Not sure how to describe these if you haven't played the games, but as a designer, I always try to imagine how someone would create something like a multi-ton that moves by the turning of one crank after having such-and-such items aligned perfectly on its face...
Were there civilizations that had amazingly involved mechanisms in their temples or elsewhere that I could check out?
They did! We get the first references of automata during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285-246 bce) when they where used for procesions: "... a wheeled cart eight cubits wide was led by sixty men. On it there was a seated statue of Nysa eight cubits high wearing a yellow tunic embroidered with gold, and with a Lakonian himation wrapped around her. This statue stood up mechanically with no one putting a hand on it, and after pouring a libation of milk from a golden phialē, it sat back down again." (From Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae, ca 279- 270 bce)
However we have the most understanding ragarding Roman Alexandria, where temples had miracles built in by inventors. Heron of Alexandria (ca 10-70 ce) left evidence of how they worked in his Pneumatics. Through pulleys, and the use of heat, vapour and water reservoirs they made automatic doors, simple automata, and self playing trumpets. One interesting thing is he writes that the automata could not be too large or too complicated, or skeptics would think there where people moving them
They also had a way to keep ever burning lamps. Fr Athanasius Kitcher (1602-1680 ce) writes ”In Egypt there was a field whose ditches were full of pitch and liquid bitumen. Philosophers, who understood the forces of nature, constructed canals which connected places like these with lamps hidden at the bottom of subterranean crypts. These lamps had wicks made of threads that could not burn. By this means the lamp, once lighted, burned eternally, because of the continuous influx of bitumen and the incombustibility of the wick.” the wicks are theorized to have been asbestos threads or gold wire