Orderoftheflame

Set in a unique world inhabited by robots, Machinarium from Amanita Design follows the classic adventure game recipe mixed with fantastic art direction to produce a remarkable title.

The game follows a young robot named Josef as the protagonist in his attempt to foil the actions of some other robots that had bullied him previously. While there is no speech within the game, the plot is carried extremely well through displaying the ideas and emotions of the characters within thought bubbles. Although the plot is not particularly in depth, it’s a good short story that’s easy to get into.

It’s not a particularly long game. It took about five hours to complete on my first play through, however as with any adventure game a player could spend a longer or shorter amount of time playing depending on if they get stuck or not. The difficulty of the game seemed pretty fair to me. It certainly wasn’t a straight run through, and I found myself having to search around for the solution to some of the puzzles for a while, yet it didn’t become tiresome at any point.

One of the most interesting features of the game is it’s fantastic art style. Almost every element of the game appears to have been hand drawn, providing a unique feel to it. This also results in an immense amount of detail to be found in every scene, more than is generally found in games today. This however comes at a downfall resulting in a fixed upper resolution meaning that on a large monitor the game will have a quite substantial border surrounding it. Despite this, the game still looks fantastic both full screen and windowed.

The sound within the game also adds a great deal of depth to the game, with the simple grunts and other noises that characters make conveying their emotions extremely well.

The gameplay is a simple one click interface used in a lot of adventure games of the past, removing the choice for picking “Use”, “Open”, “Push” ect in favour of have just method of iteration for all items. As with most games the player has an inventory for storing items that have been picked up, and stored items can also be combined with each other. As well as the standard adventure game mechanics the player is often asked to participate in solving simple puzzles or playing mini-games. These tend to fit well into the flow of the game and are usually placed in order to allow the player access to a locked room.

One of the more annoying aspects of the gameplay is the lack of information regarding whether an object is part of the game or not. Due to the art style of the game, objects drawn the background and objects usable within the game merge together seamlessly, and the game will only allow you to interact with an item (or see that it can be interacted with) if you are standing directly next to it. This means that some items, particularly smaller ones can be extremely hard to locate unless you happen to be stood in the correct spot.

An addition to Machinarium that is becoming more and more implemented in adventure games is a hint system. In Machinarium this takes two forms. Each different location has a single hint for the player. This is usually a thought bubble explaining the main objective of the area. From examining it after my first play through, the hints seem extremely obvious to me, however a new player to the game (or genre) might find use for them.
The second help system implemented is a walk through guide. To unlock this the player must play a tedious side scrolling shooter each time they wish to look at the guide. This takes several minutes to play through and is clearly implemented to encourage players to solve the puzzles for themselves. The each walk through shows a hand drawn story board of the current area with the solution to the puzzles, but assumes that a player has all of the items required to solve a puzzle. Should a puzzle require an item that the player does not have, they are given no hints of where to find the item and still must search for it.
The deterrents should help to prevent some players from resorting to using the guides, but personally I feel that having the help included would generally invite players to use it.

Machinarium is a fantastic title, proving that the new IPs still have a place in a genre generally where well established characters and stories hold the top spots. It’s biggest downfall is it’s price. While it’s definitely a great title that I enjoyed a lot, it’s difficult to justify it’s £15 price tag on Steam for the amount of time that I spent on it, especially when games with more content are available cheaper, but I’m very glad I parted with the money.
I would have to say that it’s worth getting for fans of the genre, it’s uniqueness and great sense of style are worth experiencing. However newcomers may find that they can find more cost effective titles to begin playing.