving sequence. The boss of the stage is a robot that resembles Montana Max.
- Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster's Bad Dream: The second act of the fourth and final world takes place on the elevator to Montana Max's factory, complete with an Elevator Action Sequence. The third act takes place in the basement, and the final boss is a giant tank shaped like Monty's head.
- Nicktoons Unite!: The EvilToyCo. Factory in Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots is an gigantic factory churning out legions and legions of evil Living Toys. You effectively spend nearly all of the game in it.
- The Simpsons:
- The Itchy and Scratchy Game has "Disassembly Line", which serves as the final level of the game. The final boss is Scratchy, who operates an Inconveniently-Placed Conveyor Belt.
- The Simpsons Game:
- "Lisa the Tree Hugger" combines this with The Lost Woods in the form of an active lumber camp filled with machinery, and progresses into it fully by the time the main plant is reached. Level traversal involves traveling along giant conveyor belts, dodging buzzsaws, setting off Exploding Barrels of nuclear waste to jam up machinery, and rearranging exhaust pipes in order for Bart to glide on the smog updrafts.
- The Game Engine levels take place inside immense mechanical complexes that keep reality running, and require the family to navigate mazes of machinery while avoiding giant pits of suspiciously colored fluids.
- The Simpsons: Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror: The fifth level, "If I Only Had a Body" is based on the Treehouse of Horror II episode segment, "Homer's Nightmare". In this level, Homer's head is on a robot body, and Homer has to find the five pieces of his human body hidden in the Nuclear Power Plant while dodging the plant's workers and hazards.
- The Simpsons: Virtual Bart: The Pig Bart level involves Bart (as a pig) rescuing other pigs from Krusty's Pork Factory. The level also contains a freezer section and a furnace section.
- Spider-Man: Mysterio's Menace has the Empire Metals Foundry, filled with molten pools, cogs and buzzsaws, and Chemcorp, filled with sparking electric wires.
- Toy Story:
- Toy Story has "Inside the Claw Machine", which serves as the game's tenth level. This level takes place in the claw machine at Pizza Planet. As he tries to find Buzz, Woody must dodge hazards such as spinning blades, falling tokens, and exploding diodes.
- Toy Story 2 has "Elevator Hop", "The Evil Emperor Zurg", and "Airport Infiltration", which serve as the tenth, twelfth, and thirteenth levels, respectively. The first two take place in an elevator shaft, and the third takes place in a baggage handling system.
- Toy Story 3 has the junkyard incinerator.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge has Episode 12, "It Won't Fly!". The level takes place inside Baxter Stockman's secret laboratory, which acts as the production facility for the Foot Clan's Mecha-Mooks (such as the iconic Foot Soldiers and Mousers) and mutagen. Obstacles are comprised of exposed electric cables, giant industrial fans and freezing turrets.
Metroidvania
- Aquaria: The Sun Temple is a clockwork Eternal Engine; you can even pilfer the key and use it to decorate your cave (which inexplicably has chambers constructed in the style of every locale you visit, including the Sun Temple). In spite of having supposedly been abandoned for quite some time, it's still running and shows no signs of decay; possibly the clockwork sea life lurking around are automated maintenance staff, keeping one another wound as well as making sure the temple stays in working order, after their masters are long dead.
- La-Mulana features the Tower of Ruin, especially in the remake. In the original, the mechanical basis of the level isn't quite as pronounced because there's no moving machinery. Naturally, there's magma everywhere, but that's justified because it's located right behind the game's local magma world.
- Legend of Kalevala has an underground factory area underneath the first area. It's full of Floating Platforms, and it's the first place where you'll find Lava Pits. This area is one of the tip-offs to the protagonist that the former inhabitants of Kalevala were a very intelligent civilization.
- Metroid:
- Metroid Fusion takes place in a Biologic Space Laboratories research station, a huge space station that simulates a variety of natural environments, thus most of the levels have a few Eternal Engine aspects to them. This also applies to the Bottle Ship in Metroid: Other M.
- Metroid Dread: In contrast to the mostly stony, low-tech ruins on other Chozo worlds, the ZDR colony has many factories and other mechanical structures. This is especially true for Dairon, which is a biological research site that is entirely artificial in design and primarily features robotic enemies.
- Shadow Complex has an area like this. Justified in that the purpose of the factory is explicitly explained as building the mechs and weapons.
- An Untitled Story: The FireCage is an abandoned but still partly operational underground factory or power plant of some kind. The pools of molten metal or rock found here and there give it elements of Lethal Lava Land.
MMORPGs
- The Secret World: The Manufactory dungeon. The secret manufacturing hub of the Orochi Group hidden deep beneath the company headquarters in Kaidan district Tokyo, all their cyborg soldiers, war engines and other Magitek devices are built down here. The place looks big enough to take up the entire district plus the surrounding waterfront, and it's hinted that you only see a relatively small part of it when you venture inside — no surprise, given that the place is essentially supplying all the armaments and vehicles needed by Orochi forces all over the world. Unfortunately, it's been taken over by the Black Signal, who isn't much interested in letting you investigate the goings-on down here.
- Spiral Knights: Many areas, particularly the Ironclaw Munitions Factory. Given the constructed nature and the ever-shifting mechanized innards of Cradle, the whole planet is arguably an Eternal Engine.
- World of Warcraft:
- The Gnome capital city-turned-dungeon, Gnomeregan, is a giant Steampunk factory city.
- The interdimensional spaceship(s) of Tempest Keep (including the Exodar, which serves as the Draenei races' home area), although the hazards normally inherent to Eternal Engines do not show up here, limiting the use of the design to be mostly thematic in purpose.
- Various bits and bobs of Titan technology can be found throughout Northrend. Many of them seem to be gigantic engines of some kind, though very few of them are working.
- The ruins of Uldum are less about gears and more about beam emitters, computers and robots made out of stone.
MOBAs
- Battleborn: The lower settlements, near the Jennerit throneworld Tempest's surface, are full of industrial facilities, refineries, massive wind turbines, mines and work camps of the Thrall. Giant tether-elevators connect the lower settlements to the floating cities known as Echelon above, and these giant tendrils reach to the sky across the planet.
Party Games
- Mario Party:
- Mario Party: Luigi's Engine Room is a mechanical board with advanced machinery whose main gimmick revolves around color-coded doors (red and blue) that open and close respectively at the start of every turn or when a character lands on certain Event Spaces, thus requiring the players to work around said doors (with either luck or strategy) to devise the route to the Star's current position. The advanced tech of the board is also lampshaded, as the announcer says "This is the Engine Room, but what kind of Engine Room is it? I have absolutely no idea!"; the mystery of what the machinery is exactly powering up isn't solved until someone becomes the Super Star (it turns out that the engine is powering a flying machine of some kind).
