Machinarium is a story about a robot. Not a giant Japanese one with lasers in its eyes or a mechanical dick that transforms into an underwater sea vessel, but a weak, pint-sized, weaponless, Czech robot that is more likely to wind up on the Island of Misfit Toys than in an episode of Evangelion. (This little guy should feel lucky that Shinji isn’t inside him though.)

In Machinarium, you’re dropped into a world that seems determined to keep you from the girl you love. It’s not totally clear who this girl robot is; your sister or girlfriend, but you’re trying to get her back. It’s a simple story, but it’s the execution of Machinarium that is so special. It’s a simple point and click adventure game, but the art is beautiful. There are 30 screens you’ll visit, but they’re all so fantasically drawn, you’ll be glad you’re spending time staring at them while you solve the riddles in the game. If I had to describe the art and animation in Machinarium, I’d have to say it’s like a mix of retro Disney and The City of Lost Children, with Studio Ghibli handling the physical humor. The robot designs are endearing, and the backgrounds are filled with small details that beg to be explored and played with. If there’s one thing that makes Machinarium worth playing, it’s the art.

The game’s puzzles are numerous, and some can be quite challenging. They aren’t all solved by finding the right item and using on the right whatever though. At one point in the game you visit an arcade, and in order to get the item you need, you have to beat a Space Invaders clone. But the rest of the puzzles do require you to do quite a bit of thinking. And thinking beyond a lot of the video game conventions we’ve come to know is a necessity. To assist you in this, Machinarium has a two-fold hint system. The first hint system is a little light bulb you click on at the top of the screen that will pop a little thought bubble up above the robot’s head. It usually just tends to tell you what the end goal is for the area; not specific steps to get you there. The second hint system is a book with an LCD screen that opens up to a horizontal shooter. If you successfully complete the shooter level they give you, you are shown a fairly extensive cheat diagram that will pretty much explain everything you need to do to progress in the game. The shooter isn’t hard, but it’s just annoying enough that you don’t wanna open it up unless you have to. It’s really the perfect balance between a relative easy hint system and one that doesn’t make it too easy to abuse.

The story in Machinarium is told completely without spoken dialogue. In every place that would normally be a conversation, thought bubbles appear overhead that are animated, and convey whatever the characters are trying to say. It’s pretty clever, and rather than listening to possibly bad voice acting, you get simple and easy to understand visual cues. But just because the game is without voices, that’s not to say it’s devoid of great audio. Machinarium has lots of great music. One puzzle has you finding instruments for a robot jazz band, and our little robot friend even boogies to their tunes if you let him stand and listen. The mechanical noises of all the robots are great, and the blips and bloops of the retrofied computers are like something out of the original Star Trek episodes. And the creepy old-man robot you meet towards the end of the game has a slurping noise that is so creepy and unsettling that I had to mute the game. But that’s a good thing. It sounds like someone dying, and will certainly get under your skin.

The only problems I had with Machinarium are due to its Flash-based interface. In order to run the game on all operating systems, Amanita Design, the developer, programmed the game in Flash. The menus take a few too many clicks to navigate and manipulate items. When I wanted to just drop an item, and go back to my pointer, so I could move, I’d hit escape and would just back out of full-screen mode. It wasn’t that big of a deal, but it was an annoyance. That’s really about the only problem I had with the game. It’s priced at $20, and will likely take you 8-10 hours to complete it. I don’t see a lot of replay value in Machinarium, but for that price, 10 hours of quality gameplay seems perfectly fair. Because the game’s in Flash, you can play it on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and you get access to all three for that $20. If you like adventure games, you owe it to yourself to check out Machinarium, and at the very least, play the demo.