Come to think of it, LLMs with the right prompts would be pretty handy for a Scribblenauts clone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribblenauts

Probably outputting a format supporting the same characteristics as the Object Editor: https://scribblenauts.fandom.com/wiki/Object_editor

You have to reallllly squint to see Incredible Machine in these. These are basic associations, not physical interactions. The closest you get to IM is "what happens if I stick these two things together" but it's more guessing and less input output.

In IM, you know what each thing does and see the output of each action, so you can iterate: placement, angle, special attributes like fire or light. It's not just stack two possibly related icons to see what you get. With these you either know the association exists or you're doing conceptual guesswork. There's no testing and iterating on a hypothesis, at a point once all known associations have been exhausted, iteration looks like permutation.

Also "The Alchemy Game" from 1997.

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Alchemy_Game_The_1997

OH GOD THANK YOU! I was playing this on a Packard Bell Windows '95 PC with integrated loud speakers and a mic. Super high tech for the time.

BUT: The German-language full version of that game had been pre-installed in the Start Menu (?!), so if you deleted the start menu entry by accident, you'd need to reinstall Windows to get that game back. Or at least, that was young me's solution to the problem.

wow, I totally forgot, thanks! I remember playing that game or a derivative, I think on my father's 386 sometime around 1995?

Maybe this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caKj6rGEdyM. I was obsessed with this for about a week in high school.