Machinarium

I love a good RPG, but this one left me cold. No characters, just puzzles, and no dialog at all. The puzzles are also counter-intuitive, to me, and the whole "adventure" is relatively pointless. It isn't terrible, no major bugs encountered, and some of it is a bit clever, but just not fun.

I'm not a gamer by any stretch of the imagination, so when I started this game I was totally lost. However, I persevered, clicked stuff, and discovered things. Finally I got moving forward a little bit which gave me encouragement. That was short lived. I went online and read and read posts about this game and how to move along in it. Some of the information worked, but eventually I'm in a boiler room and can't get out. I do what each site says to do but never managed to get that final sequence to get out of the room. So I left the game. Today I get this Amazon request for a review, and here I am. I ask you, what do I say about a game I cannot really play? It looks to be a really great game to play, lots of fun and artistically creative, but I just can't play it. Sigh! My Headline will say it all for me.

Machinarium is great exercise for the old gray matter. Moving from scene to scene requires completing a puzzle. Some are tough, but most just require common sense. Graphics are somewhat unusual, not your typical adventure game style, but refreshingly amusing. You can tell the folks who created this game had a wonderful sense of humor, and were able to weave their humor into the game. I especially got a kick out of the walkthrough pamphlet...all the wording is in an unreadable alien language, and puzzles are explained in the accompanying pictures. Great little game, wish there were more like it.

What a fabulous game. I would give it 17 stars if I could, it is so much above the ordinary! Machinarium is a mixture of pure puzzle (such as solving a moving marble puzzle to open a lock) and inventory-based adventure game (such as picking up a flower stem, which later you will plant in a pot in another building). You're in a wonderfully drawn and painted world inhabited by robots. There are no words spoken when robots interact. Rather you see thought balloons with a little video that moves the story along, or a pictogram or figure of an item that a robot wants. The way emotions are portrayed without words is inventive. Reminds me of the movie "Wall-E". The protagonist is just as cute as Wall-E. He's a little robot who's sweet on a little girl robot. Unfortunately, there are bully robots, and their evil plans must be thwarted. I thought all of the puzzles were pretty challenging and some of them are DIFFICULT. Wow - hurt my brain and my family got tired of me muttering to myself, "No, that doesn't work. Maybe if I move it this way." Only one, to defuse a bomb, is timed, and if you don't make it in time, the game dumps you back to right before you started working on the bomb. I "died" the first time, but what was good (for me) is that what you managed to learn the first time still holds true the 2nd time, so the 2nd time I didn't need as much time and defused the bomb. If you need a hint, there's a little lightbulb over the scene. When you click on it, it gives you a pictogram of what you need to do next. The lightbulb didn't help me much, because I generally knew what I was supposed to do, I just had trouble finding out how to do it. What was much more useful, however, was the booklet, "machinarium walkthrough" that came with this Collector's Edition. The walkthrough is a work of art, itself. The whole thing is in handdrawn pictures/pictograms, such as the thought balloons in the game. It is marvelous! And I had to resort to it more than once, though I'm not sure why I couldn't figure out on my own that bringing bees into the oil pub to distract the bartender was the way to get the barrel out the door. There was only one "puzzle" that I really didn't like and that was the giant one at the end. It's like a pac-man game where you have lives and after you unlock a gun you have to "get" 33 red evil robots in order to finish the puzzle, including finding the buggers as you go from one screen to another trying to make your way through a maze. I don't like games like that and I'm not good at games like that (latter contributes to the former, of course!). Though I could tell that it was much slower, etc., than real pac-man, I still had trouble (reflexes of a slug) and just got annoyed that I had to do this to proceed. Brain-puzzles I love. Reflex puzzles I don't. BUT - I'm sure most people wouldn't have trouble with it, so there you go. And fortunately for me, the booklet that came with this edition has a map of the maze, so at least I could figure out where I was. I played Machinarium with no problem on a PC XP. When I put the disc in, to install the game, I didn't get a pop-up screen. Instead I had to go to: My Computer Click on CD Click on icon to Install-Machinarium.exe After I'd saved my game and exited, to resume the game: Insert CD and wait for it to load (there was no pop-up) Click on the desktop icon for machinarium When a black screen comes up, with the name "machinarium" in wavy white letters click on the name Happy Reader

I was looking for a Myst-like game. While this game has the "wander around" and "figure out puzzles" aspects of Myst, it simply didn't visually engage me. Myst was lush - this game was more like stick figures. I played about a third of the way through the game and lost interest. Packaging and delivery of product was excellent.