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.
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.
TeaBag
3 months ago