Adam Wilcox; tea drinking Brit with fondness for the media and tech.
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Machinarium and Indie Gaming 16 October 2009

Recently there have been some great things coming out of the indie game market. Consider the previously reviewed World of Goo, one of the most fun, inventive and frankly daft games I’ve ever played.

Meanwhile on the iPhone independent developers have turned out some cracking games, and has made “playing with your phone” something perfectly acceptable to do and not simply the last recourse to hide embarrassment after realising the girl you’ve chatted up already has a boyfriend. (I had a depressing weekend).

Moving on, if you’ve ever wondered what might happen if Super Mario could control time then you’re in luck because that’s my shorthand for describing the puzzle-platformer Braid. The game was original released on the Xbox Live Arcade, but is now available on Mac and Windows. Braid is one of my favourite game purchases this year, has a unique and beautiful art style and truly innovative gameplay mechanics.

As a caveat, I’ll quote Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw of Zero Punctuation who accurately pointed out that it does however undermine the whole indie aspect when you hear the lead developer of Braid Jonathan Blow sank $180,000 into the project.

Finally we come to Machinarium released today.

Coming from Amanita Design, (a Prague-based studio which made the charming but deeply weird Samorost and Samorost2), Machinarium is set in a decrepit, grimy, rust-stained and tower-filled city of robots. All very Wall-E I know, but other than they both share robot themes and are funny, sweet and utterly brilliant the comparison ends.

You play a little robot, thrown out to the scrap yard behind the city he must return to and face the Black Cap Brotherhood and save his robot-girl friend. The game mechanics are ludicrously simple to pick up- click on objects close to you to pick up, click on multiple objects to use them on one another. The puzzles in this game however are detailed, complex and tend to require some out-of-the-box thinking.

This is a return to classic point-and-click adventure gaming, and I love it. I’m only a few hours in and I’m already thoroughly captivated. Available on PC, Mac and Steam, a demo is also available as well.