Gorgeous graphics, and lovely fluid animation. Jumping around the cities is a joy. Unfortunately, playing the game is not. All the way through, you are doing the same thing and it gets dull very quickly. Climb up a tower, rescue a person from the guards, follow this person, assassinate this person. It should be fun, but it's not at all. The worst part is that the same voice samples are used constantly throughout the game, they will make you want to punch something: "THIEF! You are FILTH!" "You dare steal in my presence?! That will cost you your life!" The combat is deeply flawed and unintuitive. The story has its interesting points, but the voice acting and writing is pretty horrendous. The worst parts are the terrible speeches each major boss victim gives as they die, just painful to listen to.
The Whispered World is possibly the most gorgeous adventure game ever created. The artwork is incredible, full of colour, detail, and beautifully fantastical. The quality of the animation is also top notch, and there are moments where you feel like you could be playing through a Studio Ghibli movie. Graphics aren't everything, though. While the game looks wonderful, it does lack heart and charm. The ingredients for a great adventure are there, but they never quite link up perfectly. The story begins to build up to something very interesting, but can't quite maintain the thrills all the way to the (weak) ending. A real let down is that the English voice acting is not good at all. The character you play, Sadwick, is probably the worst culprit - he sounds like an extremely whiney, depressed version of Steve Smith from American Dad (I initially thought Scott Grimes was providing Sadwick's voice). But most of the surrounding players are just as bad for different reasons: Sadwick's brother doesn't seem to understand how to speak sentences properly without accenting odd words. Gameplay-wise, it's just like a classic 90s adventure game. The puzzles are mostly not too hard, but there's a few strange ones in there. It's worth playing, but you may lose the will to continue all the way to the end.
Machinarium feels very unique and fresh amongst adventure games. The art style is wonderfully stylised and creates its own world; however, personally I found the colour palette and the images not particularly to my taste. I recognise that the artwork is extremely well done, but in terms of feel I found it somewhat ugly, and even repulsive at times. That is down to me, and I stress that the games artwork is stunning, it just turned me off somewhat. Similarly, the soundtrack fits the images perfectly - unfortunately, that means that I found it quite unpleasant. What I did like very much was the way the game plays. Having no diaogue means that the way information is presented to the player needs to be creative. Hints are absorbed by the player through imagery, and it's done extremely well. I found the game very difficult, and the (inspired) hint system did need to get utilised a few times. The game is quite short, but you could spend quite some time with it due to this high difficulty level. The story is quite charming, and kept me interested even without a huge amount of depth. Without dialogue, it meant that the personalities of the characters really needed to come through, and they do wonderfully. An unfortunate segment at the end of the game is an arcade style sequence which I absolutely hated. Add to that the fact that it caused my game to crash the first time through, and I had to repeat it all again, and for me the game ended on a sour note. Very well put together game, it has a strong personality that makes it stand out. Unfortunately, from a stylistic point of view it just didn't work for me.
