By John Walker on October 1st, 2009 at 10:38 am.
Oh, what a beautiful thing this is shaping up to be. You can now play the first three levels of Machinarium, and find out for yourself why Amanita Design’s latest hand drawn adventure is filling us with so much hope. The demo is available from here or here, and the full game is due to be released on the 16th October via Steam, Direct 2 Drive, Impulse and so on. Most of those places are taking pre-orders now, and while I’ve not played the finished game it’s a pre-order I feel fairly certain will be well invested. There’s also a new trailer below.
John, you bring me news that has brightened my sleep-deprived morning… Excellent. Thanks
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Agreed, great news. Downloading now.
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Finished the demo yesterday. The stunning visuals are beyond compare, and dripping with atmosphere. The hint system is clever as well. I’m buying.
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Don’t see it on Steam yet. Could be because I’m on mainland Europe, ofcourse..
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It’s lovely.
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Is the demo available for Mac? Websites says game is available for PC and Mac…. Any thoughts/links?
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No Mac demo? Pfft.
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Funnily enough, the game is just a full-screen Flash video – they shouldn’t have any trouble getting a Mac Demo out there!
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This is good stuff indeed. Can’t wait for the full game.
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On GamersGate.com we have both the PC and Mac demo. Altought it seems the Mac demos doen’t work. We are waiting for a new Mac Demo very soon!
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On GamersGate.com we have both the PC and Mac demo. Altought it seems the Mac demos doen’t work. We are waiting for a new Mac Demo very soon!
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Well, there goes my hopes of running it on Linux.
Bloody Flash.
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Another perfect example of a promising game being ruined by being made as a classic adventure
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Short but beautifully made demo. I thought the single click interaction would be a little shallow but the puzzles are inventive and the flash hand cursor only comes into play where appropriate (i.e. when you have met certain conditions to interact with that object rather than always present but frustratingly non-interactive)
Although I think Flash is an excellent way to develop increasingly more sophisticated games it may have been nice to hide that a little from the user. A custom cursor and disabling the right-click context menus are all fairly Flash 101 stuff and would have added to the feeling of a solid professional game rather than just another Flash game from PopCap. Which it certainly isn’t.
My only concern really is the length of the game. The demo took me minutes (albeit only two screens). Does anybody know how many screens / puzzles we are to get for our £12 (or thereabouts)?.
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I liked the demo but the length bothered me too. The demo ends with the message that the full game will have 30 levels. If each screen constitutes one level, then as charming as it may be, I’m not entirely convinced that it’s worth the asking price.
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@abhishek:
Did it say that at the end of the demo? Apologies I must have “switched off” at that point…
I suspect that this is what you get if the game does not utilitse a dialog / quest mechanic. It ends up as a “escape the room” game (albeit beautifully done) I guess that it would be wrong to criticise it on this point as it certainly is not selling itself as an epic adventure game. Additionally these are first two “puzzles”: some of the screenshots show multiple doorways so maybe there will be a bit more to-ing and fro-ing to solve puzzles later on.
I still think its going to be a purchase if not simply to give these guys a fiscal round of applause and to fund their next project.
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The demo was beyond amazing. The atmosphere, the fun puzzles, the whole ‘feel’ to the game… Simply fantastic. It has the potential to be as memorable as old LucasArts adventures.
I will definitely buy this, but the boxed version – Germans and Russian get one, so I hope other countries will, too.
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Mixed feelings about the game. Certain things irked me, like the ability to stretch up the character and squash him down. I mean if your going to make a certain range around the character ‘usable stuff’ then its quite annoying to have to move up/down as well. Maybe its just me though, no one else seems to have complained.
However the game looks great and I liked the whole mini game to open the walkthrough as it ensured I was less tempted to instawalkthrough. The puzzles seemed well thought out but they really need to be- more so than other adventures, where you can resort to a basic pixel hunt.
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Great demo, albeit a little short. But in this case it does whet the appetite for more. I just hope the full game is long enough, but either way, I’ll probably get it.
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Smeg it. I’ll wait until the full version is released. Pre-ordered this baby months ago :D
Bring on the awesomeness!
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The puzzle minigame for the solution is a nice touch. And it’s VERY nicely drawn.
