Machinarium is immediately captivating simply by virtue of its unique and beautiful art style, creating a world both cute and grimy, kind of reminiscent of WALL-E in tone, where you control a small robot in a big world that contains quite a good deal of badness to contend with. The gameplay delivers as well, a simple point-and-click puzzle adventure where you try to piece together what happened to your character as well as reunite him with his girlfriend. The puzzles and puzzles-within-puzzles are challenging but also once you start to "think" like the game, become quite fun to piece together. If I had any complaints, they would be that I feel like only just when I started to really get into the mind of the developers on how their puzzles were constructed, the game was over. There were also a few challenges that seemed a little bit of a stretch to remember -- a key acquired much later for a seemingly inconsequential cabinet you might have forgotten about comes to mind. Really fun game, though! I will play more by this developer as it seems they're similar in style and substance.

Reviewed on Monday, August 14th, 2023, 11:55am.