Machinarium

[MinisterofDOOM]

This game was a real treat.

It's a point and click adventure game with some neat mechanics and an incredible hand-drawn art style. It is also backed with a great soundtrack.

You must help a little robot, who has been kicked out of the robot city, get back in and...I can't really say much else without giving things away.

The robot can telescope...stretch vertically to reach different things. This matters, because unlike most point-and-click adventures, he can only interact with things he's standing near. While that might sound annoying, it works with the gameplay: if you can walk somewhere, there's something to do there. Which helps prevent the tedious "click everything on the screen" syndrome that often accompanies these kinds of games.

The puzzles are great, and require some nonlinear thinking. To solve one puzzle, you may have to solve several others in other areas...it's a multi-threaded interweaving that keeps things from being predictable and really requires you think about what you're trying to do.

The story is great, but nothing particularly groundbreaking. However, the way it's told is brilliant, and as it's told you'll find yourself smiling or laughing or feeling bad for the little robot.

One of the most brilliant things is the game's help system. There are two tiers to the help. The first is a "you need to achieve this" though bubble that helps you realize what you need to do in a given scene. The next is a thorough walkthrough...but to keep you from abusing it, you must play a short R-type style minigame that is very simple but takes time. Once you complete it, the walkthrough shows ONLY the steps for the scene you're currently looking at. This goes back to the interwoven progression I mentioned before...it might show you leaving an area and returning with batteries...but how you retrieve those batteries is covered in a DIFFERENT scene, and on a different page of the walkthrough...which you must access separately by again playing the minigame. Keeps you honest but also means you'll never put down the game due to frustration because good help is always there.

The game's biggest weakness is it's overuse of minigames as puzzles. Some of them are tedious, others are just unfair, and all of them break up the otherwise brilliant flow and pacing of the game. The very worst moment of the game was, without question, the stupid tic-tac-toe game. You must play 5-spot tic-tac-toe against another robot, and it is, as tic-tac-toe ALWAYS is, a complete waste of time and more luck than skill. As the WOPR taught is in Wargames, no one wins at tic-tac-toe unless the other guy screws up. And playing game after game waiting for the computer player to screw up is anything but fun.

The game is disappointingly short, too...too short for it's $20 price tag if you ask me. BUT...it's such a wonderfully enjoyable game that it really IS worth those $20. It's too brilliant...the visuals are too good, the sound too perfect, the story too adorable, and the puzzles too much fun, that passing it up is a huge mistake.