- Mario Party 6 has E. Gadd's Garage. This board takes place inside a large, thriving laboratory run by Professor E. Gadd, being filled with pumps, pipes, warehouse crates and even a rocket. There's a conveyor belt that transports a character to another part of the board if they land onto a nearby Event Space (they can get coins during the ride). There are also teleporters shaped like E. Gadd's head; landing upon a nearby Event Space makes E. Gad himself appear, asking the player if they want to use the teleporter to travel instantly to another (the link across the three teleporters is counterclockwise). There's a large fan in the northwest area that allows a player, upon landing onto its Event Space, to suck coins from the other players (who can attempt to damp the coin loss, not unlike when they did the same against Boo in the first four Mario Party games). A large shuffle machine shaped like E. Gadd's head is located at the east, and landing upon one of its two Event Spaces allows the player to take all orbs from every player and turn them into other Orbs (during day) or into coins (during night). Lastly, the circular junction at the center rotates clockwise once every day/night transition, thus changing the direction you'll go to when you get there.
- Mario Party 9 has the second board, Bob-Omb Factory. The characters drive through the specific areas of the facility, and as they do so they must deal with Bob-Ombs that deduct the number of mini-stars from the character currently in charge. There are conveyor belts that can change the current path, making navigation more difficult. The boss is King Bob-Omb.
Platformers
- Banjo-Kazooie:
- Rusty Bucket Bay in the original game. While largely Down the Drain, it includes a large interior whose machinery puts the ship into work. Banjo and Kazooie have to be careful when moving through the rotating setpieces, as they may otherwise fall into the pit and lose a life. There's a Jiggy that can only be obtained after slowing down the metallic fans from the central part of the area, while another Jiggy requires shutting down the underwater propellers so it can be safely collected. The boss is Boss Boom Box, a King Mook of the sentient explosive Boom Box crates, hidden in the ship's depository.
- Banjo-Tooie: Grunty Industries. It is a five-floor building owned by Gruntilda that can only be accessed once its underground train station is opened and then reached while driving Chuffy. Among other things, there's a massive pit of toxic sludge surrounding the building, and it has Smashing Hallway Traps of Doom, large vats of toxic chemicals, barrels of toxic chemicals that will chase Banjo down when they're broken open, Mecha-Mooks and worker grunts who swing monkey wrenches to attack, large piles of packaged product on the upper floors, and a boss battle against a giant sapient welding torch (Weldar).
- Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge: Parts of Bad Magic Bayou and Freezing Furnace have machinery with gizmos (such as pipes and moving platforms) and parts that can be powered up with Battery or Ice Eggs.
- Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts: Nutty Acres and Logbox 720. The former is a mechanical approach to the Green Hill Zone setting, where several of the seemingly-organic features present are actually man-made. Meanwhile, Logbox 720 is a futuristic reimagining of the interior of the Xbox 360.
- Blinx: The Time Sweeper: Forge of Hours, the last world before the final boss, features lots of spikes, gears, machinery, and lots and lots of molten metal.
- Castlevania: The Clock Tower in most games. Castlevania: Bloodlines has a relatively modern factory level. Not too surprising, since the game takes place across Europe during World War I.
- cat planet: One area is an industrial sector which intends to only kill its visitors as far as anyone is concerned.
- Commander Keen: The second installment is set entirely within the Vorticon Mothership, while the fifth installment is set entirely within the titular Armageddon Machine. Both settings feature hazards like beam shooters, fire pistons and hot tiles, as well as evil machines (cannons in the second game, generators in the fifth) that have to be disabled so the titular character succeeds on his mission. Some levels from the third and sixth episodes are mechanical as well, as they're respectively the bases of operations for the Vorticons and the Bloogs.
- Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure: Levels 7 and 8 in the first episode, level 5 in the second, and all levels after the second in the third. The latter one's case is justified, as Cosmo manages to reach the industrial city where he can supposedly find his parents. These levels feature hazards like fire pistons, retractable spike traps, pitfalls that can only be crossed by toggling on certain mobile platforms, rockets that can take Cosmo at high spots but at the cost of harming him when they explode by clashing against a ceiling, and enemies like a Chrome Champion robot with an invisibility cloak and droids that shoot projectiles.
- Crash Bandicoot: Many games have these types of stages, typically as either the last level or close to it.
- Crash Bandicoot (1996): The third quarter of the game consists mostly of this (levels such as Heavy Machinery, Cortex Power and Generator Room), with Crash roaming through Cortex's enormous power plant which, on the surface, doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose other than to dump tons and tons of radioactive sludge into the nearby oceans.
- Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back: The Piston It Away, Rock It, Pack Attack and Spaced Out levels, which take place aboard the Cortex Vortex. In the second and third mentioned levels, you're navigating through gravity-free areas with a space suit. In the first and fourth, you're venturing across an entirely mechanic setting populated by robots, pistons, shrink rays, and lab assistants, among other hazards.
- Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped has a lot less of this; the only clear examples are the arenas the player fights N. Tropy and Neo Cortex in, and the two "future" stages (which overlap with Tomorrowland).
- Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex: Every fifth level, often combining it with the element utilized by the warp room's boss fight.
- Crash Twinsanity: The Iceberg Lab levels, combined with Slippy-Slidey Ice World and in the last one Gangplank Galleon. Also the final stage, Ant Agony, and some other parts of Twinsanity Island.
- Donkey Kong:
- Donkey Kong Country: Kremkroc Industries, Inc., the fifth world. It is located not too below Gorilla Glacier, and causes a lot of pollution to its surroundings (which damaged the original lush environment of the place). Features include Oil Barrels, bouncy barrel tires, platforms that travel across rails, a polluted underwater area, and directional platforms found in a level with intermittent lights. The boss is Dumb Drum, a Mook Maker that aims to stomp the Kong and unleash assorted enemies before eventually giving up.
- Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!: Mekanos, the third or fourth world (its order is interchangeable with Cotton Top Cove), is an industrialized island in the middle of a lake. Features present in its levels include pools of molten metal, owl-like enemies (Karbines) that shoot fireballs from the background, bazooka-armed Kremlings (Bazukas) that shoot barrels from their positions, and pipelines that have to be either traversed with speedy rail cars or explored on foot with the presence of a gravity-lowering mist.
