Machinarium
2009
Audio: Vietnamese, Arabic, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Danish, Swedish, Thai, Norwegian Bokmål, Ukrainian, Dutch, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Czech, Turkish, Portuguese, Polish, English, French, German, Spanish
- point-and-click
- puzzle
- adventure
- indie
- fantasy
- science fiction
- single player
The story
Machinarium is award-winning independent adventure game developed by the makers of Samorost and Botanicula. A little robot who’s been thrown out to the scrap yard behind the city must return and confront the Black Cap Brotherhood and save his robot-girl friend.
What it’s like
Hand-drawn and painted in soft, rusted watercolour tones, Machinarium looks like a storybook left out in the rain: muted ochres, mossy greens and dusty blues, with the warm glow of lamps and furnaces punctuating grey industrial sprawl. Scenes unfold as static, fixed-angle tableaux you explore by clicking, so the rhythm is unhurried and observational, broken by small, clever mechanical puzzles that feel more like tinkering than problem-solving. The soundscape is mostly gentle: wind over scrap heaps, clanking gears, creaks and hums, and a wistful, folksy score that rises and falls with each discovery. Wordless, with only cartoon glyph-speech, the game speaks through body language and tiny gestures, and its emotional arc follows a small robot who is cast aside and slowly gathers courage to rescue his friend. There is no real violence or gore; tension comes from mild peril and the occasional bumbling villain rather than fear or cruelty. It suits a quiet rainy afternoon, a late evening with headphones, or anyone who enjoys patient puzzles and a melancholy-tinged, whimsical world. It is made for players who want gentle, thoughtful adventure without time pressure.
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