review: machinarium

there is one thing this review exists for: to communicate to you that machinarium is awesome.  buy it, play it, love it.  potentially impregnate it with your children and then spend the next nine months trying to figure out what sort(s) of sustenance a human/software hybrid child needs.  it's that fucking grand.

two things that might exempt you from liking machinarium:
1. Do you hate love?
2. Do you hate the nightmare before christmas?

if your answer to either of those is "yes", then you might dislike machinarium.  but you might also not be human, in which case HOW ARE YOU READING THIS?

i digress.

here's what machinarium looks like and sounds like.

i can't get over the way this game looks, the way it moves, and, perhaps most surprisingly, how good the music is.  i could pulsate subliminally to the soundtrack all day long.

anyway, the game itself is a semi-standard point-and-click adventure game.  you have an inventory, but it never ends up holding more than 3-4 things at once.  you can stretch your little robot-guy taller or shrink him shorter if necessary.  beyond that, you just move from screen to screen and click on things.

now, i should come clean: i hate "adventure" games.  nothing seems less like an adventure to me than clicking through a bunch of 2-D landscape paintings strung together by a cliche narrative.  i tried to like myst, i tried to like lots of the myst clones that have come out since.  none of them worked for me.  machinarium works.  despite having more in common than not with games like myst, somehow it's significant enough artistically and - yes - emotionally to warrant a full playthrough (i actually played through the entire game in two sittings, and though it's a short game, it still probably took me about 10 hours to figure everything out, so that's a lot of sitting).

somehow, machinarium sidesteps the dullness of the simple point-and-click and experience that so many adventure games seem to boil down to...part of this is due to the simple (but ingenious) touch of making it so you can only interact with objects (or realize that you can interact with them) if your robot is in arm's reach of them.  so, every time you enter a new room, you don't just immediately canvas the whole room with your cursor, waiting for it to turn into a clicky-hand.  granted, what you do instead is click around to make the robot walk the circumference of the room, and then check to see if you can click on anything...but somehow this little tweak is significant.

the story, told entirely through little thought bubbles that pop up at opportune times, is also oddly significant.  the robot is looking for his robo-girl, and there's an especially poignant moment about halfway through the game when you find said robo-girl, but are unable to rescue her as yet.  the two of you trade items through the bars of her cell-like room, and it's simultaneously adorable and sad in a way that i've seen few games manage (indie games or fancy full-on 3-D megacorp games).

the puzzles themselves are hard.  not impossible, but hard.  they require a lot of clicking, obviously.  machinarium also includes two levels of sanctioned "cheating"; at any point, you can click a little thought bubble in the inventory bar, and you get a short pictorial representation of how to solve the puzzle closest to where you're currently standing.  if you want more help, you can click on the book icon, but the game forces you to play a little side-scrolling shooter game a la gradius before giving you a hand-sketched book page of how to proceed for the next several steps.  interestingly, neither of these tricks will blatantly spell out an answer for you, but they do reduce the stymie-ing effect of some of the games puzzles to more simple visual riddles.  other reviewers have complained about this, but i think it's absolutely perfect to be made to run through the mini-game before getting any game hints.  if you really want to cheat, just look on the internet.  if not, the game's going to force you to work for it.  that seems fair.  also, the hand-drawn nature of the hints you do get, and their presentation (through the metal-ish book creaking open) are just perfect within the steampunk aesthetic of the game.

i have to say, in response to some of the criticisms i've seen of the game's puzzles, that i didn't find anything in the game too hard.  machinarium is actually quite a blessing in the sense that the solutions to the puzzles make sense, unlike in a lot of adventure games.  even the few times that i accidentally happened upon a solution, it was clearly a solution that i could have thought of myself logically; i just hadn't.  only once in the entire game did i hit upon a solution to a puzzle that didn't make any sense (involving scaring a robot with something that i never would have guessed would scare it in a situation where it was completely unclear that you were even supposed to scare it), but even that one i just got through via random clicking.  i never used the walkthrough and only used the hint bubbles once...and i'm bad at these types of games.

so yeah.  i love machinarium.  you do too, even if you don't know it yet.