Vital Stats

Genre: Adventure

Players: 1

Online: None

Developer: Amanita Design

Publisher: Amanita Design

ESRB Rating: Not Rated

Release Date: 10/16/09

Platforms

• Mac
• PC
• Linux

It is an internet-verifiable fact that robots make everything better. You can therefore imagine awesome it must be to play a robot in a robot city as he tries to save his robot girlfriend from robot terrorists. Machinarium is an adventure game that lives up to those expectations in almost every way.

Brushed Steel
Adventure games are in full-on revival mode. However, as much as it means renewed vigor, the revival also means revisited franchises. You might wonder where all the new stuff is, but it turns that it was just indie all along. Amanita Design is a Czech development house that has been making Flash adventure games like Samorost for some time, but they really came to the fore when they started winning awards for Machinarium.

The game takes place in a rusting robotropolis that should actually be a pleasant place to live for its rusting residents. However, a gang of hostile robots called the Black Cap Brotherhood has spread mayhem through the city. One robot in particular lost his girlfriend to kidnapping and was scrapped and sent out of the city on a trash jet. Armed with little more than an inventory system and a hint book, you guide this robot as he tries to make things right.

The first thing you’ll notice is the art. As a rule, hand-drawn 2D sprites are gorgeous, but Machinarium stands apart as something special. Maybe it’s the city’s slow ruin or the expressive robots, but the game looks surprisingly organic, and the artistic coherence reinforces itself everywhere you visit. The detail of little things like crumbling masonry, or the fact that pipes rust at their joints sells the city as real. It’s usually a crime to be uniformly beige and gray, but Machinarium sells it like no other game.

Less obvious than the art, but just as pervasive, is the game’s unique approach to storytelling. After a handful of tutorial sentences at the beginning of the game, Machinarium contains virtually no language. Characters instead communicate through animated sketch vignettes in thought bubbles. So if a robot wants a drum, you’ll see his recollection of a Black Cap Brother smashing his old drum. It’s the ultimate incarnation of “show, don’t tell.”

It might seem like this approach would hamstring the storytelling, but it doesn’t. This is a light comedy game, so it never tries to explain anything complex. Better still, this spares the game from having to explain any of its setting or contrivances. The Black Cap Brotherhood isn’t fighting for a cause, they’re just jerks who have your girlfriend. Who cares why? If anything, the storytelling is more effective, because it’s easy to underestimate the format. So when you’re stumped by a puzzle and idling, and your robot remembers playing paintball with his girlfriend, it comes off as sweet rather than prosaic.

Cogs and Gears
The gameplay is built around a core of textbook adventure object puzzles, but with a variety of adornments and improvements. Chief among them is your robot’s reach. Your mechanized minion can only interact with objects within an arm’s length, and you must walk to a position before you can interact with puzzle-relevant items. It’s definitely kludgey, but it spurred an architectural change that fixes a lot of the problems with adventure games. The developer apparently realized that this mechanic would be a nightmare in a free-roaming world, and so there are only a limited number of places you can stand in Machinarium. This virtually eliminates the age-old adventure problem of missing puzzle pieces and mistaking scenery as relevant.

You can extend your limited reach somewhat with your robot’s telescoping body. Grabbing his head with the mouse, you can stretch him to twice his height, or squish him down to navigate through sewers. It adds some depth (there are puzzles that exploit the mechanic in unexpected ways), but for the most part it really just added unbalanced wobbling animations to your robotic repertoire of charm.

There is one sour note about the core adventure gameplay. Machinarium is the first game Amanita Design has done with an inventory system, and the mechanics could use some polish. Whenever you select an item, it replaces your cursor in the way that you’d expect. However, if you chose wrong, the only way to get your cursor back is to manually return the item to your inventory. It’s a trifling annoyance, but it’s everywhere, and you’ll notice it as you play.

Machinarium doesn’t limit itself to object puzzles, and one of the adornments is the variety of puzzles and minigames. They range from a clone of Space Invaders to abstract spatial puzzles. Some of the action minigames will be a bit pedestrian or overly easy for experienced gamers, but they shake up the monotony of object puzzles, and each is crafted with the same attention to detail that went into building the rest of the game.

One of those minigames (a horizontal shooter) is required to access the in-game walkthrough. That’s right, this may be the only game that can credibly say that it wasn’t created to sell strategy guides. Your robot carries a locked hint book for the times when his idea bubbles just can’t get you through the puzzles. It’s strange to imagine a walkthrough without words, but it’s actually a lavish sketchbook with pictorial instructions. Critically, the hint book only opens to the page that describes your current location, so you can read it without being tempted to spoil the whole game.

More broadly, the walkthrough is indicative of a design philosophy that is new to adventure games: keep the player engaged. Most genre entries leave you stymied and frustrated when you can’t solve a puzzle, and the few that offer substantive hint systems either just hand them over or regulate hints with a boring token economy. Either way, the game stops trying to entertain the player. Machinarium instead offers you a shooter when you can’t solve a puzzle, and figuring out the walkthrough’s meaning is entertaining on its own. It’s a rare game that offers you all the necessary support to succeed, but isn’t boring while it does so.

Well Oiled Machine
Machinarium is definitely an adventure game, but it has a breadth of scope that should make it satisfying for many players. The simple interface and excellent support structure should help casual players ease into an arcane genre, and the impressive art and electro-acoustic soundtrack make playing immediately rewarding. Genre fans will likely appreciate the design streamlining, and hardcore gamers with eclectic tastes will enjoy the gameplay diversity. It is a linear adventure game, so there isn’t much replay value, but the first time through is excellent.

What It Costs: $20 (buy it direct from the developer. You’ll get a free soundtrack and you’ll be a good person)

What It’s Worth:

•To The Hardcore: $20 (buy)

•To The Genre Fan: $20 (buy)

•To The Casual: $20 (buy)