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Machinarium is promising at first glance. It has an imaginative setting to explore, with detailed backgrounds in a neat hand-drawn style. It's got a very consistent aesthetic (albeit one that's annoying cutesy--the main character looks like something a third grader would scribble on the back of his math paper), and much of the animation avoids that ugly "paper doll" look commonly seen in Flash games. Even the electronic music is pretty cool. Unfortunately, the simplistic interface and puzzle design result in a game that's merely decent, with plenty of atmosphere but few interesting things to do.
Like Amanita Design's earlier Samorost games, Machinarium is Flash-based and involves solving puzzles by clicking various hotspots on each screen to move around and activate objects. Two improvements to Machinarium are the addition of an inventory and your interaction with hotspots being limited to the reach of your character, both of which force the player to think at least a little bit about what he's trying to do instead of sweeping the screen for anything clickable.
Still, like the Samorost games, there's often little indication of what a hotspot will do before you poke it. This results in a lot of aimless clicking, hoping for something different to happen, rather than piecing together a solution in your brain and then trying to implement it. By itself, this isn't so bad--figuring out how a strange world works is half the fun--but there are very few multi-step actions you need to perform. Most of the time, getting something interesting to happen with a hotspot means you're already done with it. The inventory puzzles don't fare much better, with most items either obviously functioning as keys or as missing components for other inventory items.
My biggest disappointment with this game is the wasted potential of the theme. The game's called Machinarium, for Christ's sake, and it's set in a robot city. It seems so obvious to include puzzles that involve figuring out complicated piping, wiring, or other power sources, or trying to operate large machines with interconnected parts. The detailed backgrounds offer plenty of opportunity for clues, and it would fit the control scheme, too. There's a reason why games like Myst focus on mechanical puzzles--if all the player can do is click and drag without a list of actions to choose from, it makes sense to design puzzles with lots of buttons, toggles, and sliders.
Sadly, when Machinarium does give you anything resembling a mechanism to play with, it's usually some dumb mini-game like a 9-tile sliding puzzle. There are at least a half-dozen of these throughout the game, not including a couple action mini-games (such as a Space Invaders clone). This kind of puzzle design (or lack thereof) is really inexcusable for adventure games at this point. They're transparently tacked-on with no attempt to plausibly integrate them into the environment. I solved most of them with random fiddling, so they don't even add much challenge.
Speaking of challenge, Amanita Design included both in-game hints and walkthroughs for every screen, in case it wasn't already obvious that they are afraid of alienating their less-intelligent customers. You have to play a mini-game to unlock the walkthrough, but then you get to see hand-sketched storyboards that show step-by-step solutions for the puzzles. It's bad enough that they make the answers available at all, but I'm tempted to deduct a star for putting art in there that only encourages players to look at the damn thing.
I suppose the best I can say about Machinarium is that there's nothing particularly bad about it. There's a great sense of exploration, I found the world charming despite my complaints, and not much in the game seemed stupid or nonsensical. It's a decent game, but a step backward in everything other than perhaps visual style.