“Machinarium” is not a game about shooting people in the face. There aren’t any giant cars to drive, space marines in huge suits of armor or awful B-movie dialogue. Instead of doses of adrenaline and twitchy reflexive action, “Machinarium” delivers patience, zen and a haunting mechanical world to explore.
The player’s character is a small, nameless robot with a head like an upside down mixer bowl and a modifiable, telescopic body. In this point-and-click style adventure game, the player moves the character from one scene to the next, delivering objects from one scene to the next or solving small logic puzzles to activate other objects. Puzzles vary in difficulty, and occasionally the clues are frustratingly esoteric or camouflaged. Patience is a must for players.
A small budget game, “Machinarium” was developed over a period of three years by Amanita Design with a budget of 1,000 dollars. The creative team consisted of seven Czech members, an appropriate coincidence since Josef and Karel Capek, the inventors of the word robot, are also Czech.
Such a small, personal production lends the game a beautiful degree of detail. Hand drawn and incredibly detailed, it brings to mind the clockwork metropolis of Dreamworks’ “Robots” with the broken-down, rusty aesthetic of “Wall-E.” There are 1950s vacuum-tube “Flash Gordon”-style computers with bulging glass screens, steam punk pistons and pipes, dot-matrix displays and plenty of tangled wires and cables. The music is a minimal mix of piano, music boxes and looping electronic samples.
There’s no dialogue, and most of the plot is pantomimed or suggested. The characters: a varied menagerie of robots of various shapes, sizes and tasks–communicate in thought bubbles with tiny, inked animations. Using these techniques, the game gives off a charming level of abstraction like a children’s book–relying on strong visuals and a strange, mechanical focus around which the characters are built.
With no branching plot or complicated storytelling schemes, “Machinarium” trades narrative flexibility for a more focused, thematic experience. The story isn’t interactive in the sense that you can change the plot arc, but you can interact with the story through the hidden details. Carefully constructed levels, scenes of romance and unsettling depictions of horror emerge in a slow, circular manner. “Machinarium” reveals itself like a picture book come to life–neither straightforward, nor predictable. There’s never any hand-holding or coddling of the player to help them progress.
“Machinarium” can be played in anywhere from six to ten hours. It’s available for $10 on the Internet and on Valve’s Steam digital distribution service. This short, slow-paced adventure contains only a few of the trappings of modern high-performance blockbuster gaming; so for those of you tired of “Call of Duty” and “Super Smash Brothers”, “Machinarium” is an engaging, understated opportunity to explore a new place.
