Machinarium is a point and click adventure game where you play an oddly stretchy robot attempting to... get into a city. At least that is all the motivation you have in the beginning. Over the course of the game the creators, Amanita Design, develop your character's circumstances and goals.
There is no voice acting in the game, there is not even text based dialog, all thoughts and speech is done in the game via animated pictures in speech/thought bubbles. It makes for an interesting change, I was not aware that the main character even had a name until I looked at the wikipedia page for Machinarium.
The art is hand drawn and the designs are quirky, the game is almost entirely devoid of organic life, this is pretty much a robotic world with robotic analogues for most creatures.
It also features an in built hint system which you can always use from the inventory section. It requires playing a kind of shoot em up minigame and then gives you some pretty detailed pictorial instructions on how to solve the current puzzle.
You also never wander around with useless items because when an item no longer has any use your little robot either loses it or gets rid of it. It seems a little arbitrary at points but it reduces the need to play random item tag when you are stuck.
It was a pretty good point and click adventure though not too long. There are a couple of drawbacks, it is written in flash, the steam overlay does not work when windowed and when it is full screened you get some hefty black borders as you can see in the screenshots. Finally, there is no right clicking in the game, if you do you get the standard options menu which is always rather jarring.
Amanita Design are currently doing a humble bundle which gives you their most recent game Botanicula as well as Machinarium, 2 other games and a movie.
The art is hand drawn and the designs are quirky, the game is almost entirely devoid of organic life, this is pretty much a robotic world with robotic analogues for most creatures.
You also never wander around with useless items because when an item no longer has any use your little robot either loses it or gets rid of it. It seems a little arbitrary at points but it reduces the need to play random item tag when you are stuck.
It was a pretty good point and click adventure though not too long. There are a couple of drawbacks, it is written in flash, the steam overlay does not work when windowed and when it is full screened you get some hefty black borders as you can see in the screenshots. Finally, there is no right clicking in the game, if you do you get the standard options menu which is always rather jarring.
Amanita Design are currently doing a humble bundle which gives you their most recent game Botanicula as well as Machinarium, 2 other games and a movie.
Games list status: 391 unfinished titles
Net change: 3 titles finished, 7 title added
NB: This final section now reflects the status of the list as of the post being written.
Yep! I loved this game, I ended up playing it twice (with a fairly large time gap so I forgot how to solve most of the puzzles). Even though they have no dialog, the robots all have character and are all cute and lovable in their own ways (except the evil ones), from the beefy security robot to the random vacuum cleaner bot.
ReplyDeleteI'm currently part-way though botanicula, and I'm enjoying it too, but the style is quite different, the puzzles are less traditional so far.