![]() I don’t really see the virtue in being needlessly vague when it comes to puzzle-solving. Like, why bother designing legitimately interesting and forthcoming puzzles in the same way that Professor Layton does, when you could just force the player to hunt around for little bibs and bobs before they can actually do any real thinking? I don’t mean to compare the game to Layton, because it’s so obviously different, but that game and a few recent adventure titles I’ve played (the better episodes of Telltale’s episodic series, for instance) really pleased me in that they often outright told you what needed to be done and what objects you had at your disposal, and then forced you to think within those constraints. It just feels like lazy design to me, in a way. You very quickly figure out where you can and can’t walk to, and then have to ascertain what’s important, what height you need to be, and figure out a way to get from place to place in enough time to do what you need to do. That actually has been my biggest criticism of recent adventure / “escape the room games.” They either become the 2-pixel hunts you’re talking about, or they become a “just click on everything as fast as you can to figure out what’s up” kind of deal I think this strikes a good balance. ![]() It prevents you from just flailing your mouse across the screen to see what you can interact with - it makes you think a little bit more about what’s available to you, what you need to do to access certain parts of each room, and the benefits of being tall vs. I can see how not being able to interact with everything on the screen whenever you want could be annoying, but I actually think it works well as a design choice. In general, I had collected most of the items on the screen pretty early on, and then spent most of my time figuring out how to utilize them. I’ll give you the light bulb having to be in first before being able to put on the cone, but from what I played, the game was pretty good about about not making the game a pixel hunt. I thought the things you could click on and interact with were fairly straightfoward. I got to the sewer escape and moved to the room with the guard, but when I moved back, the propeller thing + broom was gone from my inventory. I think I managed to break the game, but I don’t hold that against it since it’s an uncompleted demo (I’m gonna restart and dive in more tomorrow). I can never just look at everything in front of me and say, “Alright, now how do I solve this puzzle with these things at my disposal,” because I’m never sure that I’ve found or activated every little goddamn thing I need to activate in the right way, in the right order. Since the game isn’t forthcoming about what you can and can’t interact with, I’m not allowed to focus my thought process on solving the puzzle because I’m constantly worried that I haven’t found the two-pixel-wide hotspot the developers hid under an oven. My least favorite parts of classic adventure games usually consist of shitty pixel-hunting puzzles, and it feels like Machinarium is a game made entirely of them. Only after screwing the light bulb into your own head and then using the cone could the puzzle be completed. Like the fact that you can’t interact with anything unless you’re right next to it, and have stretched or contorted yourself into the appropriate height, or the fact that, like, in the puzzle where you have to pretend to be a guard robot so he’ll let you pass over the bridge, you couldn’t just combine the light bulb and the cone in your inventory, and you couldn’t just wear the cone, then use the light bulb. It seems like there are all these layers of needlessly obfuscating mechanics designed to keep the player from the solution whenever possible. What I feel is more of a “Wait - I could have clicked on that?” When I finally solve a puzzle, my reaction isn’t “Oh, how clever - why didn’t I think of that earlier,” which is an emotion I feel constantly while playing some of my favorite adventure games. The game’s just too fucking hard to me, for all the wrong reasons. Currently slated for an October 2009 release, Machinarium looks to be a remarkably long (our preview had 23 playable levels out of an ostensible 28) slice of surreal indie adventuring - but is it any good?Īfter the jump, Anthony Burch, Chad Concelmo, Ashley Davis, and Jonathan Ross weigh in on what looks to be a truly polarizing experience. ![]() If you haven’t heard of Machinarium, it’s an atmospheric, hauntingly well-illustrated indie adventure title from the guys who made Samorost. When we received a preview copy of Machinarium this weekend, our excitement was as unsurprising as it was vocal (Chad literally used about half dozen smiley-face emoticons after receiving the download link). If there’s one thing we like here at Destructoid, it’s robots if there’s two things we like, it’s robots and adventure games.
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