- Donkey Kong 64: Frantic Factory is a mixture of this setting with Toy Time, since it's a toy factory. There are a few rooms involving the machinery of the factory, such as elevators, conveyor belts, pipes and pistons, and a number of the collectibles within these rooms require you to platform around these aspects.
- Donkey Kong Country Returns: World 7 (Factory). This industrial facility, originally shrouded in fog until the completion of its first level, is where the Tiki tribe takes the stolen bananas and prepares their juice to feed their master (Tiki Tong). As Donkey and Diddy venture through it, they have to deal with dangerous mechanisms like fire pistons, giant mallets, purple electric barriers, and moving pieces of mechanical terrain. In three levels, the Kongs also have find and press hidden switches in order to enable the launch of a rocket that will take them to the lair of the world's boss, Colonel Pluck.
- Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze: Frozen Frenzy, which itself is a Nostalgia Level based on the aforementioned World 7 of Returns. Also, the entirety of World 5 is a huge facility that harvests fruit, then processes said fruit into giant popsicles.
- Freedom Planet:
- Thermal Base takes place within the bowels of the villains' high-tech base, and consists of an obstacle course through a maze of winding tubes, giant pistons, flaming vents and mechanical enemies. Sections alternate between ones with water at the bottom, through which Sash Lilac can swim just fine, and ones with molten metal instead.
- Final Dreadnought goes through the bowels of Brevon's starship, winding through a mechanical maze crawling with soldiers and automated sentry systems and down into engine levels filled with the huge moving parts of alien machinery and, in later stages, deadly energy streams.
- Freedom Planet 2 has its fair share of mechanically-themed levels:
- The Shade Armory in Shuigang is Serpentine's current base of operations after Brevon left Avalice, and it stations several types of Shade Troopers, who have their armors built in the armory. To go through the level, you need to deal with several threats, like spinning sawblades and green liquid that you can drown in if you're not careful.
- The Lightning Tower in Parusa is a lightning-powered tower that the heroines traverse through to chase the Sigwada down. The electricity in this stage, while opening up some paths, also triggers hazards like cannons and electrified floors.
- Later on, the Bakunawa itself. Starting off by raiding the inside of the ship, you later ride through an elevator next to gear-filled rooms in Clockwork Arboretum, going through the engines of the ship while avoiding Serpentine's troops in the Inversion Dynamo, and then finally going near the ship's cannon to disarm it in Lunar Cannon. And Weapon's Core is the core of the Bakunawa.
- INSIDE (2016) has one in the last third of the game. The engine itself isn't ever seen apart from shockwaves created by it that move through a gigantic hall and tear the main character apart unless hiding behind certain surfaces. It is unclear what it does or if it even does anything at all.
- Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy: Gol and Maia's Citadel, which also makes up for the final level. It's a large industrical tower originally created by Precursors, and now taken over by the Big Bad Duumvirate who renamed it after themselves; it also serves as the whereabouts of a very powerful Precursor robot which the aforementioned villains aim to empower so they can pilot it and open the biggest source of Dark Eco, leading to the world's total corruption. There's a large number of assets and hazards that have to be worked around here, such as color-coded tiles, platforms that move over huge chasms, and a chamber where Jak is ambushed by several lurkers. All the Sages (including, eventually, Samos) are kept imprisoned here, so Jak and Daxter have to venture through the level to free them one by one. With that done, they have to climb the top of the tower to face the evil characters (who, by that point, are aready using the Precursor Robot) in a Final Boss battle.
- Jazz Jack Rabbit: The planets Tubelectric, Letni, Orbitus, Technoir, Dreempipes, Industrius, Deckstar, and the Megairbase and the Twin Battleships. Also the abandoned lab levels in Jazz Jackrabbit 2.
- Jumper: Sector 6 of Jumper Two takes place in the Boss' factory of OgmoBots. Ogmo can, and will, interfere with production while finding the way out. The Boss even tries to make the place as dangerous as possible for Ogmo.
- Kirby:
- Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards features one as the fourth level in the game's resident Slippy-Slidey Ice World, complete with giant machines trying to crush you, robots, rooms full of molten lava, and inexplicable giant animals floating in tanks of water, which might be bizarre toys if the Christmas theme of the earlier levels is any indication. Earth apparently fell into a nuclear winter... during winter.
- Kirby's Return to Dream Land: The penultimate world, Egg Engines, which looks positively Robotnikian.
- Kirby: Planet Robobot: Most of the stages are industrialized, which given the game's theme is something to expect.
- Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil features the factory levels in Volk, constantly churning out bombs, planes, and, apparently, soldiers for Volk's neverending civil war. The Maze of Memories level may qualify as well, though the 'machinery' all runs in the background, and doesn't seem to affect gameplay at all.
- Meat Boy features the Salt Factory, which features buzz saw launcher, salt and even rocket launcher.
- Mega Man:
- Mega Man (Classic) examples: Metal Man's level in Mega Man 2, Spark Man's level from Mega Man 3, Dust Man's level from 4, Mercury's level from V for the Game Boy, Junk Man's level from 7, Grenade Man's level from Mega Man 8, Plug Man's level from 9. All of them justified by Wily's Mad Scientist nature.
- Mega Man X has Flame Mammoth's factory. With inconveniently placed conveyor belts that crush rubbish for no particular reason. Mega Man X6 also has Metal Shark Player's stage as one of these.
- Mega Man Zero usually fit 2 or sometimes even 3 into each game.
- Mega Man ZX: The entire world itself is cybernetic to an extent.
- The Messenger (2018): The final level, the Music Box, features pistons, vents blowing hot steam, conveyor belts, and saw blades moving back and forth on tracks. All synced up to the background music, no less.
- Oddworld:
- Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee: Rupture Farms 1029 (a meat packing factory).
- Oddworld Abes Exoddus: Necrum Mining Company (a series of mining tunnels), Fee Co. Depot. (a mass transit hub), Slig Barracks (a military base and training grounds, the headquarters itself count as this trope), Bonewerkz (a bone processing factory), and Soulstorm Brewery (a drink bottling facility and torture facilty).
- Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee tones down the sheer scale of the facilities, but Vykkers' Labs (a combination R&D laboratory, security installation, and factory) housed in a Flying Saucer /Cool Airship hybrid certainly counts as this trope.
- Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath: Sekto's Dam is basically what you would get if you mixed a dam, bottling plant, and DEATH. It's one of the few areas with Bottomless Pits in the game. Sekto keeps two large reactor type objects that he apparently uses as weapons right next to his desk, which like most equipment in an Eternal Engine, will explode if you shoot it enough. Apparently he either really wants to be a Load-Bearing Boss, or he doesn't care about his own safety.
