Machinarium First Impressions
Playtime: 1.75 hours (1.75 hours total)
Personal Rating This Session: 10 - The graphical style and charm of this game melted me from the beginning...the puzzles are appropriately difficult, require clever thought, and have not yet delved into illogical cheap crap.
Machinarium is another one of those games I started ages ago and never finished, probably because I got distracted by something sparkly in the house. It's a puzzle-adventure game with an incredibly unique hand-drawn art style, and absolutely no story. Literally, none -- I got dumped into a junkyard in pieces and start marching off with no idea why. There are bits of characterization and story woven in as I progressed through -- all done completely without dialogue, relying instead on thought balloons of the main character remembering things (usually someone beating the shit out of him), or someone with a speech balloon showing a picture of something they want. All in all, this makes one of the most atmospheric and gorgeous games I've played.
Now, I'm not the best at puzzles, but I still love trying them, and there's nothing better than actually figuring out a well-done one, as opposed to one that's convoluted. And even though there are a couple times I've gotten stuck so far, the built in hint system is brilliantly done. There's one hint per screen if you're stuck, that will usually get you on the right track. If that fails, you can crack open the in-game walkthrough book, which you unlock by playing a small 2D side scrolling shooter (controlling a key), avoiding obstacles and blowing up spiders until you reach the lock, at which point the book opens and a gorgeous multi paneled page comes up exquisitely describing exactly what you have to do. The little mini-game is long enough that a lot of times I say, 'Fuck it, I'll try to figure this out myself again' (which is the intention), but short enough that I don't say, 'Fuck it, I'm going to GameFAQs'.
That said, there are times it's totally unhelpful. In one particular puzzle, I knew exactly what I had to do, but I was missing a vital item. Pressing the hint button only hinted what I was meant to do (which I already knew), and the in-game walkthrough went to great lengths to show the steps, but it never ever thought maybe I wouldn't have the item. So after backtracking and searching three times, I finally had to look it up online. And felt so stupid afterwards, because I had actually looked at it earlier, thinking, "Hmm, I may need that" and then promptly forgot all about it.
The controls are well done, but can be a bit frustrating. The little robot main character can shrink or grow his height, which can be used to access pieces of the level you can't at normal height. You can also only interact with things directly in your reach, which means you can't do the standard adventure game tactic of entering a room and inspecting all the nooks and crannies without moving...you explore the bits around you, move forward a bit, explore, move forward a bit. The game is done in Flash, so there aren't any alternate clicks or anything like that - just a cursor that changes automatically between walk, stretch/shrink, and interact.
Most of the time this works great, but there are a few hiccups. Walking when you are really short or really tall takes forever, so if you accidentally do it, you have to madly click around to stop the little turd from moving, wait until he does, and then resize him. There was also one annoying bit where I accidentally clicked the wrong side of a container...so I slowwwwwly pushed it all the way to the other side of the screen. Except the other side of it was then offscreen, so I couldn't push it back. So I had to push it all the way into the next screen (slowwwwwly), all the way to the other end (more slooooowwwly)....then get on the other side and push it back to the original screen (not quickly), and back to the original place it was.
My favorite bits so far, are definitely if you leave him alone for a bit. Sometimes he'll start having a memory of spending time with his friend, and the sort of things they do. It's unbearably charming.
