Machinarium

Machinarium is a quaint little indie game that came out last year to relatively high praise. The folks over at Game-Central.org were huge fans, even going so far as to make it a top contender for Game of the Year for 2009. Because of all the good things I had heard about the game, I was pretty excited play it and also had relatively high expectations for it. I picked up as part of a six-game indie bundle for a mere $20. While the game is undoubtedly brilliant, it didn't quite live up to my expectations.

For any of you not familiar, the game is a classic point-and-click style adventure game featuring inventory (with item combinations) and other similar adventure game trappings. The main character is a spunky little robot who has the ability to make himself taller and shorter and store items... by eating them.

Loved

• Music. The music in Machinarium is absolutely amazing. If you are into video game music at all (I'm really not, but still enjoyed it), you will be blown away by the music here. I absolutely can't think of any game that had better music. It's so good, I know of people who paid pretty high fees to buy vinyl soundtracks from overseas. It really is that good.
  
  
• Art. Everything in Machinarium was hand-drawn and then rendered frame by frame in Photoshop. The game is just beautiful to look at and all the animations are beautiful. It's the kind of game where you could take a screen shot at pretty much any time and set it as your wallpaper.
  
  
• Puzzles. I loved the puzzle variety in this game. There were mini-game style puzzles (even a full Space Invaders game!), as well as more traditional adventure game style puzzles like listening to a radio and then playing the same tune back into a miniature piano like device. None of the puzzles in this game felt awkward or contrived to me; I never once had to use a rubber chicken as a pulley (Fate of Atlantis I'm looking at you) or anything like that.
  
  
• Narrative style. I was a little torn by this, but in the end I really liked it. Instead of using either written or spoken dialog, all the robots communicate in the game using pictures. In one area, I saw a sad wrench shaped robot. I "told" him that I wanted to use him to unscrew a large cap and he "told" me about how his record player was stolen and that he was sad. I was able to figure out exactly what he wanted me to do without the use of any words whatsoever. It worked surprisingly well and by the end of the game it had really grown on me.
  
  
• Hint system. The way they implemented their hint and walkthrough system felt so brilliant to me, I want other people to steal it. For every screen, you can press the hint button and your little protagonist robot will "think" of what the overall goal of the area is. His thought bubble gives you a valuable clue in what you are trying to accomplish without really spoiling anything for you. I thought that it worked so well, I found myself using it on pretty much every screen just to see what it would show. In addition, the game features a full walkthrough built into the game. To access the walkthrough, however, you are forced to play through another mini game in which you guide a bullet shooting key to a lock. Once the walkthrough book is open, it uses beautiful images to show you what you should be doing. (Just as a side note: I was able to quite easily finish the game without using the walkthrough, but I did use the hint system quite liberally.)
  

Hated

• It's a Flash game. Machinarium was made in Flash and plays in a wrapped Flash viewer. There is no reason that this game couldn't have been a web game. While some would think this a minor complaint, it bothered me more than I thought it would. One of the big problems with Flash is that the right mouse button doesn't do anything but bring up a right click menu to tell me about Flash. Also, when the game was in full screen mode, it was surrounded by blackness (admittedly not necessarily a Flash issue), however it was very annoying as lots of the areas were very dark and it made it almost impossible to see where the "screen" ended and the blackness began. That wouldn't have been much of an issue, but the only way to access the inventory was to mouse over the hotspot at the top of the "screen," click the item, try to use it, then drag it back to the hotspot and click to put it back. I would have loved to be able to put items back by pressing escape or right mouse clicking (I tried it do it throughout the entire game), but alas, the limitations of their development environment didn't allow it.
  
  
• Length. I absolutely don't feel like all games need to be really long; in fact, I've found myself enjoying shorter games more and more. However, Machinarium felt too short too me. The game doesn't take more than a few hours tops (unless you you fail at puzzles) and left me wanting more, but not in a good way. For how sprawling the city looking to be, it felt downright microscopic. Additionally, the game featured almost no back tracking, which could be good depending on how you look at it, but for the most part just made the game feel smaller and shorter.
  

Machinarium really is a good game. I would easily recommend it to anybody who loves adventure games and even to people who don't normally games. It has a charm that few games have. While I definitely had some complaints with a couple of things, I liked what I played. Hopefully this just means we'll see more similar games from this team.