- Ratchet & Clank: Planet Quartu from Ratchet & Clank (2002) and the Great Clock from Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time. Both have similar origins.
- Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc: Hoodlum Headquarters, an elaborate factory base full of lava.
- Ristar: The aptly named Planet Automaton is an entire planet made out of machines and populated by robots.
- Shovel Knight: Tinker Knight resides in a clockwork tower which, as one might expect, is full of conveyor belts, gears, wind-up mice and various other enemies and obstacles themed on machinery.
- Sonic the Hedgehog: Every game has at least one of these, sometimes more than one:
- The very first example is Scrap Brain Zone from Sonic the Hedgehog, which is a huge factory that is both Dr. Eggman's headquarters and the engine powering his entire operation.
- Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has a number of zones that fit this theme; Chemical Plant Zone, which produces a toxic chemical called Mega Mack, Oil Ocean Zone, an oil rig that pollutes the ocean with crude oil, Metropolis, a huge factory that is the base of Robotnik's operation, and Death Egg, a Space Station that serves as the game's final level.
- Sonic 3 & Knuckles has Flying Battery Zone, a highly technological airborne level, and the return of Death Egg Zone, this time as a full-fledged level. The 2-Player mode features Chrome Gadget Zone, which takes place inside a factory.
- Sonic 3D Blast has Gene Gadget Zone and Panic Puppet Zone, both of which are factory-based levels.
- Sonic Adventure: Final Egg has plenty of machinery created by Dr. Eggman, fitting to its name. Sky Deck and Hot Shelter are also this to a lesser extent, both taking place in the Egg Carrier.
- Sonic Adventure 2: Cannon's Core, the Magitek innards of a space station built using modern robotics and ancient mysticism. The deeper the characters go, the more the mystic elements begin to eclipse the mechanical ones. Adventure 2 also has Crazy Gadget, Lost Colony, Cosmic Wall, and even Eternal Engine itself.
- Sometimes the designers like to mix it up a bit. The aforementioned Chemical Plant Zone, for instance, heads Under the Sea. And then there's Sonic Chaos' Mecha Green Hill Zone...
- Sonic Unleashed goes overboard with Eggmanland, an Eternal Engine continent. With Circus of Fear elements.
- Sonic Advance Trilogy: Secret Base Zone, Egg Rocket Zone, Cosmic Angel Zone, Hot Crater, Egg Utopia, and Ocean Base (once again combining this with Under the Sea). Also, Techno Base in Sonic Advance 2 is an Eternal Engine set in Cyberspace.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (2006): Aquatic Base, combining it with Under the Sea.
- Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Mad Gear Zone in Episode I, and Oil Desert Zone and Death Egg mk.II Zone from 'Episode II''. Oil Desert Zone combines this with Shifting Sand Land and Down in the Dumps (Act 3 only).
- Sonic Colors: Planet Wisp — the Eternal Engine is still under construction, but much of the natural beauty has already been spoiled. There's also Asteroid Coaster, mixed with Big Boo's Haunt and Theme Parks of course, but it's where Eggman converts the Wisps to the Nega-Wisps. Sweet Mountain has very slight elements of this.
- Sonic Generations: The aforementioned Chemical Plant and Planet Wisp both reappear.
- Sonic the Hedgehog CD combines most levels' current setting trope with this in bad futures. Wacky Workbench is this in the Present and Past as well as the Bad Future, but becomes Toy Time in the Good Future. Metallic Madness is this full-time.
- Sonic the Hedgehog Spinball: Both Lava Powerhouse (doubling as a Lethal Lava Land) and the Machine fill this trope, making out 50% of the four main levels in the game.
- Sonic Pocket Adventure has two levels that fit this criteria. The first is Secret Plant Zone, which essentially resembles an 8-bit version of Chemical Plant Zone. The second is Gigantic Angel Zone, which resembles a cross between Scrap Brain Zone and Metropolis Zone, having the background design of the former, but the enemies and hazards of the latter.
- Sonic Lost World: Frozen Factory mixes this with Slippy-Slidey Ice World, hence it's name. It appears to have been inspired from Metropolis Zone. Lava Mountain also contains slight elements of this; most notably in Zone 3.
- Sonic Riders has several: Egg Factory and Ice Factory (which also have, respectively, a Lethal Lava Land and Slippy-Slidey Ice World aesthetic, if not their gameplay) in the first game, MeteorTech Premises and MeteorTech Sparkworks in Zero Gravity, and the two tracks at Final Factory in Free Riders. They also mostly avert No OSHA Compliance, in that the more dangerous machinery is behind guardrails.
- Sonic Mania features the return of Chemical Plant, Oil Ocean, and Metallic Madness, and adds two new zones; Act 1 of Press Garden takes place in a newspaper factory, and Titanic Monarch, a truly colossal robot that Act 1 consists of getting into, while Act 2 takes place inside the robot to fight Eggman.
- Sonic Forces: Chemical Plant and Death Egg make their reappearance once more in this game, though the latter is a new and rebuilt Death Egg but modeled after the original one. In addition, the original Green Hill Zone, of all places, is in the process of succumbing to Eggman's industrialization, and the game culminates at Eggman Empire Fortress, a gigantic tower full of metal and machines.
- Sparkster: The middle-left section of the image at the top is of the Steel Works level, although it's far from the only Eternal Engine level in that series; at least half of the levels in that series could be considered variations on the concept.
- Super Mario Bros.:
- Super Mario Bros. 2: The Tower levels are reimagined as factory-like warehouses in the All-Stars and Advance remakes of the game (they're just traditional castle-like towers in the original version, likely due to graphical limitations).
- Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins: Mario Zone is a large, mechanical statue modeled after its homeland's former ruler (Mario). Since Wario took over the land, this zone has been taken by the Three Little Pigheads, and Mario must reach and defeat them after venturing through various mechanical traps and hazards.
- Super Mario 64 has Tick-Tock Clock, set within the interior of a large mechanical clock. Mario has to tackle gizmos and obstacles like conveyor belts, rotating cogwheels, cubed setpieces that move periodically, and a minute hand that can lead him to one of the stars.
- Super Mario Galaxy has Battlerock Galaxy, Buoy Base Galaxy (a bonus level) and Dreadnought Galaxy, particularly in the 2-D sections. In them, Mario has to avoid hazards like laser barriers, electrified beams of light, multiple active cannons and enemies like Bob-Ombs, Sentry Beams and Tops. They double as Remilitarized Zone levels.
