Machinarium

Independent developer Amanita Design strikes a beautiful chord with Machinarium, a smart and elegant point-and-click adventure that follows a nameless robot through a dilapidated world of machinery in search of his kidnapped girlfriend.

       This interactive graphic novel is a prime example of the pure and unpolished, if pretentious, appeal of indie games, combining a fantastically detailed grunge-robot aesthetic with good music and occasionally evil brainteasers to create the arthouse masterpiece many gamers have already experienced through a great deal offered by the Humble Indie Bundle (http://www.humblebundle.com/) program and the marketing kindness of Amanita Design itself.

       As one is bound to notice, Machinarium is completely hand-drawn, and each environment you encounter has you exploring the canvas with your eyes, picking out all the minute details that make the game so visually interesting. Crosshatched nuts and bolts, silvery washers and grimy corrugated aluminum – all of it is distinct and very pretty, and you’ll probably remember it as one of the high points of the experience. Whimsical and slightly tragic, this world is special, and never lets you forget it.

       Tomáš Dvořák’s phenomenal soundtrack brings an entirely new dimension to the game’s already unique ambiance. A mesmerizing blend of synth, piano, and other minor instruments overlaid with a moody echo and old-vinyl crackling, it imbues the world with an eerie loneliness that puts you in a mystical, smaller-than-life mood and affects your emotions in ways few games can (check out "The Glasshouse with Butterfly” for one of my favorites).

       If you’ve played a 2D adventure game before – Monkey Island, The Dig, Day of the Tentacle, or even Amanita’s own Samorost 1 and 2 – then you know what to expect. If not, then you probably still know what to expect. While it innovates in many other areas, Machinarium does not play with the tried-and-true adventure game controls; that is to say, put your mouse where you want to go and click. Yet you’ll find that much of Machinarium’s beauty lies in its functional simplicity, its ability to achieve depth and variety with a single mouse button – which it does by trying to ensure that the challenges you face, be they traditional puzzle mindbenders or “use item to proceed” matching games, are always varied enough to keep your interest. The quality of the self-contained puzzles is undeniable – they’re often based on existing concepts like slide or rotational puzzles with a few old-school action types thrown in, only with a grungy hand-drawn makeover, and like all good brainteasers, their answers are excruciatingly simple in hindsight. While the pace of the game is occasionally marred by a handful of truly unintuitive ones (here’s to you, water pipes), the exercises that do hit home will leave you feeling relatively accomplished after you’ve managed to work them out logically and on your own brainpower.

       Unfortunately, this means that technical difficulties with a control scheme as old as the point-and-click system are particularly jarring against the sublime backdrop the rest of the game creates. Want to cancel your movement because you suddenly thought of something better to do? Good luck, because your tiny robot avatar will move with single-minded fixation towards where you told it to go, even if it needs to go across the screen and down three ladders to get there. Better luck if you stretched him out first (a mechanic to enable you to access some out-of-reach items), as a tall robot waddles at about a third the pace of the limber short one. Machinarium is also no stranger to "pixel hunting," an ailment that has plagued point-and-clicks for their entire development history; actionable areas or objects are hard to find, especially given the hyperdetailed environments, and you will likely be subjected to a random clickfest at least once every screen while guessing out what to do.

       Clearly, the makers of this game anticipated the trouble most gamers would have with its many brain-mangling puzzles: one standout feature of Machinarium is its creative built-in hint system. Rather than launching into a long textual explanation or dispensing with hints altogether, the game translates its visual storytelling tactics into a comic-book walkthrough that explains with pictograms what your next step should be – and that’s assuming you get that far in the first place. You get one very simple hint per screen, and if that doesn’t give you the epiphany you need, it’s off to the detailed, painstakingly illustrated ingame walkthrough. To unlock the leather-bound cheatbook, you must play a minigame wherein you must guide a pixellated key to its keyhole across a 2D spider-infested tunnel. A novel idea, it might nevertheless benefit from a bit less repetition – if you want to access the book on two different screens, expect to play the game again. And again and again, for each additional screen you can’t quite figure out.  

       The walkthrough itself is also far from perfect; as with many of the game’s (admittedly sparse and shallow) plot points and expositionary “dialogue,” it’s very seldom completely clear what is happening or what you need to do. Oftentimes you may find yourself stumped even by the blow-by-blow picture explanations, and again be reduced to random, futile clicking to determine what arbitrary step is next on the storyboard.

       Expect to be moved, impressed and enchanted, but do not expect to be entertained for more than five or six hours. Machinarium’s major weakness and is that it is over far too quickly. Even moving at a slow pace and spreading out your play, the abrupt ending and unresolved ghost of a storyline will force you to notice how short your experience has been, and how disappointed you are that you aren’t getting. Ultimately, whether or not you get your money’s worth falls to how much you enjoyed the superb art, otherworldly atmosphere, and clever puzzles, and this reviewer believes that the gamut of what Machinarium has to offer means it’s worth a playthrough for anyone who doesn’t outright hate puzzle games.

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