Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The long awaited adventure Machinarium is finally available today. After staring in wonder at the artwork and trailers for months I was able to play through a finished version this week in order that I could tell you Wot I Think.

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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.

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Another of 2009’s Unknown Pleasures inches ever closer. Samorost’s creator’s commercial adventure will debut on October 16th via all the digital channels you can imagine, including Steam and Impulse. If you want to pre-order you can do it from their site for a mere seventeen – count ‘em! – dollars. Which saves you three whole dollars over the release price. I’m not particularly interested in the pure adventure genre any more, but this really has be intrigued. Here’s the latest short video…
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A new extended trailer of game footage has emerged for Jakub Dvorský and Amanita Design’s gorgeous-looking Machinarium. The full-length adventure from the creator of astonishing-o-games Samorost 1 and 2, and the lovely edumacational Questionaut, is looking pretty fantastic. We’ve had a play of an early build, and will have a preview of it for you next week. A quick advanced preview of the preview: it’s rather good. You can pre-order it at a discounted $17 from here, should you feel the urge.

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Yippee! A new trailer for Machinarium, and a garden full of snow. What more could a man ask for? Don’t forget we spoke to Amanita Design about the game just a short while back. This time we get to see some of the puzzling in action, including exciting stretchy robot techniques! Plus there’s a few new scenes that haven’t been shown before, each breathtakingly detailed and pretty. It’s below.

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Amanita Design have quietly made gentle adventure games for a few years. As well as the gorgeous Samorost games, they’ve also produced equally charming Flash games for the BBC, Nike and The Polyphonic Spree. Machinarium is their first full-length project, hand drawn and meticulously animated, about a city populated by robots. We spoke to front man, Jakub Dvorský, to find out more.

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I’m so very excited to see that progress on Machinarium continues apace, with the first gameplay video emerging. The utterly gorgeous screenshots that preceded this have had me slavering to play it. Now seeing the endless charm of Jakub Dvorsky’s designs can be seen in their latest motions. Tis below.

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Two of my very favourite web games would be Samorost, and Samorost 2. Created by Amanita Design, which consists of founder Jakub Dvorsky with Vaclav Blin, both games are serene, beautiful experiences. Ostensibly point-and-click games, they are more about exploring the locations and experiencing the techno-natural environments. There are puzzles, but they are gentle, and usually are solved by experimentation rather than ingenuity. The news (it’s not news, but we’re writing about it today) that they are working on a full-scale adventure is met with a happy heart.

Machinarium is due in the second half of this year, and as yet very little is known so far. So check out the two screenshots available here (and they are screenshots, not concept art).

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