Machinarium (PC) (From Daily Echo)

Machinarium (PC)

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Genre: Point-and-Click

Platform: PC

Publisher: Amanita Design

Classification: 7+ (PEGI)

MY head hurts. I’ve been banging it against the desk for 40 minutes and still I can’t figure out how to get the rat out of the robot musicians’ weird tube instrument thingy.

I wouldn’t mind except just moments before running into this obscure and irritatingly impenetrable puzzle, I had been wrestling with a similarly abstract and intractable problem. Namely, how to shoot a robot dog with a sucker gun and pull him to the other side of a canal in order that I could return him to his owner, who would then lend me his umbrella allowing me to navigate past a waterfall. Simple in retrospect.

This is the world of Machinarium - a poignantly weird bit of intense point and click puzzling in a memorable mechanised world of drab colours and disaffected, broken down robots.

Willfully unique, instructions are at a minimum and you can forget about explanations altogether.

This clean interface is beautifully simple and involving, as your little ‘bot tries to navigate his way first into and then through a bleak city filled with fiendish obstacles.

It is a return to point and click strategies of great games from the past. Everything you loved (or hated) about Sam and Max games or Day of the Tentacle is here, including the random clicking of everything on the screen as you desperately search for something, anything to dig you out of puzzle hell.

It does have a fun mini-game to help you unlock solutions, which this reviewer is ashamed to admit he relied on utterly to progress. I’m not proud.

Fun, searingly original and classy, like World of Goo before it, Machinarium shows the cutting edge of original gaming right now is with the independents. Just bring your own Nurofen. I’ve run out.

SCORE 8 / 10