Machinarium

4 A cute story with heavy emphasis on the visual appereance
This is a tough nut to rate, to be honest. It was an adventure game alright, even if it was somewhat uncertain at the linear beginning. I keep yelling in my head at people who choose Flash as their platform, and this game was no different – the disadvantages of Flash did stand out, and I really do wish that a game of this nature was done with AGS or similar if they didn’t want to create their own engine.

The visuals were all but amazing, truly a magnificent masterpiece of interactive paint work. Character animation looked smooth and fluid, details in the scenes were astonishing, leaving no detail out. Everything in the scenes seemed to “just belong there”. It is incredible how many different moods it is possible to create with nothing but rusty machinery.

The traditional type puzzles were about what you’d expect, and I have nothing to complain about those. Some were easy, some were hard and there was a good balance between them. The hint system was great, and I played the shoot’em’up minigame in all the rooms only to see the quality art that was in the hint comic book. However, those trivial puzzle-puzzles were a mood killer: Do I want to solve a rubik’s cube while playing an adventure game? Not really, and I do wish those weren’t there at all. Luckily you could use the hint book to get past the most tedius ones. Some of them were fun, such as the one at the late-middle parts, but most of them simply paused the game for a cumbersome quantity of time.

The story began in a bit slow fashion, not giving you much idea on what is going on and what you are doing, but later on this became more clear. It’s a cute story, in its own brutal fashion.

Play this if you want to play an adventure game with a heavy focus on the visual appereance, and don’t mind a logic puzzle now and then.

5 One word: Awestruck
This simply one of the best games I have ever played. period.

The Story is simple and sweet, but is revealed very gradually. There is no dialogue or text at all in this game (at least, in a language understandable to humans) The entire story is narrated in-game, and through weird graphic symbols and thought bubbles.

The Visuals are great and the artwork is incredibly detailed. The world the game-makers have created is simply amazing, and gives an eerie and dystopian backdrop to an otherwise light-hearted game. If there is flaw, with the graphics, it is the fact that the game resolution is limited to a maximum of 1200×800px.

The Soundtrack is some of the most original music i have ever heard, and succeeds spectacularly in setting the mood and ambiance of each level and the game as a whole.

The Puzzles are the real treat in this game. Most hit games of a similar genre are built around one good idea for a puzzle.(think World of Goo, Cut the rope, etc.) Machinarium has one for each level in this game. Really, the originality and sheer imagination put into some of the puzzles is hard to overstate. Make no mistake. This is a hard game, and the puzzles are very challenging. But the rewards for passing are correspondingly satisfying. The hints provided become vaguer and less useful as the game progresses. (I wouldn’t allow myself to use the hints or walkthrough even when i got stuck.)

Word of advice. The first two or three levels can be a show-stopper for most people. But if you pass through those, the best parts of the game are yet to come, with each stage being better than the last.

In conclusion, This a definite must-have. More importantly, the effort and patience put to get through those first 2 or 3 stages will be amply rewarded once you get into the groove of the game.