I would love to say that the reason I decided to get Machinarium was that after my experience playing the golden cuntass I wanted to a truly great game to play. However the real reason is sadly far more prosaic: It was on sale.
I'd heard about it a while ago of course, and played the demo and liked it, but never actually gotten around to buying it. Then I found out you could buy it for a mere $5 for a limited time only. And that limited time only expired the day I found out. So it wasn't so much a decision as a mad scramble to grab it as quickly as possible. If you didn't buy it in the last week or so you missed out. Sorry about that.
How to describe it? Well, obviously it's a point and click adventure game from an independant studio, but that only takes us so far. I think one word I've seen used a bit is "whimsical". The art style and presentation does I suppose fall into this category. The whole thing being hand drawn in a style reminiscent of an old childrens book. It all looks quite lovely and just goes to show how irrelevent the latest generation of hyper advanced graphics really are. The whole thing runs in FLASH for fucks sake. The storyline and events follow this storybook feel as well, and the whole thing does have a lovely timeless quality to it. A nice touch is the total lack of text or speech, with everything being expressed via though bubble images and animations. Literally anyone from anywhere could pick this up and get on with playing with no fuss. Both family and forigner friendly, you don't see that everyday.
Gameplay what we have of course is a series of puzzles of various difficulty. Judging these sort of things is always tricky, as you'll always spend ages stuck on at least one thing that, after you actually work it out, seems pretty obvious. However the game comes with a hint and help system, so getting really stuck shouldn't be a major problem. There's a couple of mini games strewn about to keep things varied, including space invaders. Yes, actual space invaders. Pure class.
My only real problem with the game is the length. It's not nearly as long as I'd like. This is I suppose a testament to how much I was enjoying the game. I'd just really gotten into playing it and found myself at the end. Obviously I'm not going to complain about much considering how little the game cost me, but I can't help but wonder if I'd feel more dissapointed at the end had I paid full price. really it's hard to say. This is a top quality game, and it's obvious a fair amount of effort has gone into it. Maybe I'm just being greedy.
One thing that I did particularly feel when playing though was that this is a game that NEEDS to be on the Wii. It's pretty much perfect for a Wiiware port. Obviously the Wii is a great system for this style of point of click game, and whilst I did say that the game felt a little short this wouldn't be a bad thing for a Wiiware game. However it was in the arcade section that this really struck me. There's a bit where you have to power up the machines using a pedal powered generator by circling the mouse. This is the sort of thing that would convert well to the Wiis motion controls. Theres one or two other waggly bits in there as well that really make me wonder just why it is nobody seems to have thought about porting this. It's a crime.
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