Machinarium

I thought a great game to review to get the ball rolling here would be one of my favourite games of all time, an indie game by the name of Machinarium. It's a beautiful little puzzle/adventure game by Amanita Design, a small independent game developing studio based in the Czech Republic. Amanita started out with educational and advertising minigames, followed by the short adventure/puzzle games Samorost and Samorost 2, and then the award winning Machinarium, which was released in 2009 - their first full length game. I adore all the games that Amanita makes, due to their distinctive style. Completely hand drawn, with peaceful background music, they have a relaxing and immersive feel that some other games are now proceeding to replicate.

Machinarium tells the story of a small robot, who has been ejected from his city onto the scrapheap. He must enter the city and explore, solving many puzzles and brain-teasers, to confront the evil Black Cap Brotherhood and save his robot girlfriend. The story is intriguing and player-paced, as you play the small robot (named Josef) you must figure out how to solve each "room" to move onto the next area.

The animation and artwork of the game are hugely appealing. Each new area elicited a new sigh of wonder from me, and finding the small clickable objects in each scene to solve the puzzles is a lot of fun. There are a lot of cute details. If you leave Josef standing around for too long, he will produce a thought bubble remembering various past adventures and scenes with his robot girlfriend. There's also an awesome little puzzle in which you get to play a recreation of the arcade classic Space Invaders.

One of the really beautiful things about this game is the hint system. If you get stuck on a puzzle, you can either click on a small lightbulb icon at the top of the screen, which will cause Josef to produce a thought bubble containing a picture of what he needs to do next (these hints become increasingly vague), or you can consult a mechanical book which has been "programmed" to show a walkthrough of the entire puzzle in picture form. To open the book however, you must play a little minigame involving a key moving slowly through a side-scrolling screen. There are spiders on the screen which you can move the key to avoid, or you can shoot little pellets from the key to get rid of them. If you successfully navigate the key through to the end, it will reach a keyhole which unlocks the book and the walkthrough for the scene. I really love the ingenuity of this - it makes the game completely solvable even if you aren't very good at puzzles, but it makes you work for the hints it gives you. It's really the best hint system I've ever encountered in a puzzle game.

Overall Machinarium is a particularly beautiful and immersive game, and one which introduced me to a love of indie games. With many hours of gameplay along with gorgeous visuals and music, it's a game I recommend to everyone - casual and hardcore gamers alike - for a little peaceful, fun adventure.