The great story teller Ira Glass once explained that when you’re learning a craft, there’s this gap between the Bad stuff you make and the Good stuff you want to make. These days, I’ve been trekking through this gap with the game I’m making. As I hike across this rough and barren valley, I wipe my brow and look up. On the cliff above me, Machinarium sits and stares at me in its greatness.

Machinarium is a Flash adventure game by Amanita Designs, the studio behind Samorost. The game stars a small robot who can change his height between normal, stumpy-short, and clumsily-tall. The game begins with a trash craft flying from a city to deposit the little robot’s parts in a junk yard. The player must guide this robot as he puts himself back together and makes his way from the junk yard back to the machine city. Along the way the city’s diverse cast of dilapidated machine citizens reveal a malicious plot involving a robot gang, bombs, and girlfriends.

Amanita Design crafted each robot’s appearance, animations, and sounds with care that these characters ooze personality. They managed to bring life to a bunch of metal heaps like Grim Fandango brought life to a bunch of dead skeletons. Something about the way the little robot pushes his mouth closed when it randomly falls off its hinge makes him such an endearing character. This attention to detail seeps into their environments and puzzles as well. The robot city’s rusty old locales work with the odd mechanical music to wrap the player in a sublime sense of isolation.

The game presents a variety of mind flexing puzzles to the player. Along the way, the little robot will impersonate a robot cop, roll a blunt for a robot inmate, and use a giant oil canister to bait a robot dogs from hiding. Each of the game’s screens presents the typical adventure game puzzle, using objects in various places. Like older adventure games these puzzles can be fairly cryptic. Your motivations can be unclear when you enter a screen, necessitating a goal-hint button. It feels a bit like a cop-out as games like TellTale’s Sam and Max have been making strides in puzzle clarity lately.

What sets the gameplay apart from other adventure games are the mind bending devices that populate the city. Apparently robots like using cryptic puzzles as user interfaces for such things as plumbing and elevators. For example, a sliding tile puzzle controls the flow of electricity in a street lamp. Just like in their previous games, Samorost 1 and 2, Anamita really has a knack for creating these foreign little devices for the player to decode.

A unique and welcome innovation is the in-game hint system. Whenever I got stuck on any of the aforementioned puzzles, I could click on the strategy guide in the top right corner of the screen. A simple sidescrolling shooting game ingeniously unlocks the step-by-step instructions from compulsory clicks. If you want these instructions, you’d better be so stuck that you’re willing to play a boring shooting game to get them.

While the robot’s height changing mechanic had a few interesting moments at the beginning of the game, it felt underused by the end. Furthermore, when the little robot was extended or shortened he walked slower. The animation was funny the first time I saw it, but after that, every time I forgot to push him back to normal length before moving, I had to sit and watch him clumsily waddle across the screen. However, the mechanic felt like it had potential that I’d like to see explored in a sequel.

Machinarium is a charming, refreshingly unique adventure game. The seven- to ten- hour game is available for $20 on various download services such as Steam and Direct2Drive. However, if you buy it from Machinarium.net you also get the game’s soundtrack.

A-

Exceeded Expectations
+ Lovingly crafted character and environment design builds a unique robot world.
+ Puzzles present mind bending challenges.
+ Music is unique and sublime.

Needs Improvement
- Player motivation can be unclear from screen to screen.
- Easy to accidentally get stuck in a slow-moving state.
- Height mechanic felt underused.