
Machinarium stands out as one of the best Adventure/Family titles in recent memory.
92
Verdict
95%
Steam
88
IGDB
Verdict score based on confidence-adjusted Steam reviews?
Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam (95% positive from 19K reviews)
Critically acclaimed (88/100 critic average)
Compelling narrative and story
Outstanding soundtrack
Steep difficulty curve may not appeal to casual players
Machinarium is award-winning independent adventure game developed by the makers of Samorost and Botanicula. A little robot who’s been thrown out to the scrap yard behind the city must return and confront the Black Cap Brotherhood and save his robot-girl friend.

Runs well on modern hardware.
Last updated 6d ago
A classic adventure game that paved the path to many others. Machinarium was one of those flash games that had higher quality than 99% of flash games in the 2000s. It's also tied to most of the same issues as other flash games, the infamous right click menu is there and some weird hotspot detection. It's one of those games with no dialogue at all, everything is conveyed by comic like bubbles showing concepts, requests, or issues the characters have. You are Josef, a small robot thrown into a junkyard, your first task is assemble yourself by finding your robotic body parts. Your actions, apart from the typical adventure inventory, are stretching up or down. A cool mechanic for maximizing game area. Once you move on, the main plot is about a group of bad robots who want to blow up the main city tower. It's a short game, but there's a lot of back and forth. The main area is composed of various screens where there's quite a good number of fetch quests. The character moves slowly and there's set points where you can walk to. It's a little cumbersome around midgame where the game opens up a bit and the puzzles are not that easy. Music and sound effects are great, perfectly fitting with the cute visuals. There's also a system of hints that forces you to play a minigame before actually giving you any leads. It's interesting for the first time, but the minigame is just not fun. It was spectacular and fresh to see it when it was released. Nowadays, it's slow, sluggish and one of the puzzles involving an elevator is problematic in modern hardware. It's a game that should only be bought under a huge discount.
Machinarium simultaneously feels like a perfect exemplar of the adventure genre's strengths and an disappointing example of the failures that made the genre so infamous and radioactive for so long. The game's main strength is in its personality. Beautiful and quirky hand drawn art, charming character designs and an approach to storytelling with minimal dialog in favor of actions and little animated thought balloons. The music is also perfectly quirky and off-kilter. So why the negative score? The puzzles. The puzzles are what does it in. They're exactly the sort of moon logic, pixel hunt nonsense that Sierra would get up to in Kings Quest or the like, and they're still just as unfun to figure out. You walk into a room, often without a clear goal, click on things to see what's interactable (and hope you don't miss something in the detailed but unhelpful art), and then randomly start using items or combining them to see what what will happen, often something arbitrary and obtuse but necessary to progress (and the lack of dialog makes for a difficult time in figuring out exactly what's wrong with your solution). If you're lucky, there might be a somewhat useful hint for the puzzle. If not, then you can consult the in-game guide which spells out the solution *directly*, which not only spoils whatever fun there might have been anyway, it also feels like an obvious Band-Aid for bad design. Oh, and also whenever you use it for the first time in a new area, you have to play a dull little shmup in order to access it. Fun? It's a real shame that a game so dripping in charm and appeal is so unfun to actually play, but style can't trump substance when it comes to games like this.
Point and click puzzle solving, controls are a little touchy, you'll often walk to an area you maybe didn't mean to. But it's a cute game for what it is. You will probably get stuck a couple times for a little bit.
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Data sourced from RAWG, Steam, IGDB, CheapShark, Wikipedia, HLTB, and GX Corner. Sources: rawg, steam, igdb.
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