This is basically my imprexperessience (experience and impressions) with/of Machinarium.
Well I'm sure many of you are well aware of the recent resurgence of point-and-click adventure games. There's just simply too many out now to list, just goes to show how the genre is coming back. I'll be the first one to admit that as a kid I didn't really grow up with these games. Since practically all point-and-click adventure games were on the PC back then, and I didn't have a good PC and wasn't even into PC gaming, I never really played any of these.
I do have some memories of watching my cousin play one of the Monkey Island games, forgot which one, but I sort of dismissed it since I thought it looked boring and too slow-paced. The genre just simply did not appeal to me at all. Even if it had a great story, I still wouldn't be willing to play the game to experience the narrative.
Also majority of the time I hear people talking about how this one puzzle in this one game needed to be solved in this really obscure way that didn't follow any sort of consistent or clear logic. Then there was the dreaded pixel hunting in adventure games that was a constant complaint. There would always be one little thing, like a silver button or something near a dead pirate’s buttocks that was critical to a puzzle. Then when you needed it, you wouldn't have it since you missed it like five screens back. So now it's time to do a screen-by-screen pixel-by-pixel sweep; hooray for engaging and not-tedious gameplay.
You have to click something on the sink, have fun finding the sweetspot
But my attitude toward point-and-click adventures changed with Machinarium. Ever since I saw the first screenshot for it, I knew I had to get it, adventure game or not. The art style and color palette was exactly how I wanted to draw myself (I'm not a very good artist, but I'm trying to improve). It was steampunk-ish, but not overly done, the machinery and robots had a beautiful rusty-organic feel, the architecture was both mesmerizingly detailed and intricately designed; I loved the scratchy yet charming look of the game.
Even after the many mixed reactions in the various previews for it I still remained positive just based on the games visuals. There was something about the way it looked that I could just feel the amount of care and attention that the developers and artists put into it. I had faith that the audio would be just as good; that the developers wouldn’t botch the unique setting and atmosphere that the visuals created with inappropriate sound effects and mood-killing music.
Once it was up for pre-order at Amanita’s site I put down the $17 for it and eagerly waited for October 16th. After dealing with my craptacular college’s bandwidth (download speed was anywhere from 8-24 kb/sec; then again, everyone else was downloading it as well) and waiting almost five hours for it to finish downloading (I did other stuff while waiting, fapped to Destructoid mainly, I didn’t just sit and watch the bar crawl along) I installed it and played for about three hours straight and enjoyed every second.
Having completed the game I can say that I’m an adventure game fan now. I’ve been wowed so many times at the game. Mainly by the characters’ animations and the daydream bubbles; they are simply adorable. Also there’s this band in the game that is just awesome; not only musically, they got some nice jazz, but they just look so delightful. Every new character has this unexplainable ability to make you smile or your eyes bug out in shock and sadness. The story isn’t a big part of the game, nor does the game ever try to make the narrative the highlight, but the simple plot is cute in a children’s story kind of way and it’ll motivate you to keep going.
I would give these guys money if I saw them on the street
It's quite clear that the game is beautiful, as by the screens and the fact that Machinarium's best hook was it's visuals. But the music is no slouch either. The soundtrack varies from ambient electronica with a touch of aqua-lounge, to bass-heavy funky 'badguy-ish' theme songs, and the music that plays on European weather channels. It's all good stuff and sets the games vibe perfectly.
Now the game itself is just great. There is no pixel hunting for starters. While the objects that you can interact with are really well integrated into the scenery, I never felt like the game was being a dick and flat-out hiding stuff from me. The robot you control also has a stretchy torso; he can extend and compress himself to essentially reach higher and lower areas. Although you can only interact with things when you’re next to them, you can’t move anywhere you want. Instead you can only move into ‘hotspots’. These are just predetermined places where you can stand, and they do a really good job of streamlining the experience and not making you go berserk clicking on every inch of the screen. If you can’t go somewhere, there’s nothing important there.
