Machinarium - A Review

Machinarium has been one of the greatest joys to play in the gaming world for me. This game is single handedly responsible for getting me invested into exploring more games. Thus, it holds a very special place in my heart.

Adorable story accompanied with quirky characters, gorgeous sound design, stunning visual appeal and fantastic puzzle pieces. Solving each section felt gratifying and most importantly, I had an incredible time in doing so. I think this game is the reason that I’ve developed a fondness for Amanita Design, I’m keen to explore more from them.

I would absolutely 100% revisit this game down the line and would recommend it to anyone who has an interest in puzzle based games with an eye for detailed visuals, it’s such a bundle of joy. Especially the ending!

I adore it with all my heart.

PS- Forever grateful to the friend who introduced me to this game, what a sweetheart. You can tell that I have an intense bias for this game, that’s how much I loved it. It’s personal

I'm not too familiar with the point and click genre, but this feels like it's got to be one of the better ones. It's got an intricately detailed world realised in stunning visuals with a unique art style, and some consistently pretty great music throughout. I perhaps wasn't the biggest fan of the sound design; being a robot world, everything is constantly creaking and clanking and groaning, and the character voices are just... weird, but I guess it does all help to sell the world.

The puzzles are a bit more hit and miss; the standard point-and-click / inventory puzzles are mostly good (with the occasional splash of some pretty heavy moon logic, but that's just a given for this genre), but the more self-contained puzzles can be pretty disengaging or frustrating (e.g. sliding block puzzles, a prolonged Space Invaders clone, etc.). I also found the game could be quite picky with certain objects' click detection boxes; there were quite a few occurrences of me figuring out how to solve something but then being unable to actually solve it because I didn't realise I was clicking a few pixels away from where I needed to. But overall, it's a solid experience throughout; while the aesthetics are what sell this one, there's nothing too awkward or annoying in the gameplay to detract from it.

So... why have I given a relatively low score then? Well, I played this on Steam in 2023 and it barely runs at all. I am not an FPS snob at all, I couldn't care less as long as I can tell what's going on, but the whole game ran on my PC at something between 1/2 to 2/3 speed. At one point towards the end I ended up googling the answer to one of the more esoteric puzzles, and seeing how fast Josef is supposed to walk was shocking. I did a fair bit of reading up about this and it seems to be some kind of issue with modern graphics cards (it seems to be a common problem with the Steam version, but only in the last few years), and I hate to demote a game for something like that, but it honestly becomes near unplayable at times. Once the world opens up and a lot of the puzzles involve backtracking to previous areas, I could feel the seconds of my life draining away as I watched Josef waddle across the map at 10FPS for what felt like minutes at a time. It's such a shame, because Machinarium is a sweet and charming little adventure that I wanted to get invested in, but so much of it ended up feeling like a chore because of the slowdown. But I have to rate the game I played, and the Steam version of Machinarium is absolute ass on this technical level.

I've never been huge on point and click games, but Machinarium always caught my attention. I remember playing through the first hour or so over and over again as a kid, but I only decided to actually finish it recently. Maybe it wasn't the best introduction to the genre, since some of the puzzles did feel kinda unintuitive at times, but I was still able to get through everything, and roll credits on it.

While I do have some problems with puzzles every now and then, they're really well designed, and some of the flaws I see in them could totally just be my brain being stupid. There's a really good variety with the challenges, and I love how they make you explore every last corner of each level. You could make the argument that the game gets too tedious due to the constant backtracking, and slow character movement, but I feel like that's kinda the point. Machinarium is always giving you time to reflect, and soak in the atmosphere.

Speaking of atmosphere, holy fuck. This is one of the most immersive feeling video game worlds I've ever seen. Every frame is so densely detailed, and the music goes so far in drawing you into The City. This was easily my favorite part of the whole experience, and what I'm gonna be remembering for the longest.

I know that Amanita Design has a bunch of other games out there already, and I can't wait to check them out. I almost wish they'd make a sequel to Machinarium, or at least another game set in the same world, because this probably stands as the usage of the steampunk genre, other than maybe Bioshock.