- Super Mario Galaxy 2 has Chompworks Galaxy, a foundry run by Chomps and Gearmos. Many of the puzzles revolve around dealing with Chomps in different ways, while also bringing back the Spring Mushroom in the second star mission.
- Super Mario 3D Land has Level 7-3 and Special Level 7-4 which are both mechanical levels set inside a giant clock. Special Level 4-1 takes place here as well, but it focuses entirely on fighting enemies while a large platform transports Mario and Luigi to the exit area.
- Super Mario Odyssey: There are plenty of machines to be found in the Wooded Kingdom, as well as in the energy plant of Metro Kingdom. In both worlds, Mario can find and possess a tank enemy known as Sherm, which is capable of shooting projectiles to attack other enemies and destroy certain walls, and in the latter level this is used to defeat the boss Mechawiggler to restore peace in New Donk City.
- Wario Land 4: This is the main theme of Ruby Passage. All of the levels in this set of levels have a mechanical theme to them: The Curious Factory is an industrial factory with many compressors, the Toxic Landfill is a garbage dump exposing the dark side of industrial progress, 40 Below Frisge takes place in a giant walk-in freezer storage area, and Pinball Zone is a giant pinball machine riddled with mechanical traps.
- Yoshi's Island: Yoshi's Crafted World has Mr. Geary's Factory, which has a few Lethal Lava Land elements and ends with a battle against Mr. Geary himself.
- Super Mario Fusion Revival: World 6-F1 (RGB Factory) is a fortress level taking place in a high-tech factory with three distinct areas: a red area (lava and fire), a green area (overrun with plant life), and a blue area (a swimming area). This is a key hunt level with a central hub that leads to a boss fight with Dobkeratops of R-Type fame.
- Vice: Project Doom: The eighth level is an industrial complex with conveyor belts and surging electricity everywhere.
Puzzle Games
- The entire setting of Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine is the titular Mean Bean Machine, where the player faces off against the members of the Super Special Sonic Search and Smash Squad from Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog to rescue the citizens of Beanville, who are being turned into robot slaves to serve Robotnik's evil purposes.
- Kuru Kuru Kururin: The levels in Machine Land take place within a dangerous factory, and each one introduces a type of hazard that has top be avoided. The first level has metallic crushers that move sideways, the second level has cubic boxes between which spikeed metallic spheres roll to be transported, and the third as both those and cannons that shoot balls of dark energy at Kururin's ship (and those cannons always aim at him).
- Meteos has a handful of planets that match this trope. Grannest is a City Planet inhabited by Cute Machines after their original creators left in the vein of WALL•E, Mekks is a former mining facility turned civilization by it's robotic inhabitants and Wiral is a mechanical planet inhabited by aliens made of electricity.
- Portal: The behind-the-scenes sections the Aperture Science Enrichment Center, excepting the (scarce by comparison) office areas. Portal 2 goes further, where apparently the entire facility's operations is to churn out products for testing against other products. While there are facilities to manufacture products (indeed Wheatley apparently was able to design and mass produce his own robots) there seems to be no way of shipping them, only to continue sending them back into tests. GLaDOS and Wheatley also seem to have little else other than to continue testing for their entire lives.
Racing Games
- F-Zero from GX onwards features Lightning, a heavily polluted industrial complex just outside Mute City. It is so polluted, in fact, that the sky is perpetually blacked out with a blanket of thunderclouds that also double as flashing lights that mess with the player's visuals.
- Mario Kart:
- Mario Kart DS has a course based on Tick Tock Clock from Super Mario 64, and makes a return in Mario Kart 8. True to its Clockworks Area setting, it features all sorts of gizmos and mechanical setpieces that, depending on the case, can be either an ally or a hindrance to the drivers.
- Mario Kart Wii: Toad's Factory, a race course from Mushroom Cup, features some elements of this trope, being a factory with crushing machines, conveyor belts, a steam room, and bulldozers that move back and forth periodically across a mud path at the end of the course.
- Sonic Drift:
- The original game has Scrap Brain Zone, which serves as the sixth and final track of all three GPs, differing only in layout.
- Drift 2 has Iron Ruin, which serves as the sixth and final track of the Purple GP, and Death Egg, which serves as the sixth and final track of the Blue GP.
Role-Playing Games
- Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean: The city of Mintaka, which is built out of pipes that are constantly emitting steam of some sort. Origins refers to it as 'machina' and discusses the ethics it presents. Origins also has Tarazed, which is a man-made airship the size of a continent.
- Blender Bros: Most of the levels have some aspect of this, such as Shelltarl being set in underground missile bunkers and Fog being set in a space base. The game is set in the far future and takes place mostly on various futuristic planets, so most of the worlds have a high level of technology.
- Blue Dragon: There are a couple massive ones, and at the end of the game you find out the entire planet is one. The term "Eternal Engine" itself is used to refer to the Ancient machine's power sources.
- BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm: Her World, the last dungeon, overlooks the vast network of machines building Arianna's new reality.
- Bug Fables: The Honey Factory mixes this theme with Hornet Hole. The area is normally the bees' main production center, but a mechanical malfunction sends its defensive procedures into overdrive and traps the player party, two other adventurer groups and the factory's staff inside by locking the factory down. The players need to rescue other characters and reopen the factory while navigating a complex system of moving platforms that become electrified as part of the defense system and dodging the swarms of bee-shaped robots and mechanical turrets that defend the complex.
- Chrono Trigger has you go through one on your first trip through The Future. Although it's a factory, you're required to go through it to power a machine in a different location. You can ride conveyer belts, operate cranes and fight rogue construction bots. There's also one much later in the game, although it isn't an actual factory. It's called Geno Dome, or in the Japanese version, Genocide Dome. Halfway through the level, you find out exactly what the factory is running for: Humans systematically being murdered so that only robots are left to rule the world.
- Cthulhu Saves the World: The semi-final dungeon is the Marsh Foundry in Innsmouth, where Cthulhu will have to deal with several conveyor belts before the showdown with his rival Dagon.
- Dungeon Siege and its expansion Legends of Aranna both feature these, both populated by Goblins, themselves mechanical creatures. The former is the goblin's home, and the latter is the great clock you've been heading for the entire game.
- EarthBound Series:
- EarthBound Beginnings: Sweet's Little Factory is visited fairly early on, but is relatively small and doesn't really have any threatening enemies. Later on, the group visits Duncan's Factory, a more proper dungeon, where bottle rockets are made.
- EarthBound: Belch's factory, where Ness and the others have to rescue the captured Mr. Saturn to make their through to reach the next sanctuary spot.
