Machinarium Collector's Edition

Good looking and enjoyable game. Nice puzzles and fairly logical plot. Well worth the £3.29 I paid for it but a bit short to justify the £12.99 it's quoted at the moment.

If you like the atmosphere of INSIDE and LIMBO you will like this one.

When I first started to play Machinarium I thought it will be like other games by Amanita, yeah will it has the typical Amanita flair, but the difficulty level is not what I have expected. But the puzzles are all (somehow) logical and if you really stuck you can use the integrated, wonderful hint system. The graphics are pure artwork, creative and a joy to see, as I already expect from a Amanita Design Game :) You dive into a imaginary fantastic world of machines where you have to figure what actually you should do. But step by step you will figure out more about what to do and also more about what happened, before you started the game :) The graphics resolution is quite static, as everything is handdrawn. As the graphics are not vector but images the upscaled screens may look a little bit more low-res, but still give you a nice experience. I had some issues sometimes, when I started the game it got frozen sometimes in the intro screen, and in that state it's almost impossible to close the game, because it always stays in front, you are even not able to see the windows task manager. I was able to work around that problem by opening Notepad, write some few letters into the notepad (don't save) and then start the game. If it then hangs I will press Ctrl+Alt+Del and choose to Log Off. The game is then closed, but because the open notepad, the log off will not finish, so I click "cancel" and restart the game :) Usually the second it worked then. All in all, even that game already aged a bit .. but we are on GOG here, aren't we? :) ... I still highly recommend this game, also the soundtrack is a special joy. Buy the game and relax, but also expect you have to use your brain cells quite much. :)

The game is kind of short and can be played in one go. I finished it in just under 5 hours and was probably not very quick. Overall a great game with nice design and music, very mixed puzzles and a built in guide in case you get stuck. Except for a few puzzles, it's not a very difficult game but I had to resort to the built in guide a few times. Sometimes I did it just for fun too, as the guide contains a lot of artwork etc. It's very well done. If you don't want to make it too easy, you can use it to get a vague idea as well. Even in the pictures, the solutions are not always instantly clear. I didn't enjoy Botanicula in case someone reading this also disliked it and feel hesitatant about playing Machinarium because of that. I'd really recommend trying this out.

I loved every second of it. Great music, great puzzles and a charming story!