Machinika Museum

Good and challenging puzzles and a very thematically interesting game.

It was short, as others have said. The puzzles were okay, but often made no narrative sense, and the story made absolutely no sense. My "screwdriver" tool is somehow designed to work perfectly on alien artifacts, but I have to figure out how to use my own tool? You made a puzzle out of fixing a breaker box when the power goes out. The alien artifact somehow broke into these various pieces, yet I have to open up the various alien parts to get them back together. They were packaged by my "colleagues" but opening the packages are puzzles in themselves. I somehow can't figure out how to open a zipper with a missing handle, but I can search around until I find the handle, and then can open it. I enjoy puzzles, and I find this type of game engaging, but it seems no thought was put into whether the various puzzles fit the scenario. The alien storyline is interesting, but again doesn't really make sense. Why would an alien race use Earth astrological symbols in its writing? The cliffhanger ending indicates that a sequel was planned, so maybe some sense would come in a future installment, but it doesn't fix the other issues. I gave 3 stars because the puzzles were interesting, the graphics were good and the interface was easily navigated. I can't give more with the nonsensical puzzles and story though.

Incredibly buggy, terrible controls and terrible camera. There are so many times when I have to quit to the main menu then resume the game just to reset the camera to where it's supposed to be because it just randomly zooms all the way in (and inside) whatever object you're working on and no amount of right-clicking or clicking other parts of the screen will set you back to somewhere workable. If I didn't manage to squeeze out some fun on some of the chapters it would be one star. If I'd paid full price it would be one star. It absolutely blows my mind that this game was ostensibly play-tested before release because it's so incredibly incredibly buggy and unpredictable and difficult to use. Really bad experience.