For the latest bedtime Deck game decided to replay another childhood classic. If memory serves me right, Machinarium was gifted to me during one of the one of the teenage years, and was the game that really kickstarted my adoration for Amanita Design. I had a few surprisingly mixed feelings from the replay, but the main strength of this game overpowers any flaws.

Amanita as a studio simply excels at creating charming and creative worlds, while also making them feel somewhat wistful and lived in. In this game, they invite you inside a dystopian city that looks like it was made out of scrap metal, and is inhabited entirely by robots who look as worn down as their surroundings.

Once you assemble Josef, the little stretchy robot protagonist, the best part of the game is simply down to exploring Machinarium (the city). Much like with Samorost games, it's a fairly zoomed out kind of game, and Amanita used it to cram lots of details that help to build out the world and paint the bigger picture inside your mind.

I love that despite the immensely industrial theme of the city, it has such a hand-made, organic look to it. This is partially achieved through complete and utter lack of clean, straight lines, as well as general disregard for symmetry. There's a general chaos on display everywhere around you. Like the denizens of Machinarium were left to their own devices and used every little bit of land either to create more machinery, or carve out a little place for themselves.

Something that I only noticed on the second playthrough, is that the overall structure of your adventure also helps to flesh out this city, and subtly take you through the full gradient of what it has to offer.

When you just enter, you slip and fall down to the more industrial part of Machinarium, filled with factories and machines that potentially power this whole place. Not that any part of this whole place is clean, but it comes off as especially polluted, rusted, and decrepit. You hardly meet a soul in here before moving in.

Once you do get out, you get to the more populated layer that exposes the more diverse side of Machinarium's characters and architecture. There's a bar, an arcade club, even some sort of robotic church that seems to accommodate for multiple religions depending on the time of day, perhaps another indication of the robots making the most with what they have.

Finally, closer to the end, you start reaching some of the higher areas, and while parts of it are fairly decroded, you can tell that these places served a purpose beyond survival and satisfaction of basic needs. Like the little botanical garden with advanced machinery and documentation of various plant and animal life.

But, of course, none of this would hit as hard if you didn't also encounter all the different characters living here, and get peeks into little parts of their daily life. I love helping the robot lady find her robot dog, who is digging through trash in hopes to find some oil. And my favorite "quest" in the whole game is when you help street musicians to get their instruments in order, which angers the robot lady living in the building next to them, but also rewards you with a fantastic tune when they can finally play music.

Machinarium is at its best when you're doing stuff like this. Exploring the world, interacting with the people living in it, and generally immersing yourself within this fantastic adventure set to incredible tunes from "floex" who managed to perfectly capture the atmosphere of the place.

The only part I didn't really like as much on a replay, is the puzzles, surprisingly enough. I'm generally not opposed to them at all in adventure games. Hell, Puzzle Agent is among my favorites, but in Machinarium I found them to overstay the welcome and disrupt the otherwise great pacing.

One of the earliest examples of this is the five-in-a-row game that you need to do in order to help one of the musicians. I beat it three times (thanks to losing my save), but never felt like it was down to strategy or skill. The computer is so efficient at this game that you mostly have to hope that it eventually make a mistake that you can capitalize on. It probably won't take you hours or something crazy like that, but unless you get lucky, it can take up a chunk of time that doesn't really benefit the game in any way.

Most of my other pain points had to do with more traditional puzzles, like the weird take on sokoban in the arcade, and the light up one in the glasshouse. They both share a similar structure in that each stage gets progressively harder. It's my own skill issue and not knowing the strats that made these take longer, but it really did nothing but leave a sour impression. These puzzles don't really interact with the rest of the world in an interesting way, they don't make me feel like I'm discovering how this machinery works. It just left me thinking that they wanted to add some tough puzzles because this is a puzzle game.

The final section of the game feels especially egregious in this regard. They make you play through a little action maze where you need to trudge through the corridors and spam fire to kill something like 40 enemies. Followed by musical puzzle where you have to repeat a muffled sequence by pressing on keys that are arranged in a random order, instead of according to the tone they make. It just feels so out of place and ended up taking me a bit out of it.

However, the biggest surprise for this replay was that I found the main plot kind of lacking? It's obviously not really "the point" of this game, and more of an excuse to give the player some motivation and a reason to go through the locations, but they could've and have done better in the past.

When your worlds are so interesting, you only need the bare minimum to ignite the player's curiosity. Something vague and simple probably would've done a better job than this weird damsel in distress storyline. Pretty early on, you find out that your girlfriend is kidnapped, and the evil bandit robots are planning to blow up the tower where the mayor lives.

Both of these are fairly difficult things to care about. You don't even find out about the mayor, or the fact that you and Berta (your gf) worked for him, until the very end, and Josef's relationship with Berta is only told through several speech bubble animations, which you only see if you stand afk for a while.

By all means the game doesn't give you much of a reason to feel emotionally invested into what's happening, so when you finally reach ending it sort of feels... empty? Like ok, I guess that happened. The mayor is saved, and Josef leaves with Berta by boarding a Pepelats from Kin-Dza-Dza and flying away, somehwere. The end.

I saw some art while writing this, where it shows Josef and Berta living inside a little house, far away from the city. They got a big tree there, some grass, and a small garden. It's quite cute, and even as uninterested as I was in the whole damsel plot, I feel like the game really could've used something like this at the end, just one more beat.

Is this a dumb thing to complain about? I dunno, don't really care. After that final segment, after this whole trial of saving your girlfriend and the city, I expected something more sentimental and at least a little conclusive.

Vague endings are fine, but Machinarium is focused on the city, not on what's outside of it. According to the title screen and the game's opening, the only things you'll find outside are landfills and deserts. So now I'm watching this couple I meant to care about, as they escape from the city that they just saved, and set off towards nothing. Make it make sense.

Despite all that whinging, I do very much recommend playing this game. You can never go wrong with Amanita, and no flaws can offset the many memorable moments that this game offers.