Machinarium Collector's Edition

One of the best puzzle games I have played.

This is another pieace of art from Amanita Design. The game is beautiful, funny, long and good.

Machinarium is the kind of game I have mixed feelings about. Its a point and click puzzle game, and over the years I've played too many with wonky puzzles that have inconsistent "logic" - Machinarium is the same. It makes no effort to show what you can interact with, and it's easy to miss small objects or the mouse pointer reacting. Initially the beautifully rough graphics are appealing, and the world is charming - but after half an hour of being stuck on a puzzle it gets rather boring, as the minimalist presentation offers no diversion from the frustration. I've had three save games disappear now, and frankly it's way too tedious plodding through it again - not to mention that as I was unsure how puzzles got solved in the first place I can't actually do them again anyway! They weren't too bad the first time round, but now they are mindnumbingly dull and incomprehensible to me on a third playthrough. If all it's puzzles were logical then it wouldn't be a problem, however this is the kind of game where you click on something once and can have the right item but it does nothing - on the third attempt it works. This is not a technical issue - this is the kind of outdated and illogical design that made the goat puzzle in Broken Sword so infuriating many many years ago. Its not what you're doing, but when you're doing it - and if it didn't work the first time then why would you do it again? That makes no sense, and games like Limbo are nicely challenging without this kind of ambiguity (plus it's more atmospheric) - if Machinarium wasn't so boring to experience it would be ok, but it all gets too dull to persist with when you're stuck. Bizarrely enough accessing the hint book within the game is an even more turgid and annoying event than just trying to figure out the puzzle in the first place! WTF is that all about? Unless you're a masochist, or massively patient and will click on everything in sight three times to see if does something, I would avoid this game.

awesome

I love this game very much, from time to time I play it over and over again.