Monday 26 October 2009

Rage Against the Machinarium

Loving the work of Czech studio Amanita Design. Their latest offering is point & click adventure Machinarium, which I am currently working my way through in between bouts of Uncharted 2 and Lumines.



The ambience, in particular the sound design, is outrageously good. You get the soundtrack free when you download the game from the Amanita website. As a piece of work on its own the brooding electronica is stirring stuff - but coupled with the great art direction and thoughtful puzzles it adds up to a strangely powerful and moving experience. (And I'm not usually a fan of point & clickers).

My favourite thing? Leave your character alone for a few minutes and he starts to daydream about his child/robothood. Amanita manage to cram more emotion and thought-provoking into these short 15-20 second segments than most devs manage over their entire careers!

Come on threespeechers - support these guys and download the game from their website. Works out at about £13 (you get the soundtrack too) and is available in WinDo'hs, Mac and Linux flavours.

[pabloamigo]

SONY - sign them up for some PSN goodness!! Do it!

5 comments:

  1. What the download size? length of game?

    I am a chronic obsessive for adventure titles (most recently completed for the first time broken sword and the sequel to Secret Files....and The Longest Journey is among one of my all time favourite stories).

    Only problem is - once i get into it I like to know im nt going to be hooked on the world and story and then find myself let down by a 2 hour game span.

    Details Details Boy!

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  2. All these questions - you've been on the EU blog too long mate. When is it released to rest of EU? why do you treat me like 2nd class citizen? If I was Mike Kebby those punks would get nothing. hahahaha!

    Anyway - download is about 350mb (then about another 70-100 I think for the soundtrack).

    I suppose the length of the game depends on how stoopid you are. I have read several reviews saying that the puzzles are largely logical and there is also a hints system you can use once per scenario.

    I've spent about an hour or so on it and I'm only on scene 4 out of 35.

    Looking around the web it seems that it may take you 5-6 hours to finish if you don't use the hints system or walkthrough.

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  3. By the way John, you can play a Flash demo for free on their site.

    Be warned though, it definitely made me want to buy the full game!

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  4. Not played one of these since "Beneath a steel sky" - which was very good. I had to cheat by looking on the interweb for the solution though. It's not that I couldn't figure it out but I'm too lazy I guess!

    Incidentally, how easy are the puzzles in Uncharted 2? I thought they would be a bit more tricky than in the first game as this was a common criticism of the original. I'm playing thru on Hard and I still get "hints" about what to do if I should hang around in an area for more than half a minute or whatever it is. Hint - "pull the lever!". Yeh, fanks. Don't get me wrong I'm loving the game but the puzzle element is still not up to Tomb-Raider scratch!

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  5. gaming, on a PC! they play games now!? wow.
    where will it ever end. :)

    if this came out on PSN i'd snap it up.

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