Machinarium

Machinarium is a Czech adventure game that won a worldwide audience mainly through its visual design. A small robot gets thrown onto a scrapyard outside the city, and the only thing it can do is return, piece itself back together, and find out who hurt it. The whole story is told without a single word, using only picture bubbles, gestures, and sounds, so the game needs no translation and anyone can understand it. The world is entirely hand-drawn, rusty and dusty, yet surprisingly cozy, and it's full of small animations worth watching longer than strictly necessary.

The gameplay is classic adventure fare with a strong helping of logic puzzles. The robot stretches and shrinks to reach items placed up high, combines items it finds, and solves standalone puzzles that often take the form of mechanical jigsaws, sliding puzzles, or sequence-tracking tasks. The difficulty is higher than it first appears, but the game offers a two-tier hint system: first a picture hint for the current scene, and finally a hand-drawn walkthrough, which must first be unlocked with a short action minigame. The game also isn't afraid to veer off into small pleasures, whether it's a hidden arcade game on one of the machines or a band that plays on a rooftop when the player helps it out. There's no time pressure anywhere, nor any way to lose, so you can explore at your leisure.

The PlayStation Vita version is one of the most pleasant the game has received, since touch controls match the original mouse-clicking almost exactly, and the sharp display does the hand-painted scenery a good service. Tomáš Dvořák's music is one of the best parts of the whole package, blending muted electronics with acoustic machine sounds, and together with the sound design it creates a calm, slightly melancholic atmosphere. The game earned a number of awards and helped show that an independent studio can compete with major brands. Today it's a short but exceptionally lovely experience that ages more slowly than most games of its time.