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.