Conflicted Emotions

 

  
I have extreme emotional conflict when discussing Machinarium, an independently-developed adventure game for PC, Mac, and Linux. If I were judging it solely from a presentation standpoint, I would call it one of the best games this year and be done with it. The game's striking, hand-drawn art style and positively sublime soundtrack dazzle the senses, and it's impossible not to get sucked into the strange, wonderful world that Amanita Design has created. From a game design standpoint, though, Machinarium leaves a lot to be desired. It's a slightly aimless, overly vague adventure experience, one that is sure to frustrate just about anybody who plays it. Prepare to be left out in the cold for some truly non-sensical and poorly designed puzzles along the way. Once you begin to recognize the logic the game is following, and reach the game's far superior second half, the experience clicks and becomes as enthralling as I'm sure the developers intended. Whether or not you actually make it there, though, is another matter entirely.

Your first task in the game is to piece together the robotic lead character, who is unceremoniously dumped into a junkyard in the very first scene. Here t he game offers you a brief primer on its control mechanics, which adventure players will be mostly used to. The game is mostly mouse based, and clicking anywhere on screen will cause your character to move there. An inventory bar on the top of the screen holds any items you collect, and using one is a simple matter of selecting the item you want, and then the character you want to use it on. Pretty standard stuff. An interesting mechanic lets you grab your character with the mouse and drag to extend or compact his body, which comes in handy for a few height-specific puzzles. It's an interesting addition to the game, and it's used sparingly to keep it fresh.

After the first few screens of the game, where you're introduced to the primary villains, things sort of go stale for a while. In an interesting bit of design, there is no dialogue or any kind of written communication in Machinarium. The story, puzzle clues, and conversations are all handled through little sketched drawings. It's a neat way to combat the language barrier; anyone from any country in the world could play this game and eke their way through it. But what it really ends up doing is making the puzzles feel vague, and early on things can get very confusing, especially when you need to travel back and forth between multiple areas to continue. During the game's early stages, I often found myself just clicking around on everything, trying to find something that would stick and let me progress, which is a less-than-ideal way to make it through a puzzle game. There's just not enough feedback to give you a clear idea of what you should be doing next.

The game gives you one hint per screen, but the hints given are so mind-numbingly obvious that they end up being pretty useless, and often only help you with the very first step. Another icon, though, will actually give you the entire solution to a puzzle, after completing a bizarre and boring side-scrolling shooter game where you must get a key to a lock at the end of the level. Once completed, the steps needed to solve a puzzle are explained to you in a series of pictures. It's kind of a weird system, although with puzzles as arcane as the ones found in Machinarium, you may need to make use of it once in a while. (I know I did.)

Once you break through some early game cramps (and one hellishly annoying Gomoku puzzle), Machinarium begins to pick up a little. In the second half, the puzzles are markedly more fun and interesting, and you'll be able to piece together a bit of the story as well. A series of puzzles in a greenhouse as well as the last few puzzles in the entire game are clear standouts, and yo u'll be able to use logic to solve these well-designed puzzles from beginning to end. You'll also appreciate that the game tends to remove items from your inventory immediately after use, so you won't need to mess around with dozens of different objects in a given situation, wondering which of them are actually useful.

All the while, you are treated to some truly unique and inspiring audiovisuals. Machinarium was designed and created by a very small team, and this

has allowed them to craft a very distinct look for it. Everything appears to be drawn by hand, and the backdrops have this amazing, textured look to them. The animations are modest but have tons of personality, and you will find yourself constantly impressed by what's on display. It's all done in Flash without hardware acceleration as well, so just about any computer (my two year old Macbook included) will run this game flawlessly. By far the best part of the game though, is the incredible soundtrack composed by Thomas Dvorak. Built by layers of synth and electronic resonance, the music has a vast, stream of consciousness quality that is an absolute delight to listen to, inside or outside of the game. You really do need to hear it for yourself.

Machinarium is definitely an art game. With no communication between the game and player, it's a murky and strange game, probably by design. You will most likely struggle through a fair amount of its puzzles. The story, barely there, is extremely open to interpretation, and the game ends extremely abruptly with almost no conclusion. In so many words, don't expect a huge amount of closure from this game. But, in spite of all its design flaws, it's art direction and music alone make it worth checking out. If you're willing to spend a few hours of frustration to get to the good stuff, the game is a worthy purchase. If you can't stand feeling lost when you play video games, then avoid Machinarium like the plague.