GeekReads

Who can resist a cute robot game? Not I...

Machinarium is a brilliant, quirky little game by the independent group Amanita Design. It’s a puzzle-based adventure featuring a beautifully drawn and imagined world of robots, but which contains no dialogue. The story is told entirely through animated thought-bubbles, and describes the travails of your character – a small robot whose broken body is dumped into the junkyard in the introduction of the game – as he goes about righting the wrong done to him and his friends. This is achieved a variety of puzzles, mostly your usual treasure hunt for objects and then figuring out what to do with them, but also a few real brain teasers.

The majority of these puzzles are quite fun to solve, but a couple of them are on the extreme side (including one that requires a minimum of 72 moves to solve). Given you have no choice but to complete them in order to progress, nobody will blame you for hunting down a walkthrough. The game also features quite a few little sub-games, such as a Space Invaders clone within the quest itself, but also a cool hint system implementation whereby you play through a brief side-scrolling shooter in order to unlock a hint.

Easily the best thing about this game is its artistic design, in hand-drawn style. There’s heaps of detail in both the characters and background scenery, and the animation of the characters is really cute and endearing. The music is interesting too, very apt to the game world, and not at all repetitive or intrusive.

It’s a very short game – I completed it over a couple of sessions over the weekend – but worth every cent, both for the experience itself and also in support of indie developers.

The game retains the cel-shaded visual style from Wind Waker on Gamecube

I had a minor epiphany while playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the Wii, and it was this: all of the Zelda titles are essentially the same game with different puzzles. About three-quarters of the elements are common to all of the games in the series: Link, the boy with the green clothes and pointy hat (mostly referred to as Link); the eponymous princess; the various races (Gorons, Zora, etc.); the weapons (the sword and shield, bombs, boomerang, hookshot/claw – which tend to accumulate from sequel); and of course the sound effects. The remainder are innovations in either the puzzle design or the interface. As the first Zelda title on the Nintendo DS, it should be patently obvious which way The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass leans.

Gorons... check.

The question is, are these differences enough to make the game fun? Happily for me, the answer is a resounding “yes!” but I now have a vector for understanding why others might not like it. Zelda is not the franchise for you if the story matters, or you find that familiarity breeds contempt. The Zelda framework here – because that’s what it boils down to – is but the thinnest veneer of gloss holding a bunch of random puzzle elements together, making Twilight Princess seem like Lord of the Rings in comparison. At least it’s better than the Professor Layton games where they make almost no attempt to hide the fact that the “story” is an inconvenience that gets in the way of the game’s brain-teasers*.

Fairies... check.

Phantom provides a fresh take on old favourites, for instance the ability to draw paths for the boomerang, and lots of drawing and tapping puzzles making full use of the stylus interface. The cel-shading graphics style borrowed from Link’s Gamecube outing, Wind Waker, is a love-it-or-hate-it affair but are at least functional and reliably consistent in quality throughout.

The puzzles aren’t at all taxing, and if weren’t for the baffling decision of the game designers to make you play through one of the key dungeons several times throughout the course of the game, would be a rather short adventure. The side quests do provide some challenge for those interested enough to pursue them (I did a few of the easier ones and then gave up).

When all’s said and done, I greatly enjoyed the light intellectual diversion provided by Phantom Hourglass, but came away from it with an empty feeling. I do like my stories, after all.

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* I’m not saying that these games are bad, by the way. I actually have both the original and the sequel, and hope to get around to reviewing them soon.