It’s a bit like the high-level course correction that some text adventures provide in response to the command “help” or “think”.
Machinarium jail free#
First, every scene has one free hint that displays, in a thought balloon from Josef, a picture of your ultimate goal for that scene. Fortunately, there’s an excellent in-game hint system, one I like so much that I’m actually kind of glad that I got stuck so that I could experience it properly. The environmental puzzles, on the other hand, I’ve got stuck on several times, either as a result of not noticing a clickable item or simply because the required action was one of those unpredictable ones that you need to just try rather than figure out. I had fun with these puzzles, and didn’t get truly stuck on them once. Some of the self-contained puzzles are old chestnuts, including one or two that even appeared in The Seventh Guest, but others seem to be genuinely original, like when you have to find a minimal way to block the flow of water through a complicated tangle of branching pipes. There’s a little bit of combining of inventory items thrown in, but only in fairly obvious ways, and a little bit of Myst-style contraptioneering, but not nearly as much as you might expect given that the setting is all about fanciful machines. The puzzle content turns out to be mainly a mix of self-contained mini-games and environmental inventory-item use. One of the first locations has a bridge that you try to cross, only to slip on an oil slick and fall into the lower city the same location appears again, from the other side of the bridge, much later on. And unlike Samorost, in which each room is a self-contained mini-adventure, Machinarium has a layout that returns on itself a lot and makes you revisit locations for different purposes and from different directions. I’m pretty sure I’m nearing the end of this game.
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