I thought RSC would be right up my alley - a retro-styled cyberpunk adventure game, with a moody bar too boot. But it turns out it's basically just a visual novel with a different aesthetic - pretty much all you do in this game is click through endless text windows, which comprise some 95% of the "gameplay" (I'm using the term as loosely as it gets). Even tutorials seem to go on forever, and the only thing that breaks up the monotony are two minigames that are quite useless and have pretty bad controls too. Only at the tail end does RSC begin to resemble an actual adventure game, but it's far too little, much too late. Perhaps all that wouldn't be so bad if the story was engaging, but it's not - it's just your bog-standard cyberpunk fare of an evil supercorporation doing evil supercorporation stuff and good guys (hackers, who else) having to stop it. At least the art style is nice and the music doesn't distract or annoy, but that alone is not worth the price. I cannot in good conscience recommend RSC to anyone, there are other games that do cyberpunk adventure much, much better.
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.
