When I played Machinarium with my daughter, there were a number of occasions when we had to copy a screenshot from the walkthrough into a separate document, and keep referring to it until the puzzle was solved. Furthermore, some of the puzzles remain extremely tricky even with the aid of the walk-through, and some of the solutions are too complex to remember. To prevent you from using this "cheat" all the time, the walk-through is protected by a mini-game in which you have to shoot spiders and navigate a maze of bricks and planks. If you require more detailed guidance - which most players will at some stage - you can click on a book icon, which reveals a walk-through in the form of a comic-strip. Clicking a lightbulb at the top of the screen yields a little animated hint as to how the current puzzle should be approached. At times these brainteasers, which are effectively mini-games in their own right, can become a bit too obtrusive and detract from the main storyline - but on the positive side, there is more emphasis on intellectual effort and less on clicking around until something happens.Īs an acknowledgement that some of the puzzles can be intractable without help, Machinarium provides two levels of assistance. Green beads have to be slid from one end of a constricted maze to another lightbulbs have to be lit up in the correct sequence to form various types of star tiles have to be shuffled until they form an electric circuit and so forth. We are frequently confronted with logical or geometric brain-teasers. Likewise, a lot of the puzzles in the new game ask something more of us than just finding the right objects to click or the right sequence to click them in. This is one indication that the game as a whole is more complex, and what you discover in one screen often doesn't make complete sense until a few screens later. In Machinarium, once you have found useful objects such as a key or an oil-can, you can store them in an inventory, for re-use later. In the Samorost games whatever equipment was needed to solve a puzzle could be found on the current screen. Secondly, although Machinarium retains the same point-and-click functionality as its predecessors, this functionality has been somewhat augmented. In Machinarium, the graphics have more of a hand-drawn look. Firstly, the backgrounds in the Samorost games were largely created from collages, often based on blown-up photographs of highly-textured natural objects such as tree-bark. Machinarium differs from its predecessors in some respects, however.
The music for both Samorost 2 and Machinarium is composed by Tomas Dvorak, and their basic storylines are closely related too: in Samorost 2, a little man has his dog stolen by aliens, while in Machinarium the hero is a little robot, whose girlfriend has been kidnapped by villains. They are also all science-fiction-themed, but they depict worlds which are quirky, small-scale, densely textured and slightly shambolic rather than awesomely futuristic. All three share the same whimsical sense of humour.
Machinarium has a great deal in common with the two Samorost games, particularly Samorost 2. Dvorksky started designing his first computer game at the age of 15, and Amanita is best known for its point-and-click adventure games, most notably Samorost 1 (2003), Samorost 2 (2007) and now Machinarium (which was released in October this year). Magazine électronique du CIAC - CIAC's Electronic Magazineīy AMANITA DESIGN (Jakub DVORSKY et alii)Īmanita Design was established in 2003 by the Czech Jakub Dvorsky, who was then completing his studies at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague.