Machinarium

Machinarium is a puzzle point-and-click adventure video game developed by Amanita Design and released on October 16th, 2009 on Steam. The game focuses on the player's character Josef solving a series of puzzles and brain teasers linked together by an overworld assembled from a traditional point n' click adventure gameplay.

Plot
A little robot named Josef has been thrown out to the scrapyard behind the rusty city of Machinarium and must return and confront the Black Cap Brotherhood in order to save his robot girlfriend Berta and prevent the head of the city from being blown up.

Storyline
Machinarium opens with an overview of the eponymous city as a disposal flier launches from the pinnacle of its highest tower. The player character, a robot called Josef is dumped on a scrapheap, where he re-assembles himself and sets off for the city. Upon entering the city, he discovers a plot by the Black Cap Brotherhood, the main antagonists, to blow up the city's tower. He is discovered and locked up. After breaking out of prison, Josef aids the citizens of the city, as he discovers the mischief which the Brotherhood has been working on. Shortly after flooding the Brotherhood's room (leaving them helpless), Josef locates his girlfriend Berta, who has been locked up and forced to cook. Unable to free her, he works his way to the top of the tower. After he foils the Black Cap Brotherhood's plot by disarming the bomb taped to the tower, Josef reaches the highest room, in which the story began. A huge-headed robot, the "head" of the city, sits in the middle of the room, incapacitated and gibbering. Josef recalls how the three of them lived happily until the Black Cap Brotherhood zapped this friend, leaving him disabled, and kidnapped Berta. When a garbage sucker arrived to dispose of the Black Cap thug, it apprehended Josef instead. After this revelation, Josef restores his friend to sanity, dumps the Brotherhood down a drain, and frees Berta. The two of them climb back to the tower, wave goodbye to their friend, and fly off into the sunset. In the final closing scene, their vehicle suffers a collision and falls, and they are seen being carried away separately by two fliers.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) A key feature that easily characterizes Amanita Design for their work is the personality that all their worlds bare, something that has remained in their formula since the Samorost series, and Machinarium isn't the exception. What is meant to be stated by this are the superb, mesmerizing and extraordinarily detailed hand-drawn water-colored graphics, characters and items, and better not forget its most remarkable selling point, the phenomenal background artwork and scene layouts. Added to the irreplaceable and immensely attractive art-style which makes each character feel like they belong to the same universe, and that's something you should get used to when playing a game from Amanita.
 * 2) The iconic and unimaginably expressive original soundtrack by Tomáš Dvořák aka. Floex. Apart from being delightful and soothing, the game's soundtrack has a unique trait that gets it a distinguished identity from other video game soundtracks. This featured attribute is the constant distortion effect and saturated attuned sounds from the instruments that successfully make each of the tracks unforgettable, on top of mixing perfectly with the game's atmosphere and world. The best examples of this characteristic in the soundtrack have to be By The Wall, The Glasshouse with Butterfly, The End (Prague Radio) and especially Mr. Handagote.
 * 3) The dystopian world of Machinarium is solely integrated by robots and weird machinery creatures with no trace of what happened to the human race or if they even exist in that world. This enriches the already crude events that are to be witnessed, next to spilling uniqueness to its universe.
 * 4) Josef himself is an extremely likable protagonist. Not only he's got a friendly cute look, employs intelligent acts and is the center of hilarious animations, but the motivations of his character are admirable and good-hearted withal. Josef takes immeasurable risks to save a close friend of his and as he explores the city he often greets other robots that must be assisted. The best example is the street band, other victims of the Black Cap Brotherhood's mean spirit who lost access to their instruments in one of various ways. Once they are assisted, their cheerful song will boost the happiness of Buskers' Square.
 * 5) The Black Cap Brotherhood vanquishes any other antagonist out of the spotlight, they knew how to play an awesome antagonistic role with their passion for villainy, theft and law breaking. You could say they ensured their name in the nightmares of all citizens. These machines of mean spirit came up with a plot against the major, placed a bomb in a dangerous unreachable spot, kidnapped Berta and made her work for them, outsmarted the city's security, imprisoned Josef and other innocent robots and wreaked havoc on all corners of the city. Messing up with them is the last thing you'd expect from a robot as weak as Josef, yet he met the challenge with courage.