I heard that Machinarium was ‘screen-by-screen’; that each screen was its own puzzle and once you get through a screen and move on to the next you won’t have to go back. This isn’t true in Machinarium unfortunately, well not exactly, but I think I was expecting something different. For example (puzzles spoilers ahoy; skip to the next paragraph if you want to avoid ruining anything); there is one robot NPC that cannot play his instrument because there’s something stuck in it. I spent about half-an-hour combing the screen looking for a way to unclog it. But the solution was actually a robotic cat that you had to shock, paralyze, and reactivate near the instrumentalist so it could get rid of the thing that was unclogging it, which was a robotic rat. The thing I didn’t like about this was that you don’t get the cat until three screens later. I knew that you needed something alive to get rid of the clogging culprit, since when you examine the instrument you see some red eyes that clearly belong to some creature. But to have the solution, the cat, three screens away is not following the rule of ‘screen-by-screen’.
I’ve also heard some say that it’s a hard game and quite lengthy because of the difficulty rather than content. It took me about seven hours to beat, but of course you may beat it much faster or slower depending on how often you use the built-in help devices or if you’re just better/worse than me at adventure games. There is a hint light bulb for every screen that you can click and it’ll give you a subtle clue. In addition there is a walkthrough book that will tell you a detailed picture-by-picture guide of what to do. The book needs to be unlocked by playing a mini-game where you control a flying key and must shoot down googly-eyed spiders (yeah, it’s kind of strange). Since you have to do the mini-game every time to look at the book it is a really well designed hindrance that discourages using it, but it still remains an option.
Well I only used the walkthrough book once but I did use the hint light-bulb probably like five times. The puzzles were never illogical, you knew what you had to do all the time, but the doing aspect was the hard part. For example (no spoilers); in the greenhouse I knew I had to use the projector, but getting it running was the hard part. Another part of the game is that it throws in a good amount of ‘brain-busters’. These ‘puzzles’ were basically super elaborate locks or a mini-game type of contraption that needed to be unlocked. These weren’t that hard, but I felt they messed up the pacing a bit. I don’t think many people want to walk into a room, only to spend the next ten minutes trying to open a cabinet with some crazy unlocking mechanism.
One other minor complaint is that the game would give you items that would just sit in your inventory for a long time. I don’t want to spoil anything, but there are a few items that you’ll be hanging onto for quite a while. The bad thing about this is that I kept thinking that I missed something earlier and that I should of already used the item, but it always turned out I just needed to hold onto it longer. One last quick point about the puzzles; there’s a part where you have to play connect five. I found it to be really enjoyable, despite losing about six or seven times before finally winning. My advice is to block early and always look for diagonals; the computer loves to setup diagonal traps.
My last point in this garbled mess of a blog is the how the game is written itself. It’s in flash. I’m perfectly ok with this; in fact I could go on a big spiel of why a game like this works best in flash actually, but I won’t. Instead I’ll just advise anyone who hasn’t played it to not feel like you’re playing a game that should be free; just because there’s a massive amount of free flash games on the web doesn’t mean that, flash equals free. The game doesn’t have its own mouse cursor, it’s just the basic arrow and it changes to a hand or legs when you can interact or walk respectively. I’ve heard some people complain about this, but it’s really not a big deal. Also, right-clicking will just open up the flash menu, which you may have to open to turn off hardware acceleration. With it on the game is very jittery and sluggish, so make sure you turn it off. The game tells you to turn it off in the ‘About’ tab as well.
Despite the few complaints I had with it I still enjoyed Machinarium a lot. I think anyone that isn’t really into the genre should give it a shot. It’s endearing and charming and I hope Amanita Design make another adventure game real soon, because my itch for point-and-clicking is best satisfied by their work (I did like Samorost 1 and 2). Gorgeous hand-drawn point-and-click adventure games like this don’t come by very often, if you didn’t buy it yet, I highly recommend you do so. This is all coming from an adventure game newbie, so all you veterans may have different feelings about it, if so, please share them with me.
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