- Mother 3: The Factory that digs up soil to make into Claymen, and for that matter the Claymen Factory as well.
- The Elder Scrolls: The extinct Dwemer created all manner of these in their complex underground cities. Justified, as they were known to bend the laws of nature to make their creations last, powered their cities with magical enchantments and geothermal energy, and created centurion Mecha-Mooks to guard and repair their cities. The Dwemer themselves disappeared thousands of years ago, apparently as the result of tampering with the heart of a dead god. Many of these still-working "engines" can be seen in Morrowind and Skyrim where Dwemer ruins are plentiful.
- Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard and its remake The Fafnir Knight have the fifth stratum, Heavenly Keep. It's a highly advanced building run by the Overlord (the game's Big Bad), and has features like conveyor belts, food dispensers and (in the remake) remote bombs that are harmful to the explorers but can be lured into F.O.E. to kill them. What makes this dungeon stand out, besides its Schizo Tech nature, is that all other strata in the game are The Lost Woods in different seasons.
- Final Fantasy: The series frequently displays this trope, with quite a few of its games being set in a Steampunk environment.
- Final Fantasy IV: The part when the party enters the Giant of Babil. As a humongous Mecha, the set pieces inside are full of moving mechanical parts.
- Final Fantasy V has the oddly named underground ruins of "Catapult" beneath Crescent Island where the crew finds the airship. Though its inhabitants are long-since gone and the lower levels have become home to monsters, the gang along with Cid and Mid turn the upper levels into a headquarters and maintenance bay for their ships.
- Final Fantasy VI has the Magitek Research Facility in Vector. Conveyer belts, a trash dump, and big glass tubes of chemicals with Espers inside, being drained of their magical energy courtesy of not-so-mad scientist Cid. All set to the track 'Devil's Lab', which can only be described as industrial rock with piston percussion, growling electric bass and organ, and strings. Kefka's Tower also has shades of Eternal Engine in it.
- Final Fantasy VII: The Mako Reactors function as this setting, with Nibelhelm's Mako Reactor having lots of plot-important fluorescent green chemicals. Two reactors in the opening of the game and a third underwater in the final third are dungeons.
- Final Fantasy VIII has the Lunatic Pandora, which is mixed with crystal.
- Final Fantasy XIV is very fond of this type of setting, using it often in dungeons and raids, including the Aetherochemical Research Facility, the Fractal Continuum, and the Alexander raid series (which combines this with Battleship Raid and Womb Level, since the raid takes place inside Alexander).
- Genshin Impact: During the course of Childe's Story Quest, the Traveler and Paimon end up accompanying Childe as they delve into an old Kaenri'ahn factory Domain where Ruin Guards were made and stockpiled, while taking Childe's little brother Teucer on a tour of Liyue. According to Childe, the Ruin Guard factory has been more recently used by the Fatui as a lab, albeit under the auspices of a Harbinger named Dottore. Parts of the assembly line are evidently still active, and the Ruin Guards are still highly lethal. The Traveler and Childe must race to catch up to Teucer once he excitedly runs off, before he gets hurt by one of the activated Ruin Guards or the Domain's Malevolent Architecture.
- Horizon Zero Dawn: Cauldron facilities are essentially this; vast underground complexes designed to process raw materials to churn out robots to maintain the terraforming process. By the time of the events of the game, they've been running for around a thousand years.
- Knights of the Old Republic: The Star Forge, the final level, is an ancient, giant, evil Force-powered factory that draws its power from the star it hovers above.
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky has a Magitek version of this buried underneath the kingdom's capitol. It serves as the final dungeon of First Chapter. It's revealed in the Second Chapter that its large size is because it's actually a giant channel for space-warping energy, which for unexplained reasons requires huge proportions to focus the energy properly. It's also played a bit more realistically, most of the area inside is made of hallways and empty rooms, which were presumably material storage rooms and staff quarters.
- Mass Effect 3:
- Omega's eezo processing plant, visited in the Omega DLC, is like this, with giant turbines, pipes, pistons and conveyor belts.
- The Geth Dreadnought as well. No OSHA Compliance, giant moving parts everywhere, and an enormous Electromagnetic Pulse gun with maintenance consoles and workstations inside. Justified, since the dreadnought isn't really designed with organics in mind — normally, it's run by AIs who upload themselves directly into its computer banks.
- Miitopia: The Sinister Plant is a minor dungeon filled to the brim with withered wires that continuously shed sparks and old console-like machines. Oddly enough, the Miis encounter a dragon there. The Sterile Plant also counts, and it is rife with robotic enemies.
- Pandora's Tower: Ironclad Turret and Truegold Tower. The towers operate under machinery that is as ancient as the birth of the Big Bad (500 years). The mobility of many platforms depends on the proper functionality of these machines.
- Phantasy Star Zero: The entirety of the Arca Plant levels. Mechanical enemies, machinery in the background that becomes larger and more complex, and a giant robot at the end who more than counts as a That One Boss to a degree that the final boss and bonus boss seem like child's play in comparison.
- Pokémon: Explorable areas within factories and power plants turn up periodically. They are typically home to Electric- and Steel-type Pokémon, particularly mechanical ones such as Magnemite.
- The Kanto and Johto games have the Kanto Power Plant, a large electrical plant crawling with Electric- and Steel-type Pokèmon and which serves as a lair for the legendary electrogenic bird Zapdos.
- Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire feature New Mauville, whose engine problems can be a minor mid/late-game plot element (Wattson asking the player character to check it out is what gets them in there).
- Resonance of Fate has Basel, which is not only an Eternal Engine (of gears!), but is also the entire Overworld Not to Scale in which where the game takes place, and is apparently the last bastion of human civilization. Not so eternally however, it's at its last legs by the game's start.
- Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars: Smithy's Factory (the bottom-left section of the image at the top) is another dimension consisting solely of a sprawling weapons factory, and it's also an Ominous Floating Castle.
- Super Robot Wars Z: The An Ares's strongest attack in Tengoku-hen involves summoning a gigantic machine with plenty of gears and whipping his hapless foe into it. They suffer countless offscreen agonies and spit out, causing plenty of damage.
- Tales Series:
- Tales of Symphonia has one, the Welgaia escape route, within the Tower Of Salvation. It has the slippery aspect of a Slippy-Slidey Ice World, due to it being in space, and thusly having zero-g sections.
- Tales of Vesperia has Ghasfarost, the Tower of Gears.
