Watching gamers play at the Osmos booth was hilarious. They’d grab the mouse with that kill-and-win attitude that works well for so many other games and immediately die. However, in a repeat try or two, everyone had learned to settle down and take a more deliberative approach to Newton’s third law. Dave Burke was on hand to explain why everyone’s experience turned out that way, along with a detailed explanation of Osmos and some thoughts on the game’s future.

We didn’t get a chance to talk to Jakub Dvorský at the Independent Games Festival, and it was our loss. The CEO of Amanita Design shared a lot of details about the upcoming Machinarium that might not be obvious from their advertising and site. Read on to learn about the role of language in adventure games, the game’s gorgeous art, and why you should buy it directly from Amanita over a traditional publisher.

Nintendo brought the E3 demo for Zelda: Spirit Tracks to PAX, and it feels awfully familiar. Players of Phantom Hourglass will recognize the cel-shaded art and the draw-to-interact mechanics (and perhaps the faintest whiff of reheated ideas), but old is boring. The demo notably offered vignettes of a dungeon crawl and a train run.

If you’ve been to PAX, you know that just about everybody hands out promotional swag. Most of it is pretty, but t-shirts, buttons, and temporary tattoos don’t really have much to do with the games they advertise. Nicholas Trahan, on the other hand, is a bit more thoughtful. He was handing out multicolored pens for Liight, a color mixing game from Studio Walljump. It also turns out that he’s a handy source of insight about the game’s inner workings, the art of feedback in game difficulty, and the secret origins of Studio Walljump.