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The game, I meant. Not the minigame. That one’s… suitably minimalistic.
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This has made me one desperately happy individual.
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I must be stupid or the game’s broken, what do I do with the rope – attach it to the pole? … hope this is not indicative of how the rest of it will fare for me :P
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Lol nevermind…
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Anyone else having problems running the game? I get the nicely animated title screen, upon which I click, and then the main menu screen appears, but automatically freezes, although I can still hear the audio playing in the background. I can’t click on anything, and nothing is moving on screen at all.
Anyone know what’s wrong with it, and how I can get it to play?
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Pre-ordered. It’s an absolute delight – music is fantastic too!
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Games Tm (I think that’s what it’s called, UK multi-format games magazine) has a review of this. They give it 9/10 and call it “The best adventure game of the decade” as near as I can remember. I’m fairly certain it also said it had several hours of play in there.
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Beautiful style, but I can’t say I’m terribly endeared toward the actual game. The puzzle’s weren’t amazing and the interface is annoying at times.
One thing that really annoyed me is the inventory items. I select an item an inventory and then click where I want to use it, but I’m out of range. So I right click to dismiss the item so I can move. Oh wait, no I can’t as it’s a flash game and brings up a silly menu that does NOTHING. So I have to drop the item back at the top of the screen, move, then get the item again. It seems like a really small thing, but when it comes down to it half of this game is about using the inventory items on the environment, so it really should have been as smooth as possible. A simple right click dismiss would have been enough.
The mini game for the hints was a nice idea, but for me had two problems. Firstly the mini game was pretty annoying, and secondly the hints are less “hints” and more “answers”.
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Downloading / will try this out later.
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I’m having similar trouble, except I’m not getting any animation at all. Any time I alt-tab in and out I get a new still picture of whatever’s going on at the time, but no animation.
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The graphics are simply jaw-dropingly amazing to look at, and the music fits the setting very well. The puzzles were fun to complete and the “hint” mini game was ok even though it did reveal the entire solution. They’re pretty much saving you the trouble of alt-tabing out of the game to do a google search for the answer. I can’t wait to see what they did with the later levels. When is this showing up on Steam? cause its not there now…
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Liked the atmosphere. (<i>Beautiful</i> artwork.) Liked the humor. (Low-key slapstick.) Liked the hint system – one, small, general hint, or a mini-game (to give you a bit of pause) that reveals a splendidly illustrated solution guide. Total class.
But… some of the puzzles were pretty annoying, especially the very last one, which I had to look up. Without depth perception, some things probably should not be asked of the player.
But, I mean, I'm not complaining. Was an excellent use of my 15-20 minutes.
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@PleasingFungus: re the annoying last puzzle: do you mean the moveable telescoping pole? It does actually cast a shadow that you can use to judge when it is in the right position.
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I liked. In fact, I liked so much I pre-ordered. I think the last adventure game I owned was Beneath a Steel Sky…
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Would you consider using HTML5 Video instead of requiring Flash Player?
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Well, I've put in for the preorder. If you buy direct from them it looks like you might get a full length soundtrack that may not be available elsewhere.
It's a great indie game, and deserves support.
Yes, some of the puzzles are a bit annoying but I feel the charm and the graphics outweighs that.
I don't think you can easily price this, though. It's 12 quid or so which isn't horrendously bad for a few hours of gameplay with unique graphics. For 14 quid I could walk into Tesco and buy Oblivion and Bioshock..
The question is not so much 'does this compare to other huge games' but more 'does this provide a quality experience for a number of hours'
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According to Games magazine, it's about 12 hours long – so about a quid an hour. Not unreasonable for a unique game. They gave it 9 out of 10 and commented that it was an experience to be savoured rather than rushing through with the hints.
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I have the same problem as Jeremy. Can somone help. Really like this game.
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As above… the game freezes up in like half a minute of gameplay (it means that if a new game is started, when our hero actually falls out from the “trash carrier”)… I have the latest flash (10), dualcore, 3 gigs of ram and xp pro sp3… what the hell is the problem with this?!
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The demo was great. But my problem has to do when collecting item(s) for inventory. They simply don’t show in inventory. I’ve tried the patch, but it takes me back to the demo version. Any ideas as to how I can get the items to show in my inventory?
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