Rhythm Games
- Crypt Of The Necrodancer: Zone 5 in Amplified has shades of this. It's electric-themed with floors made of metal tiles with electrical conduits running along them, the walls are riddled with wires and plug outlets, and the torches are replaced by light bulbs.
Shooters
- BioShock: Hephaestus, described by the soundtrack as "the Engine City", is an enormous power plant that funnels geothermal energy (and what looks like magma) through colossal engines to power all of the underwater city of Rapture. However, it's not especially "eternal," as, like all the rest of Rapture, it's in the process of falling apart, and one of the missions involves strapping an EMP bomb onto one of the engines.
- Jet Force Gemini has the three cargo ships that are stormed respectively by the three main characters: S.S. Anubis (Juno, though Vela tried to take control over it until she was kidnapped), Sekhmet (Vela, this time succesfully) and Spawnship (Lupus). These serve as the dungeon levels of the game. There's also the Spacestation, a wrecked vessel that has been stranded in outer space for a long time, but it's only accessible during the latter half of the game and plays more like a Mini-Dungeon.
- Prey (2006): Most of the game takes place in a planet-sized Eternal Engine. The aliens live in a giant artificial sphere in which every room, corridor and passage is strewn with wires, pipes and machinery of all sorts (not always inoffensive). Of course, since the sphere also has a biological component, parts of it also take place in a direct biological counterpart to an Eternal Engine, with loose pools of digestive juice, sphincter doorways, bleeding walls, vomiting sphincters, Body Horror Mix-and-Match Critter-weapons, Mook Maker sphincters, and that sort of fun stuff.
- Quake:
- Quake II: The factory level is a large complex in which human and mechanical parts are cut'n'pasted together (with no anesthetic...) to form Strogg soldiers. The machinery has more psychological effects and less gameplay consequences than most Eternal Engine environments, but the player is required to avoid a giant crusher or two and step on a few conveyor belts. Activating the human-mulching machines is optional.
- Quake IV lets you go through a similar factory, with a twist: you are the one strapped to a platform and being Stroggified.
- Star Wars:
- Star Wars Battlefront (2015): The Sorosuub Refinery and the Sorosuub Pipeline are a giant industrial factory and a sprawling oil mining facility, respectively, where Rebels and Imperials duke it out.
- Star Wars Shadows Of The Empire: Xizor's Palace, complete with giant gears that Dash must navigate.
- Transformers: War for Cybertron: The planet Cybertron is worth noting, since the entire game is set inside, outside, and on top of a massive eternal engine. It even features a level inside another character who is himself an eternal engine.
- Turok: The Primagen's Lightship and the Oblivion Warp Portals from Turok 2 would both count. However, the Portals are more true to the aesthetics of the trope, as each one contains a healthy dose of grim, industrial architecture complete with pumping pistons, steam valves, chains dangling ominously from the ceiling, pits of magma and all the other goodies. The Campaigner's Fortress from the first game, which is partially accessed towards the end of the seventh level and makes up almost all of the final level, also counts.
Simulation
- Factorio: Your mission is to build a factory to make yourself a rocket to escape an alien planet. Sounds simple enough, right? And it is... until you realize your factory must expand to meet the needs of your expanding factory. After all, to build that rocket factory, you need another factory, and then another factory to build that one. Then you also have to make youself your own military-industrial complex to defend your factory from the bugs. It's no wonder many players wind up having no idea how their factories work past a certain point.
- Terminal Velocity (1995) has the Moon Dagger in episode 1 (essentially a huge spaceship), and the massive supercomputer planet which makes up the last two levels of episode 3.
Stealth-Based Games
- Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus: A couple of levels in Sir Raleigh's fortress take place in the engine rooms, complete with enormous cogs and gears, fiery furnaces, and electrically charged fan-blades.
Strategy
- Battlezone II: Combat Commander: The planet "Facility", in the mod Forgotten Enemies. The planet is covered almost entirely in machinery, with huge cranes, fuel tanks, and heat sinks dotting the surface. The atmosphere is tainted green, and the only exposed land is brown, lifeless rock.
- Pikmin 2: The Subterranean Complex is one of the explorable caves in the game, located in the Valley of Repose. All floors except for the first (which is a snowy tunnel due to its proximity with the wintery surface) consist of planes of rusted metal that used to be part of a larger machinery a long time ago, filled with electrical currents arcing between tattered wires, and lit by scattered LEDs instead of the glowing mushrooms found in natural caves. The collectible treasures found within them are all bits and pieces of the ancient machinery, such as gears, nuts and bolts, vacuum tubes, a spring, and a lightbulb. They're now overrun by all sorts of wild creatures, including a number of biomechanical animals — the common but still dangerous gatling groinks with grown-in mortars and, at the very bottom, a very dangerous mechanical spider, the Man-at-Legs, that serves as the boss and forgoes bites and stingers in favor of blasting you with the machine gun attached to its underside. Other caves include mechanical floors as well, but they're not as prominent in them as they are here.
Survival Horror
- Castle Red features the Machine Tower, a massive complex of concrete and steel, with electrified floors. Margaery claims that its parts were pulled out of time and combined together to form the tower.
- Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs has the titular Machine. This time, we do find out what it makes (vitae, Manpigs, and industrialized human sacrifices and the power that comes from them), and the PC and the Machine's controller (actually the machine itself) argue throughout the entire game.
Wide-Open Sandbox
- Dwarf Fortress: In the Let's Play Battlefailed, the reactor system is called the "Eternity Engine". It literally is, being a perpetual motion machine.
Non-Video Game Examples
Anime and Manga
- BLAME! takes place in a world where there is no non-artificial environment at all. It is revealed that the world is essentially one massive Dyson Sphere.
- Clockwork Planet has the aptly named Clockwork Planet, which is actually Earth completely transformed and mechanized with gears. The planet's surface is nothing but gears that are constantly turning, and because of this, the human civilizations built on top of those gears are isolated from each other like islands, with the only efficient way to travel between them being by aircraft. The planet must be kept maintained at all times by master clocksmiths since those gears control all of its functions, ranging from weather to even gravity. A single system malfunction or failure can result in disasters threatening the lives of millions, if not the entire population of the planet outright.
- Steamboy: The Steam Castle. Not only is it ridiculously complicated on the inside, with giant pistons and wheels, but also incredibly dangerous on the outside as it freezes whatever it flies over.
Comic Books
- The DCU:
- During the JLA (1997) "World War Three" story arc, Superman invades the eternal engine an intergalactic threat named Maggedon has sent to Earth.