Nothing that stands out to me beside the design and some okay puzzles, but there is a problem that bothered me a lot

The game is kinda old and there isn't a "options" tab, so I had to ajust the audio in windows mixer, but every time I passed a level, it would go to 100 again

I'm deaf now 👍🏼

I don't know if its just me but finally being able to play Machinarium was nostalgic. I remember when I was younger and this game had only been out for a few years, and my class had begun to take an interest in playing it. I can recall my friends playing and talking about how great it was; all while I, the most tech illiterate and internet sheltered in the class (At least what I thought during the time) was unable to play it due to my parents not thinking that cheap mobile games such as this would be of any use to me. Something wherein I guess they where right, this game wouldn't have, and didn't change me with its fun story, amazing art, or fantastical score. Yet, it did work to do something in me by merely existing. For the fact that my understanding of what made a game something I wanted to play was fundamentally challenged. I was upset that I wouldn't play it in the time that it was popular amongst my friend group. But as I thought more, and grew up I remembered this story and it made me think, even right now as I write this I question why I play, but more importantly, feel driven to buy the games I do. When I bought this game earlier this month I did so for two reasons. One, it was on sale and cheap, a whole other factor within itself; and second because of the memories of never being able to play it before and wanting to know what made it "Great" in other peoples eyes. Which yeah, now having played it I can see why it was so good, but I cant help but think that if it were not for it my parents not buying it, or for the class being intrigued by it, my chance of being here right now would have been significantly decreased. I might have found it on my own, and the art might have made me interested enough to buy, and I would have had probably the same amount of enjoy-ability playing it. But I don't know this review is becoming a mess, and I don't even know what I am trying to say, if anything at all. I just want to know why we buy things. We like knowing or receiving positive reviews of games before we okay them, but why? Why should a game be considered any less then just because some people hated it, and why must we bully people for liking things other might not. This is gaming, there are soooooo many games out there in the vast web of what the internet has allowed humanity to achieve. Do I buy games because they are popular? Do I buy games because people think they are good? Because someone wrote a super long review of something that debates the very philosophies behind why in the world anyone should buy anything?
What I learned from my parents not buying me this game as a child is that while reviews and popularity of something can be helpful in determining if something will be enjoyable to you, it shouldn't be the only factor in your decision to buy. Buy games you like, buy games others don't, and just play them. Elden Ring might be shit to one person, and some people loved Fallout 76 when it came out. Just have fun, do what you want, but don't let the crowd get ya down.
Anyways, Machinarium is great and you should play it! Bye bye!

Samorost 2, for all its strengths, still felt very much like an extension of Samorost 1. It was good, but with a little tweaking I could conceivably see it being fused into Samorost 1 and released as a single ambitious Flash game that I might've beaten over the course of several computer classes while procrastinating. Machinarium, however, represents Amanita firing on all cylinders and making something new that was also their biggest game yet. The result is pretty delightful, though I found it frustrating at times. With the power of hindsight I can see how younger, stupider me never beat it cause holy shit some of these puzzles are tough. I have no shame in saying I was forced to use a guide (which by the way I quite like the ingame guide, it has just as much care visually as everything else and it requires just a little skill by making you earn the solution with a short shoot em up minigame to access the walkthrough) several times throughout the game because I found it quite cryptic. There is also liberal uses of my worst enemy in puzzles: sliding tiles. I am dogshit at those and the game loves to throw different versions of the concept at you that I either brute forced by accident or looked up the answer cause otherwise I'd be there all day. Even with that the game took me a pretty respectable 7 ish hours to beat which is quite decent. Art wise, I fucking adore everything about it. Robots are always cool, but the ones on this game are insanely creative with a fuckload of fun designs. The dirty ass city all these toasters live on is fantastic and I took screenshots in like every room because I was loving it all. Just for the visuals alone this game is worth buying on a discount, full price maybe if you like this kind of game. The Amanita bundle I got this on actually comes with every soundtrack and art book for every game included, and as soon as I beat this I poured over that. It's a shame that to my knowledge there's no physical artbook that has ever been sold because I would've gotten it in a heartbeat. Still, the art book you can get digitally is actually pretty nice. It's not very elegant, with most of it seemingly being notes and sketches made on a notebook, but they give the art a very raw, dirty feel that really reflects the final look of the game. You can tell they had a solid idea for how they wanted the world to look, and they went on to execute flawlessly. Music is also pretty nice, goes really well with the game, and its mostly relaxing. Minus points in that department because on what's basically the last room of the game there's an incredibly annoying static sound that almost gave me a migraine. I will admit I'm not totally sure if that was a bug or somehow intended, however. Story was quite simple, but I respect how much it actually conveys without any dialogue. I hadn't thought much about it, but none of Amanita's games from the ones I've played yet have any actual dialogue, just animal crossing esque funny noises when characters speak and pantomime. Ending is satisfying enough, and overall I had a pretty decent time with this game. If the puzzles weren't so cryptic at times and there were less sliding tiles I'd be even more effusive about my praise, but I think this is a game worth trying regardless.

Visually stunning and creative.
It's not as good as Samorost but still worth it.

I never actually finished it though. Some of the puzzles are hard to understand which is common for these type of games (sometimes it's more like trying to understand the devs' heads than following logic).
It can get boring after some time.