I’m not much on computer gaming, but when I saw the trailer for Machinarium online, I knew it was one experience I couldn’t miss out on. After confirming that it was Mac compatible (what luck!) I secured the game and was off.

Now the first thing you’ll notice are the unbelievable graphics. The whole industrial, almost steampunk design of the environments is gorgeously rendered by hand, giving the whole game a gritty, surreal feel, especially since there’s not a word of dialogue in Machinarium. You also might find the graphic style a bit familiar; Machinarium was made by the creators of that point-and-click internet game Samorost that got really popular a few years ago, and for good reason. The surprising depth and intelligent interactivity of such a conceptually simple yet beautiful game made Samorost at least 9,000% better than the other flash game fare that circulated the net back then.

You play an extendable robot looking for his lost love, as they were both kidnapped. Like Samorost, it’s a point-and-click puzzle/adventure game that forces you to think outside the box a good majority of the time. Here’s the catch: you can only interact with things within your reach. You’re a robot, so your reach is a bit extended, and then there’s the fact that you can click and drag him to make his body extend vertically a few feet or so for those hard to reach items. You can combine items, and to use an item you bring up your inventory, which is hidden at the top of the screen, accessed with the touch of a cursor. The menu is the same but at the bottom with stuff like screen size, save, load, quit, etc. To walk, you click where the cursor turns to leg icons. Yes it’s sort of linear in the fact that there are only certain places you can walk and certain items and objects you can use and interact with, but it’s highly abstract in its progress, and you’ll find yourself jumping ahead and then backtracking once you have the item you needed way back then. The total length of the game is highly dependent on the skills of the player, due to the fact that to progress you often need to complete difficult puzzles and figure out what to do in well-planned levels. The game took me about eight hours total.

Machinarium is straight up hard. You’re gonna have to use your thinker a lot, and I’m going to hazard a guess and say that you’re going to need a hint once in a while, which is why they’ve included just that: a hint option. On the other side of your inventory sits the hint button and the walkthrough book. Instead of any dialogue in the game, characters use thought bubbles to express desires and show memories. Likewise, clicking the hint button brings up a single picture of the main goal you have to accomplish in that room/level. So hints are free, but there’s only one per room/level. To access the walkthrough book for the level, you’ll have to put in a little more effort. You play a mini-game as a key flying through a level of bricks and spiders, which you’ll have to avoid hitting and shoot until you reach the lock. Doing this will open up the book, which is filled with cryptic symbols and more pictures of everything to do in that level, though even they can be a bit vague sometimes. The whole game isn’t consistently super hard, but there are some puzzles that might take you quite a while.

I have a few minor issues with the game, like how if you extend yourself tall or short you walk really slow, when it should just adjust your height and walk like it does when you interact with an object on a normal height while adjusted. Really though, Machinarium is highly impressive and incredibly enjoyable to play. It’s a lighthearted game with a good sense of humor set against an almost wasteland-esque industrial backdrop, worth playing if only to witness the scenery. I can’t stress enough how fantastic this game looks. The animation is so smooth I couldn’t look away. The menus are streamlined and easy to use. Also, this game has potentially the best soundtrack of them all. This is a game for anyone who likes puzzles and/or point-and-click games, and an especially good one to play with someone else. It’s not too long, but whether the puzzles take you hours or minutes, you’ll come away with a satisfying experience.

TL;DR: Exceedingly beautiful graphics, heavy on the thinking, point-and-click adventure game. Severely amazing.