Machinarium Review (failsafe)
Machinarium is an old-schoold point-and-click puzzle game also pretending to be an adventure game ;-).
There are few elements that I really loved:
- artstyle, with hand drawn robots and backgrounds is great - while obviously this is a subjective matter
- same goes for soundtrack - minimalistic, but well designed
- most of the riddles are really good, I would even say that they are masterclass, and most actually have sense. Also, many puzzles are limited to one screen only, so instead of walking around we know that solution is right there
- also, regarding the puzzles, it is important to say that they are quite different to each other. We have classical puzzles - to make someone do something we need to deliver something to him, and we need to figure out all wherabouts. And there are plenty of puzzles being actually minigames - each unique and demanding different approach, but most of them being very logical.
- game requires a lot of brain usage, which is really good. I've got the feeling that in many adventure/puzzle games instead of thinking we just need to combine every item with every other item, use every dialouge option, and click on every pixel on every screen - in this game we are actually rewarded for thinking
- since puzzles are based on logic and straight thinking game is quite easy, but this is a good type of being easy ;-)
Now, what I didnt like:
- there is one minigame, called tic-tac-toe (played on board that is 10x10) that almost made me uninstall Machinarium. Eventually I've managed to beat this minigame by using external help (other AI). Well, okay, this is first time ever in my gaming where I've used other CPU to actually beat CPU (still, it took many attempts to win) - in these terms game made me leave my comfort zone... but at the end of the day, this single puzzle was not really worth placing in the game, it was really tedious and non-satisfactory
- active cursor range - when hoovering over active element of the screen cursor changes its shape, but it works only in short range, so basically we need to walk around the screen to check whether anything is active or not. It wouldnt hurt if it worked with full screen range.