Machinarium (2009)

I played this before about ten years ago or so I guess. It still looks gorgeous, the presentation is great, and it's got enough meat on the puzzles to make it feel more like a game than a toy, which the other Amanita releases I've played have felt more like (not a bad thing, but I do tend to lose interest as soon as I can't immediately figure out in what random order I'm supposed to click on all the things on the screen). I am already stuck on like the third puzzle, though, and I remember now one of the few problems with this game is that because the cursor only goes into interact mode with stuff near your character, you're never sure if you're just missing a hotspot. (The other problem I remember is all the damn minigames.)

Further through with this (about 75% I think), and yeah, basically the presentation is top-notch, the regular puzzles are mostly good except when you don't realise something is interactive or whatever, and then all the tile puzzles and pipe puzzles and shit are infuriating lazy padding. It actually made me play like four rounds of just basic space invaders. Even the fucking hint system is a drawn-out minigame. 

Okay, done. I suddenly had a flashback to watching the Broken Age documentary as they were still early in the process of making the game and Tim getting a few different showbiz mates in to talk about what adventure games are like nowadays, and the Amanita guy comes in and tells Tim that he doesn't think you really need inventory and dialogue etc etc, and I was there groaning to myself, thinking "please do not listen to this guy, Tim!"

As lovely as this game is, and as fun as it is when you're making smooth progress, the only real obstacles are UI quirks and minigame fluff. The very last puzzle in the game is listening to a tune of 9 very similar notes in one room, walking for ten seconds over to another room and trying to recreate it. It's a very dull final puzzle, for one thing, but also it's extremely difficult for people who don't have particularly sharp musical ears. They even put some audio filters over the original tune to make it even harder to compare.

Overall, I think my opinion of this game has maybe dropped a little bit. If its atmosphere weren't so strong, I don't think Machinarium would be half so well thought of.

Rating: gorgeous but slight, with some very irritating elements