Machinarium Collector's Edition

I"m not real a big fan of adventure games due to the fact that most games design puzzles for superhuman skilled players. Not my pair of pants :). Here I was attracted to the graphics that are very appealing to the eye. Also the way animation are done is just excellent in getting emotions through in a very simplistic way. My feeling of dred towards puzzles was completely lifted after 5-10 min. Riddles wre not always that easy but at least I could see a logic behind them and only on a few occasions I had to look up for solutions in a FAQ (try to figure out by your self where the key at the end of the game should fit into... ). If you had no FAQ at hand the authors left you a really nice help system where you could get a very nicely drawn cartoon with a tip to the given puzzle. And in order to access it you need to do some pew pew with a key :) Another really great additions ware mini games! :) I enjoyed these very very much. specially the debugging part :) All in all I had surprisingly lots of fun playing in this title and sincerely can recommend this title.

I love the art, sounds, and the setting. I don't love the puzzles — some feature moon logic or surprising difficulty. I relied on the walkthrough system more than I'd have liked. I'm not a hardcore adventure gamer; some puzzles I might have figured out eventually but life is short, some others I would never have guessed. But it was worth it to enjoy all the creativity that went into the rest of the game.

The art in the game IS beautiful and, when it's doing the kinds of puzzles it excels at, it's well-done... I gotta take a couple of stars off for the skill-based minigames that are mandatory to progress the game... especially when one required me to find an online A.I. that I could pit against the 5x5 tic-tac-toe game to progress. ...and the arcade... why do you make a point-and-click adventure gamer who likes puzzle-solving play arcade games for coins? Why not just have the coin already be in the coin return? It also doesn't help that they don't always make it clear what's interactible, so I needlessly opened the built-in walkthrough just to discover non-obvious game mechanics.. sometimes because they require you to manually walk over to things before you can use items on them. (And deselecting an inventory item when you're too far away to use it has too many steps. Why not just a right-click like in so many other point-and-click games?)

I read many reviews saying that Machinarium's puzzles feel random; that sometimes you have to click everything in every room etc... Don't believe this kind of review. I mean no offense when I say that this game is for very intelligent people. And you might not be one, and it's okay, everybody has different levels and kinds of intelligence. If you wanna play games that feel challenging but really aren't (like Hitman, where the whole game is just a huge walkthrough), or games that have everything written down in order not to make you exaust yourself with thinking, Machinarium is not for you. If you wanna dive into a world of art, and let yourself fall in love with the characters, places, songs, stories, then this is for you.

Machinarium is a really lovely game with really nice artstyle, great music and an interesting setting, very reminiscent of Stanisław Lem's short stories. The plot of the game is simple, but it's not anything it doesn't need to be. The characters are pretty compelling despite not having any dialogue: the good guys are likeable, the bad guys are easy to dislike. On that front, everything works fine. When it comes to the actual gameplay, however, things aren't quite as peachy. While it is expected that a point-and-click adventure game will have some challenging puzzles, Machinarium goes overboard a few times - there are a couple of puzzles that are just too difficult, and the mini-game of Connect 5 will have you pulling your hair in frustration. Which is a shame, because some more balancing would do Machinarium a lot of good. Still, it is a good adventure game I can recommend to anyone who enjoys the genre (and especially those who also enjoy Stanisław Lem's works). At the same time, however, I'd recommend waiting for a sale because the level of frustration doesn't justify the full price.