Machinarium. What the Everlovin' Fuck.
Machinarium. It looks so cute and is so very, very annoying.
I've been venting my spleen at the screen, the dog, and the husband. But they need a break, so get ready for some ventilating internal organs.
It's a puzzle game where the puzzles don't make sense. You play a robot moving through a robot city in a series of static vignettes. You use objects to solve situations like breaking out of jail or helping musicians fix their instruments. Only a small subset of things in each scene can be used to do this and they're indicated by a symbol when the mouse is hovered over them. Each scene also has a traditional puzzle to solve, usually to activate a machine.
The problem is that the objective of each scene is often nearly impossible to figure out and the puzzles are worse.
My main problems with Machinarium and games like are
1. The objective of each scene can be impossible to figure out.
2. The steps to get there can be nonsensical and even when they do make sense, it requires specific steps to be taken in a very specific order. So even if you see what needs to be done, you can't necessarily see what has to be done to actually do it.
3. Some of the traditional puzzles are so difficult as to be unsolvable.
For example, The Lift. It's a broken lift on the outside of a building. It needs fuel. I don't know this from the game, I know it from a walkthrough. The only hint in the game is that the robot looks down a tube and then shakes his head. If that doesn't make sense to you it's because it doesn't make any goddamn sense. The fuel problem gets fixed by the robot's girlfriend boiling a radiator. She takes it out of the air conditioner and plunks it into a pot of boiling water. Then a tube a comes out and she uses it to flow oil from the kitchen she's in to the robot. How on earth is someone supposed to know that in robot world radiators have tubes that come out when they're boiled?!? I don't mind difficult puzzles, but they should be within the realm of the solvable.
This brings me to another problem/annoyance with Machinarium: the lack of skill and thought needed. It's all trial and error, solved by brute force. If something lights up when it's hovered over, then you're supposed to use it. Most of the game is just mousing over everything trying to find things that light up, not strategically working out a solution. For example, the cat. You need to capture it to eat a rat stuck in a horn. (Don't ask.) First of all, it looks like a lizard and not a cat. Second of all, you capture it by electrocuting it. Tying a broken electrical cord to a bridge stuns the poor thing. This isn't even logical, let alone an immediately obvious solution. It does, however, raise troubling questions about robot ethics.
Additionally, the more traditional puzzles don't make sense either. For one you play a sort of robot chess, trying to put 5 of your pieces all in row. After about a dozen attempts I decided to seek out help from the all-knowing interwebs. Several forum postings offered possible solutions, but none worked. I had to resort to using my laptop to play the game online by inputting all the other robot's moves and then using the site's responses as my own. It took two tries. If you have to use another computer to win a game, it's too friggin difficult.
I gave up about two-thirds of the way through. I was relying on walkthroughs more than I was actually figuring it out on my own and that's neither fun nor completely honest. It's too bad. Machinarium looked interesting and it's a game I've wanted to play for a while. Oh, well.
I've been venting my spleen at the screen, the dog, and the husband. But they need a break, so get ready for some ventilating internal organs.
It's a puzzle game where the puzzles don't make sense. You play a robot moving through a robot city in a series of static vignettes. You use objects to solve situations like breaking out of jail or helping musicians fix their instruments. Only a small subset of things in each scene can be used to do this and they're indicated by a symbol when the mouse is hovered over them. Each scene also has a traditional puzzle to solve, usually to activate a machine.
The problem is that the objective of each scene is often nearly impossible to figure out and the puzzles are worse.
My main problems with Machinarium and games like are
1. The objective of each scene can be impossible to figure out.
2. The steps to get there can be nonsensical and even when they do make sense, it requires specific steps to be taken in a very specific order. So even if you see what needs to be done, you can't necessarily see what has to be done to actually do it.
3. Some of the traditional puzzles are so difficult as to be unsolvable.
For example, The Lift. It's a broken lift on the outside of a building. It needs fuel. I don't know this from the game, I know it from a walkthrough. The only hint in the game is that the robot looks down a tube and then shakes his head. If that doesn't make sense to you it's because it doesn't make any goddamn sense. The fuel problem gets fixed by the robot's girlfriend boiling a radiator. She takes it out of the air conditioner and plunks it into a pot of boiling water. Then a tube a comes out and she uses it to flow oil from the kitchen she's in to the robot. How on earth is someone supposed to know that in robot world radiators have tubes that come out when they're boiled?!? I don't mind difficult puzzles, but they should be within the realm of the solvable.
This brings me to another problem/annoyance with Machinarium: the lack of skill and thought needed. It's all trial and error, solved by brute force. If something lights up when it's hovered over, then you're supposed to use it. Most of the game is just mousing over everything trying to find things that light up, not strategically working out a solution. For example, the cat. You need to capture it to eat a rat stuck in a horn. (Don't ask.) First of all, it looks like a lizard and not a cat. Second of all, you capture it by electrocuting it. Tying a broken electrical cord to a bridge stuns the poor thing. This isn't even logical, let alone an immediately obvious solution. It does, however, raise troubling questions about robot ethics.
Additionally, the more traditional puzzles don't make sense either. For one you play a sort of robot chess, trying to put 5 of your pieces all in row. After about a dozen attempts I decided to seek out help from the all-knowing interwebs. Several forum postings offered possible solutions, but none worked. I had to resort to using my laptop to play the game online by inputting all the other robot's moves and then using the site's responses as my own. It took two tries. If you have to use another computer to win a game, it's too friggin difficult.
I gave up about two-thirds of the way through. I was relying on walkthroughs more than I was actually figuring it out on my own and that's neither fun nor completely honest. It's too bad. Machinarium looked interesting and it's a game I've wanted to play for a while. Oh, well.
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