- Superman: After Superman comes back to life during Reign of the Supermen, he joins Steel and Superboy in assaulting Engine City, a gigantic engine built over the ruins of Coast City by Mongul and the Cyborg Superman.
Films — Live-Action
- The Borrowers (1997): A milk-bottling factory is this from the Borrowers' perspective.
- Forbidden Planet: The ancient underground Krell machinery, which was a cube roughly 20 miles by 20 miles by 20 miles. A single machine with a volume of 8,000 cubic miles, and full of fusion reactors. The amount of energy output is enough to power all of a (long dead) civilization's needs, or blow the planet to smithereens if set to overload because humankind is not ready.
- Star Trek: The Motion Picture: V'Ger is a machine so vast that it can (as Uhura and McCoy say) "hold a crew of tens of thousands... or a crew of 1,000 that are ten miles tall", and the Enterprise spends a large portion of the film inside it. When viewing V'Ger's holographic memory, Spock sees a "machine planet" which he speculates may be V'Ger's homeworld.
- Star Wars:
- Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones'': The droid factory, a rumbling, chaotic complex of assembly lines and pounding pistons, is a textbook Lethal Lava Land example, using molten metal as the lava.
- Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith: Mustafar, where the eternal engine is set in a Lethal Lava Land. Justified, in that it's an ore refinery pulling material from the lava.
Literature
- The Books of Ember: Ember is not all engine, but between the generator and the pipeworks, a lot of it is made up of constantly running machinery.
- The Death Gate Cycle: The Kicksey-Winsey is a floating factory-machine so vast and complex that it covers an entire Floating Continent. In the centuries after its designers had abandoned it, the enslaved dwarves left to run it turned their acts of maintenance and assembly into a religion; they no longer understand why the machine does anything, but have managed to keep it operational. They've since become quite used to the idea of living inside of a perpetually active machine — among other things, they've become so used to constant noise that they associate silence with death, since that's the only time when you don't hear anything anymore.
- Jack of Shadows: There is a Machine at the Heart of the World (the purpose of which is to stop the Earth from rotating).
- Humanx Commonwealth: The eponymous device from The Tar-Aiym Krang is outwardly a monolithic building three kilometers high, and which actually extends deep into the interior of the planet on which it's located, and includes certain layers of the planet's atmosphere. It's also 500,000 years old, and still functional.
- The Ship Who...: The "magic" discovered on an alien world in The Ship Who Won is powered by an enormous weather-control system inside the planet, which the mages are abusing to cast "spells".
- Spinneret: Humans stumble, by sheer chance, on a huge alien machine hidden inside a mountain, which has been dormant but active for millennia. It turns out to be a gigantic extruder, which absorbs any metal in and on the planet itself to make super-sticky string, originally destined to shield a whole solar system from detection. It houses enormous amounts of machinery, not to mention an artificial environment for the original workers and at least one fully working spaceship.
- Uncharted Stars: The Forerunner factory world to which the star map bowl leads, which is the source of the zero stones.
- Young Jedi Knights: The rocky planet Mechis III is covered with droid factory complexes and, during the reign of the Empire, it was even owned by a single company, Arakyd Industries. Less than a hundred biological employees live on the planet, the rest of the population is millions of droid workers. And yes, Mechis III has plenty of volcanic activity, so it has elements of Lethal Lava Land as well.
Live-Action TV
- Babylon 5: The Great Machine of Epsilon III, an homage to Forbidden Planet. It is seen in the episodes "A Voice in the Wilderness", "The Long, Twilight Struggle", "Voices of Authority" and "War Without End". Homage in the sense of a 1990's remake complete with giant vertical shaft with elevator globes.
- Doctor Who: The 16th season story The Pirate Planet, which was also Douglas Adams' debut as a writer for the series, features a hollow planet that crushes other planets to exploitatively harvest their raw materials to move their entire world from place to place in the universe. The Doctor must undertake some very risky maneuvers in order to shut it down.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- The Clockwork Nirvana of Mechanus is an entire plane of existence made up entirely of cogs and axles the size of towns, cities, continents and worlds, endlessly spinning and grinding to unguessable purposes. Naturally, Clockwork Creatures live there.
- Planescape: On a much smaller scale, the Foundry is a huge factory in the Lower Ward of Sigil that was the headquarters of the Godsmen. Unlike most examples of this trope, it had a known and useful purpose (it made all metal goods needed in the city except weapons) but it could still be used in any adventure that called for an Eternal Engine.
- Exalted:
- Autochthonia is an entire pocket dimension of this, consisting of masses of tubing, cables, gears, conduits and continent-sized machine blocks working towards purposes its inhabitants can barely even guess at. It's also a god. And it's winding down.
- There's also the lower levels of the Imperial Manse, a superweapon capable of annihilating small countries with a shot. It was built by Autochthon (the aforementioned god, although he's technically a Primordial, which is a step up), who can't be harmed by machines, so he didn't really think to put up much in the way of safety around the giant gears, pistons, plasma jets etc.
- Magic: The Gathering: Mirrodin is an entire plane made out of metal in which most of its inhabitants have metal as a part of their bodies. Unfortunately, this made the plane a prime candidate to be a new base for operations for the Cyborg Pyhrexians, leading them to remake the world into New Phyrexia.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- Many of the Imperium's typical "manufactora".
- Calling one a "small city" is a severe understatement for some of the bigger ones. Then you have the Forge Worlds, which are entire planets covered with factories and industrial facilities.
- Forge Worlds tend to have employment force roughly the same as population of a small hive world. Then there are Industrial Worlds which are roughly the same, but most of the labor is automated.
- Necron tomb complexes often carry this theme, though Necron technology bears little resemblance to human tech, or anybody else's for that matter. Case in point being the World Engine.
- Many of the Imperium's typical "manufactora".
Webcomics
- Homestuck: The Land of Heat and Clockwork, Dave's planet in the Medium, consists of islands of giant gears and metal building skeletons in a sea of lava.
Western Animation
- Transformers: The planet Cybertron. In its various incarnations it's depicted with all kinds of huge machinery all over the planet, with good reason — the entire planet is a Transformer. Then there's Unicron, whose insides are an even more literal take on the Eternal Engine Planet trope, and his tentacle horror Japanese cousin Dark Nova. The later US comics from Marvel also introduced the Decepticon War World.
Real Life
- Boeing's Factory in Everett, Washington State, the largest factory in the world.
- Bharat Petroleum in Mumbai, the inspiration for the Mothership in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
- Every offshore oil rig in the world is essentially this trope: a massive, complex, highly-dangerous machine, whose operators and maintainers live and work inside.
