It’s rather lovely when you learn of a tiny company consistently making splendid games is succeeding, rather than struggling to stay alive. Amanita Design, who RPS have championed for their witty, beautiful and smart adventure games since we launched, sent us some very interesting sales information about their robotic point-and-clicker, Machinarium [official site], after its four millionth sale.
RPS Feature Organismic
From the team most famous for Machinarium, Aminita Design, comes the third game in the Samorost series. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of the first two – they were both tiny Flash games. Samorost 3 [official site] is a full-length, full-screen adventure that requires no prior knowledge. How does the adventure/puzzle game hold up at this scale? Here’s wot I think:
The journey of Samorost feels very much like the journey of designers Amanita. The first game in the series was a free quick-to-play web game built in Flash, but Samorost 3 [official site] – coming out on the 24th March – is a lengthy downloadable adventure following their astonishing Machinarium and Botanicula. From small beginnings, they’re now one of the most respected adventure teams around, and expectations are extremely high for the first full-length entry in the Samorost series. Expectations that looks rather likely to be met if the quality of the new trailer, below, is anything to go by.
Amanita Design make some of the prettiest dang games around, and their Samorost games are especially lovely. They look like delicate, glowing paintings based on diddy stop-motion sets metal of scrap and thread, pebble and moss. Perhaps my favourite Amanita gameplace yet is one they’re showing in a wee new video from the upcoming Samorost 3 [official site], a forest scene which oh my giddy aunt I want to live in look:
I’ll be danged if this new Samorost 3 [official site] trailer isn’t the most charming thing I’ve seen all week, and I see myself in the mirror every day (still single, ladies). We’ve been waiting so very long for the adventure game, and now we have this trailer to see and hear and news that it’ll launch in autumn or winter to know.
One might petulantly stomp their feet and pout that we’ve been longing for its loveliness for almost a decade now, but creators Amanita Design released Machinarium and Botanicula in that time so shhh settle down and enjoy the gentle exposition I wedged in with this paragraph.
RPS Feature Amanita on Sequels, Sound and Stanley
Just as night follows day, just as dog follows rabbit, just as Shia LeBeouf follows Daniel Clowes from a safe distance, a nomination for the latest game from Amanita will, it seems, always follow the announcement of another Independent Games Festival. This year, the makers of Botanicula and Machinarium are taking their charmingly odd, experimental puzzle-adventure Samorost3 to the show, where it’s nominated for Excellence In Visual Art and Excellence in Audio. This is their fourth game to bag a nomination – will it join its three predecessors in winning a prize?
We shall see. In the meantime, let’s have a chat with Amanita’s lead Jakub Dvorský about how Samorost 3 is and isn’t like its much-loved forerunners, the role sound plays in their games, and their status as veterans of the much-changed indie landscape.
2015! That’s an insane release date for a videogame! There won’t even be PCs by then. We’ll all have Google Glass injected into our eyeballs and iPhones surgically implanted up our bums and Microsoft Surfaces built into our toilet seats. That’s definitely the future. Everyone will want closed, locked, tyrannical software ecosytems by then. Why, PC gaming has died 42 times this year alone, so God only knows how bad it’ll be in 18 months’ time.
Hopefully Machinarium and Botanicula developer Amanita Design will be able to port their long-awaited second sequel to lovely, gently psychedelic pointer-clicker Samorost to Smartwatches and curved televisions BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE. Meantime, I’m going to watch Samorost 3’s first-ever trailer just before I take my PC to the dump.
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