Machinarium Review – Guide a helpless robot lost in a steampunk wasteland

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By: Amanita Design s.r.o

Version #: 1.2

Date Released: 2011-10-24

Developer: Amanita Design

Price: 4.99

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Machinarium is an app assembled from a number of different elements, including storybook, animated film, and point-and-click adventure game. It starts with a cinematic view of a sort of mechanical wasteland, where the vast expanse of emptiness is interrupted only by patches of trash. Then the clip halts at a pitiful cluster of junk, where the player is tasked to assemble the robot who is the anointed hero of the adventure that runs within Machinarium.

This initial robot assembly assignment is only the first of many objectives to be met in each episode of Machinarium, and this sufficiently serves as a training ground for the more difficult challenges to come later in the game. Naturally, there are a few rules to follow. The player can’t just tap mindlessly anywhere on the screen and expect something to happen. The robot can be guided to walk to the left or to the right as well as to lengthen or shorten his torso if necessary, and only objects in close proximity to the robot can be grabbed and dropped into the robot’s inventory. The player can then take individual or combined items from this inventory to aid the robot in doing what he needs to do in fulfillment of the current episode’s objective.

Even in the starting episode, where the robot is to be assembled from parts scattered and hidden among the heaps of junk, Machinarium already presents a high level of difficulty. There’s a hint button that offers a single clue as to what to do in each level, and there’s also a walkthrough book the player can turn to at the most difficult of times. But they can only tell so much. It’s really up to the player to flex some brain muscles in figuring out what tricks to perform.

Like the popular book apps The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore and The Numberlys, Machinarium is an extraordinary app that demonstrates the brilliance of the iPad as an interactive entertainment device and by extension the wondrous capabilities of iOS as a development platform. It features amazing graphics, amazing graphics, and more amazing graphics (which perhaps explains the fact that it works only on the iPad 2). Oh, and there’s also plenty of challenges that make good use of said amazing graphics.