Samorost

Samorost started as a school project by Jakub Dvorský and became one of the most famous Czech games of all — even though it lasts twenty minutes and was never sold. It was played directly in the browser, for free, in Flash, and that's exactly what opened the door to a worldwide audience at a time when the Czech game scene was struggling with boxed-game distribution.

The story doesn't contain a single line of text. A gnome in a white cap notices that a second asteroid is approaching his own, and sets out to deal with it. The whole world is assembled from photographs — tree bark, mushrooms, tin pipes, and machine parts — which the author transformed into a surreal landscape that looks like nothing else. The controls are pure point-and-click: you click on whatever looks interesting and watch what happens.

The puzzles aren't hard, and the game doesn't try to trip you up. Its strength lies in the atmosphere and the sound, which does half the work — every click bubbles, creaks, or hoots. It was exactly this combination of visuals and sound that foreign critics noticed, and Amanita Design built everything that followed on it, from Machinarium to Samorost 3.

Why play it: Twenty minutes that founded one of the most acclaimed Czech studios — and it still looks and sounds like nothing else.