Before we begin today’s journey, I’d just like to say that I cannot be rational about today’s subject. Due to my well documented love of adorable anthropomorphic robots (my favorite movie is WALL-E), and traditional puzzle adventure games (my favorite video game of all time is Luscasart’s point and click magnum opus, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis), Machinarium could have been gaming’s equivalent of Grease 2 and I would being saying that it is one of the defining games of our generation. Indeed, my affection for both Machinarium‘s theme and function are so great that it truly feels as if every workstation at Amanita Design had my picture posted beside it. “Make this man happy,” I imagine the team lead saying, while pointing toward the image of my goofy countenance, “we toil for his pleasure!”
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Fortunately, Machinarium is a great game in its own right, and I don’t have to resort to irrational fanboyism to convince you that it’s worth a play.
Point and click games are enjoying a sort of Renaissance currently, and Machinarium fits solidly within the current adventure landscape. Initially, the most striking aspect of Machinarium is its gorgeous and fully realized artistic style. Every screen is dripping with detail, hand drawn and rendered with care. Machinarium‘s world has a worn beauty reminiscent of a European city; the art implies that there is a history in this mechanical world, even if we never delve into it.
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Of course, these works of art are nothing but paintings without a game to play on top of them. Machinarium follows the traditional adventure game formula, and it succeeds because of its traditional nature. It doesn’t ever try to throw its players a loop, and it never disrespects its origins. Tradition, sometimes, is worth following, and Amanita Design knew and respected this idea. It does adopt some of the modern point and click adventure genre conventions, like keeping its puzzles self-contained and never leaving with you items that you’ll never need again. This idea is a relatively recent one in the design of these types of adventure games (though the germ of the idea can be seen as far back as Lucasart’s Monkey Island series) and it makes for more coherent puzzles and an overall more satisfying game. You’ll never encounter a scenario where, like what caused me to quit Space Quest 2 in a furious rage, an item on screen two becomes critical on screen forty-two. This allows you to spend your time thoughtfully considering puzzle solutions, not clicking randomly in desperate fear that some pixel will actually be an item that you’ll need at some point.
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On top of being self-contained units of gameplay, each puzzle is well designed and never arbitrary. Not once did I ever think, “Well, I would have never figured that one out on my own.” Another one of Machinarium‘s interesting traits is that it contains not only traditional item-based, get-ye-flask-use-ye-flask-on-yonder-grue puzzles, but also features a number of practical logical exercises. I wasn’t expecting to solve Mensa-esque peg jumping puzzles when I sat down to play, but I was pleasantly surprised and happy to do so. In every instance, these logic puzzles are presented as machinery in the Machinarium robot world, making one feel that sweet feeling of actually interacting with the fantasy universe.
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All of this praise doesn’t mean that I was never frustrated, however. Even though the game has a fabulous hint system which makes you play a short action-arcade game so you can cool off and let your subconscious mind mull over the puzzle before giving up the proverbial walkthrough goods, there was a single instance where the game forced me to click to pick an item up, then click to place it on the ground. This may seem like an odd, nitpicking gripe, but it is completely unintuitive to require two clicks for that action. I was stuck for a full half-hour until random, frustrated clicking happened to make my character act the way I had desired in the first place. This sort of issue can’t be solved with any hint system; it is an oversight in the interface of that particular puzzle, and it made me frustrated to know exactly what I needed to do, only to not be able to.
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But only one frustration in a five hour adventure game experience is pretty damned good. I’ve been far more frustrated by some games that I would put on my top ten list of all time, so this gripe really is a small one. It only seems large because of how excellent every other aspect of the game is.
Machinarium is fantastic, and is definitely a worth addition to the point and click adventure genre. It has fun, inspired puzzles, a beautiful art style, a superb soundtrack, and is made by a wonderful independent team of developers worth of support. If you like adventure games, you owe it to yourself to play Machinarium.
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