Machinarium – Making Adventure Games Cool Again

Brought to you by Czech independent game studio Amanita Design, is Machinarium, the coolest adventure game I’ve played in years. This game brings me back memories of old LucasArts classics like Full Throttle, Sam and Max: Hit The Road, and the Monkey Island series. The game also draws a lot of similarities to my all-time favorite adventure game, The Neverhood, which I’ll have to devote a whole post to at another time…

Machinarium won the award for “Excellence in Visual Art” in the 2009 Independent Game Festival and it shows. You find yourself immersed in the game’s beautiful hand-drawn world. You control a little robot, thrown out with the trash, to rescuing his girlfriend and thwarting a terrorist attack. The music is also amazing and really adds to making the world feel complete.

The game features no text and the story unfolds through series of animated speech bubbles with cute and emotive robot grunts, showing you flashbacks and giving you ideas of what to do next. To get through each stage you need to solve a series of puzzles, and thankfully, most of the items you need to solve each puzzle are contained within the levels. The puzzles are fun and challenging, save for one nearly impossible game of Gomoku, or Connect-Five. There are only a few instances where you need to use items from other screens, so the experience is a lot less frustrating than some of the LucasArts games that got you caught missing one item from who knows where.

That being said, aside from certain puzzles taking a long time to figure out, the game felt a little short once it was all said and done. Machinarium’s world is beautiful but we don’t get to see enough of it! My only other nit-picky issue is that you can only bring our hero to specific walking points, meaning when you click an area, you are stuck waiting for him to get there, or hoping he can hurry back fast enough. There is no in-between. This means that every point you can take the robot is an important point, which helps in a way, but becomes a little cumbersome. There is also one instance where an action item is stuck to a ceiling and because it’s so dark, it’s hard to notice it’s there! Anyway, very little gripes.

Beautiful art, great music, fun puzzles, cute robots- I want a sequel.

Get it now – if you buy it digitally you get the soundtrack, too! If you’ve got a PC, nab The Neverhood while you’re at it.

More screenshots after the jump…