Machinarium : Collectors Edition (PC/Mac DVD)

Machinarium is a point and click adventure game which brought me back to the good old days of such games. You control a small and cute (this is my feminine side speaking) robot through its journey to find its lost beloved one in a cruel robot world!It has beautiful hand-made style graphics (as you can see on the screenshots) and the robot world is designed almost as I would have imagined it. Its music is a great company to the graphics. There is a lack of speech, but the communication is being done well using speech bubbles which explains everything clearly. After all, in a robot world English (or any other human language) can’t be an option!It incorporates a large number of puzzles, in a great variety, from simple games (e.g. a large tic-tac-toe variation and an arcade asteroids game) to more complicated puzzles. Some of them are hard enough even for an experienced adventure games player (maybe due to the lack of explanation) but everything is solvable with some attention and patience.After successfully using an item, it is disposed so the inventory isn’t full with unusable items (actually when I finished the game, I had 2 items left in my inventory but it wasn’t annoying at all).But enough with the praise, let’s talk for the bad stuff: It’s a little bit annoying that you cannot just deselect an item in use and instead you have to return it to the inventory. Also, it might become boring at some point to have to watch the full animation of the robot walking up the stairs to go to another floor etc.The only actual downfall of the game is the use of Flash as the development platform. Right-click does nothing (actually it displays the frustrating Flash player menu) when it could be used for example to deselect an item of the inventory (if another development platform was used since Flash doesn’t support right-click functionality as far as I’m aware). Also, the point-and-click system isn’t as precise as someone would expect it to be, so you might find yourself at some point clicking in the wrong place and making a wrong move.But these facts couldn’t prevent even a huge Flash hater like myself to play and enjoy this amazing game! Before I forget, you cannot die in the game, so feel free to explore and try anything that you can think!PS: The collectors edition is really worth it.

I really wanted to enjoy this game. I'm a big fan of the old school point & click graphic adventures, I like puzzles, and the game is beautiful. However, I got bored after a few levels. Maybe because there's no actual plot to the "story" (or however you want to call it), no actual dialogs, etc.Beautiful art work, but the game is just not enough fun.

To begin with, the soundtrack to this game is soooooo good, it's worth the price alone. With this pack, you get the full soundtrack on a bonus CD. Okay , so the game is not as long as most other adventure games I've played, but the content is so well done, that it's easily forgiven. The way this game pulls you in emotionally is very impressive, and I was hooked after 15 mins or so of playing, so much so that I just lept playing and playing until I finished it. I wont lie, when I finished it I felt I'd been through a beautiful and moving experience, and was sorry it had ended. However, I pretty much felt like immediately starting again, it's that good. I didn't start again, as I want to savour it as much as possible, and will play it again in near future. I have played the Broken Swords, and the Siberia's, and this game is more than a match for them story and gameplay wise. If I really HAD to find any faults, they would be that it is a wee bit too short. Also the interface is not quite as slick as my other favourite adventure games, i.e Broken Sword, Syberia, and Overclocked. Still, the amount of MECHANICAL puzzles in this game is impressive, and they are HARDER than the Syberia's and Overclocked (both of which had excellent mechanical puzzles). They really will provide a challenge, and you're not just 'ticking boxes' to progress, as with a lot of adventure games. If you have ever been drawn emotionally into a game like Syberia etc, and have a thirst for challenging mechanical puzzles, then I cannot recommend this game enough!

On a PC, the games works wonderfully well with Flash Player 10. I heartily endorse all the positive comments posted elsewhere about the game itself.However, Mac users need to know the game does not load with Flash Player 10 in OS.X. The workaround is to uninstall v.10 and re-install v.9. Quite a chore but the game will then work. Problem is you will find large numbers of websites are now optimised for FP 10 and will not load content if you have v.9.So it's a trade-off, the game versus online content. Unfortunately for me, I need FP10.Support for the Mac from the designers is non-existent and they appear to have little interest in improving it. They are a small company so I can understand that, but this game would be perfect for the Mac community. Shame we can't use it. Nice booklet and poster, though.