 * 6) Unexpected crude and real scenarios are occasionally portrayed in Machinarium. Since this game takes place in a massively big metropolis inhabited by myriads of citizens, not all of these will be good people and many robots are actually mean to Josef by nature. It isn't until the player helps them that they finally change their minds, yet sometimes there's no other choice but to fight and leave only one to get what is theirs.
 * 7) Offbeat take on the science fiction genre. This game doesn't fear to step out of the stereotypical, generic and tiresome world of science fiction that is often related to a futuristic and advanced world with vivid colors like blue, gray and white. Instead, the game takes place in a gritty and desolate world filled with rusty metal, this world's color is primarily composed of sepia palettes consisting of beige and brown that one would never imagine in a world involving robots, pretty much like in the first act of the film mh:greatestmovies:Wall·E.
 * 8) A simple and yet intriguing story that'd become the ambassador of Amanita's well-known formula; point-and-clicks shouldn't just prioritize storytelling over stale gameplay. Josef's only mission is to rescue his girlfriend and take revenge on his childhood bullies, so there's no deep lore investigation at all. Nevertheless, you can come across easter eggs and references to other Amanita games that don't affect the game's story in anyway. One specific reference to the Samorost series is the sad revelation of the Robot found inside the Castle's lobby, he isn't a statue, but a being from space that was taken from his world to the city and hung in the Castle as a trophy.
 * 9) A nice extract of the story pointer is how Machinarium and its communication methods contain no dialogue, spoken or written. Instead, communication is entirely independent of an understandable language to express emotions, all thanks to the use of kooky symbols and sounds. A good sample of latter characteristics are the secret cut scenes that are revealed when idling in an area. This puts Josef to recall vague memories of anecdotes with Berta or the Black Cap Brotherhood, all made in the format of animations inside comic bubbles.
 * 10) Puzzles that are absolute brain teasers. Difficulty level is far more demanding than any other point-n-click that revolves around gathering items and combining them, as these puzzles involve thinking and using strategic logical answers in order to advance further. One puzzle in particular involving the Fan at the top of The Wall is undeniably impressive. This robot will ask Josef a series of questions, answering the correct ones shines its day, but the real solution to the puzzle are the incorrect answers. When choosing many wrong answers in a row, the Fan will heat so much that its mouth will get unattached from the building and let you walk inside the next room.
 * 11) One radical departure of Machinarium is how only the overworld objects within the character's reach can be interacted with, so you are obligated to find a way to reach certain areas out of range to acquire said items or craft new ones to do so.
 * 12) Doubtlessly, one determining attribute to the cosmic power that Machinarium emanates as a video game is its calming and cozy atmosphere formed by the environment, disregarding the considerable desertic world that surrounds the place. Locations such as The Buskers' Square, The Pub, The Glasshouse and The Wall are arguably the most relaxing spots in the city. Players would imagine living in that world just to experience those feelings.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The conclusion to the Black Cap Brotherhood's story is laughable: when their meeting room is flooded in water none of them thought of opening the doors or blocking the tube where the leak came from. After a long time of not changing their state and prevailing in the same room nothing seems to have changed, and in the end, Josef opens the water disposal so they are flushed out of the city.
 * 2) *It is understandable that the story had to be kept simple, but an ending this absurd was not a good conclusion to the bad guys subplot.
 * 3) Completion usually takes a bit less than 5 hours, yet experienced players, if fast enough, can easily complete it in less than 1 hour, which comes off as very short play time.

Reception
Machinarium was well-received on release; on the critic aggregate sites GameRankings and Metacritic, the game has an average score of 85% and 85/100, respectively.

In 2011, Adventure Gamers named it the 17th-best adventure game ever released.

Machinarium was critically acclaimed as one of the best point n' click games and one of the best indie games of 2009. The critic aggregate site Metacritic rated the game's PC version an average score of 85/100 based on 47 critic reviews, and an 8.7/10 user score based on 698 user ratings.

In 2011, Adventure Gamers named Machinarium the 17th-best adventure game ever released.

As of July 2016, it has sold over 4 million units, making it the best-selling Amanita Design video game up to date.

Game trailer
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Review
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Trivia

 * The marketing budget for the game was $1,000.
 * Josef has been featured as a playable character in the platform game Super Meat Boy.
 * Apart from Machinarium, Floex has composed the soundtrack of other games by Amanita Design, such as Samorost 2, its sequel and Pilgrims. In 2021 he's composed the soundtrack of a non-Amanita puzzle game titled 'Papetura'.