Finally had a chance to play a game I’ve mentioned a couple of times in passing… Machinarium. My thoughts? In a word… Magical.
I’m trying hard not to oversell it, but I found the art style charming, the music beautiful, the animations delightful and the puzzles clever and challenging.
My only complaint — and it’s a fairly subjective one — would be that the wonderful sense of mystery the game begins with isn’t persisted for long enough. Most importantly to me — as I used social engineering to sneak back into the city during the second screen — was a sense of moral ambiguity. Are my motives noble or selfish? Do robots even care about morality? Why am I even trying to enter the city?
SPOILER ALERT: By the fourth screen that moral ambiguity was gone… Ahh, I’m The Good Guy™, they are The Bad Guys™, and it’s ’cause of The Girl™. Oh well, not a major complaint, the game was still charming. The very traditional motivations just meant it became more cute than it was mysterious.
Back to the positives, the game contains a wide variety of mechanical interfaces — buttons, switches, levers, valves, locks, meta-games, puzzles — and they are all wonderfully designed. These are interfaces without labels or instructions, often without symbols, and yet, it doesn’t take long to work out exactly how to use them.
The entire game only provides around 6-9 hours of gameplay — depending on how long you spend banging your head against the trickier puzzles before cheating — but you’ll enjoy every minute.
Machinarium I highly recommend! If you are interested in picking it up, it’s available on Steam for US$20 or if you act quickly you can grab The Indie Bundle for US$20 including other titles: And Yet It Moves, Auditorium, Aztaka, Euphloria and Osmos — Auditorium is fun, Euphloria and AYIM look interesting and Fumbles would recommend Osmos (not I).
