Machinarium

Machinarium is a point-and-click adventure by the Czech studio Amanita Design, in which a small rusty robot travels through an industrial city full of pipes, gears, and grotesque mechanical inhabitants to rescue his robotic girlfriend and expose a conspiracy inside a corrupt tower. The game was originally made for computers in 2009, and the 2011 mobile version carried over the same hand-drawn world unchanged - only the controls were adapted to touch, so tapping the scene replaced mouse clicks, and it works surprisingly smoothly even in more complicated puzzles.

The atmosphere is completed by the music of Tomáš Dvořák, performing under the name Floex, whose melancholic electronic tones, together with the characters' silent, wordless pantomime, give the game a sense of poetic, almost childlike dreaminess despite the industrial and at times gloomy scenery. Harder puzzles come with hints in the form of a mini-comic, which makes the mobile version accessible even to players unfamiliar with classic point-and-click adventures.

Machinarium was a breakthrough title for Amanita Design, earning it international recognition and a number of awards for its visual design, and it opened the door to further projects such as Botanicula or Samorost 3 - the studio built a reputation at the time for making games that look more like an animated film than a typical game product.

It is a paid app with no ads, and a one-time purchase unlocks the entire game at once, so the player knows in advance how much they will pay to finish the whole story, with no hidden extra charges along the way.

Why play: Recommended for anyone looking for a visually distinctive, tranquil adventure with excellent music who doesn't want to worry about ads or purchases while playing on mobile.