I was excited when Humble Indie Bundle #3 came out including Humble Indie Bundle #2 as a bonus if you paid more than the average because I hadn’t heard about Humble Indie Bundle #2 until it was over. Machinarium was one of the great-looking games included in the bundle I’d missed. I hadn’t realized until I decided to play it recently that it is from the same developer as the Samorost games, and is another flash-based point-and-click adventure game.
I wouldn’t straight up buy a flash-based game as I have this idea in my head that flash is a thing that’s on the internet for free. When you also consider that Machinarium costs $10 on Steam and took me just over 4 hours to play all the way through, it’s not a good buy at full price unless it’s really amazing. Some of it is, but not all of it. That whole flash thing especially gets to me when I try to right-click and get the flash settings context menu.
The graphics are an arty / sketch style that I really appreciate, and everybody’s a robot so that’s fun too. The color tone gives it a sort of a steampunk look though there’s no steam or clockwork and the robots are a bit cutesy. The background music and sound effects are also pleasant. The developer is called Amanita Design, so it makes sense that the graphics and sound are so good.
Machinarium also takes an interesting approach to telling its story. After the title screen there aren’t actually any words in the game, so the story is conveyed visually. When you need to know what happened before, or if your robot communicates with another robot, you see thought bubbles with animated line drawings. Things like you ask a robot for her umbrella and she says she just wants her dog back, or you remember when you built a sandcastle and some bully robot stomped all over it. The story isn’t very complicated, but I liked the way it was told.
I like the idea of point-and-click adventures, but I get impatient if I get to a point where I don’t know what to do next. Machinarium has a hint system built in though, so you can check the simple hint or play a little game (which reminded me of playing pong on Commander Keen’s watch) for a more thorough hint. Of course it’s usually easier to find out what to do on the internet, but they get points for including the hint system. Sometimes the stuff that makes sense to the people making the game doesn’t occur to those of us playing it — for example I knew I needed to attach some sort of hose to a faucet but didn’t think that boiling the inside of the air conditioner would get me a hose. For much of the game you have a large area open for you to move between, so it can take you a long time to figure out what to do with that plant you picked up from down on the street level. I could have done with a few more hints in the game itself instead of separate in the hint system.
Besides figuring out how to make a police bot disguise there are also some straight-up puzzles. These I enjoyed and didn’t bother looking up hints for, so attempted a few of them multiple times. One is a 3x3 sliding puzzle with one empty and one removable square. Another is a 5x5 grid with some squares filled in where you need to fill in the rest but have to pick a starting point and go in one direction until you hit something, and then turn. There’s also a video arcade where you play a couple simple games within the game.
While I enjoyed Machinarium, I’d recommend waiting for a 75% off sale or picking it up with some sort of bundle. I didn’t really enjoy $10 worth of it, but I basically got it for free when I bought Humble Indie Bundle #3.