Machinarium (2009)

The hand-drawn art and animations, the wonderful soundtrack (which I've actually owned for years after getting into Tomáš Dvořák through the Samorost soundtrack)—it's just a good time.

Some of the puzzles are a little unintuitive, but I didn't really mind looking up the occasional walkthrough because the puzzles didn't really feel like the point, and none are particularly long or tedious so you can pretty quickly move on to the next one.

Short too, which is a nice change of pace.

The game winned me over with the visuals and music, but it only cemented further my aversion to poin-and-click adventure games. The game suffers from the same issue that plagues the genre. While some puzzles are clear and have clever solution, too many of them are overly convoluted and nonsensical.

Futhermore, most of the time I was doing stuff because I could see the puzzles in the environment instead of because I could see what I needed to do inorder to achieve some goal. The main example is the part in which you need to mess around with the fountain in the central square. I did it because I could and it was a puzzle that was presented to me, but never in the process I could see the big picture .

Still, the art design is very appealing. Each character is unique and charming in its own way and the music is very atmospheric.

A true labour of love, Machinarium was developed by a small indie team of Czech developers with their own savings and a marketing budget of just $1000. The game features exquisitely hand-drawn dystopian industrial environments and is populated by mutely expressive robots.

Following in the tradition of the artistic Myst series, an important inspiration behind the game, Machinarium does not contain any dialogue or comprehensive language in any form. While this can be slightly disorientating at first, without any obvious prompts or hints from conveniently placed bystanders, the game encourages creative thinking by challenging more conventional modes of information gathering, instead inviting players to examine its meticulously drawn world ever more closely. This allows for a heavily absorbing, almost sedative atmosphere and a greater appreciation of the game’s ambient, space-like music.

On the whole, Machinarium is an inventive, memorable and surprisingly sweet experience that is over too soon.

I've chosen this as an example of a game I feel has elevated the medium to an art form. Please check out my blog, Inky Squiggles, to see the others!

I'm not really a point-and-click adventure game guy but I really liked the hand-drawn art style of this bleak but charming robot world and heard good things so I thought I'd give it a try.

You play a little robot who at the start of the game is dumped in a trash heap outside a large city for an unknown reason. You have no idea what's going on at first but this is revealed as you progress.

Gameplay consists of you solving environmental puzzles and logic mini-games. Most of these were not too hard until I got to about the last quarter of the game. Then the puzzles difficulty seemed to spike to really obtuse brain-teasers. I admit I had to look at a guide for a couple. I'm not saying it's necessarily the game's fault and it might just be me being a dumb ass but it took the wind out of my sails in the final stretch.

The minimal story is told with no dialogue or writing, everything is conveyed via sounds, gestures and thought bubbles. This adds a lot of character and charm to the world.

The sound effects and music are also great. The lo-fi, techno jazz vibe gives the grungy cityscape some real atmosphere.

Overall I liked the game. The music, sound and graphic design are top-notch. Only some annoying puzzles near the end brought it down for me.

A beautifully stylized adventure game about a cute little robot living in a mechanical world.

Right of the bat the game is very pretty and awesomely stylized with great attention to details. The animation is on point as well.

You play as a robot trying to stop two bad robots from blowing up a tower by solving different puzzles along the way.

The game is not that long but it doesn't need it. The location are varied and with a lot of details. The puzzles themselves are mostly restricted to just a handful locations meaning there is no annoying traveling between various locations and figuring what's next. They're also pretty logical so it's not that easy to get stuck and even if you do so - there's a helpful hint available as well as a page guide that you can unlock with a simple mini-game.

All and all a very polished solid game with interesting setting. Thumbs up from me.

This is a beautiful point-and-click adventure with an artfully presented story entirely devoid of speech, which is really hard to do. Its world and characters are quirky and original in a manner that reminds me a bit of The Neverhood (despite Machinarium being hand-drawn rather than clay).

I will admit that some of the puzzles and pixel-hunting were a bit too challenging for me. This is my third attempt at a playthrough without getting stuck, during which I finally resigned to using a walkthrough intermittently so I could experience all the game's content. I don't necessarily think the puzzles are poorly designed, they just felt a couple degrees tougher than what my modest skills were ready for.