Amanita Design is well known form its delightful Samorost games, which are free; with Machinarium, they've basically taken the aesthetic of those games, produced a much larger one (about six hours of gameplay), and are offering it for sale, along with a playable Flash demo that's an excellent little game in its own right.
Amanita is a Czech studio, and their games have the hallmarks of Czech animation: beautifully drawn, somewhat melancholy in terms of story and emotional feel, and wordless. The game itself is a conventional point-and-click graphic adventure, with an inventory and inventory combination (something the Samorost games didn't have). The puzzles are charming, if in some cases moderately obscure; one feature I'm not sure I like is that while the cursor changes over hotspots, which makes it easier to figure out what to do, it does so only when your character, a robot, is sufficiently close to the hotspot to interact with it, so you spend a fair bit of time wandering around each location simply to determine which bits are clickable.
One other nice feature; at any location, you can ask for "help." Rather than providing hints or a walkthrough, what this instead does is require you to play a rather easy little shmup minigame which, if you win, provides you a walkthrough for the current area, in comic-book form. Since playting the minigame takes a couple of minutes, this disincentivizes you from reaching for it the instant you encounter a problem, but does provide the solution should you feel you really need it.
Amanita seems to have put considerably more effort into Machinarium than into the Samorost games; not only is it much larger and longer-playing, but the level of detail in its painted scenery is intricate and impressive, and the puzzles are more complicated and imaginative than in the previous games.
Machinarium is beautiful, haunting, strangely evocative of its alien world, often frustrating (in a fruitful sense, as all good puzzle-based games are), and to my mind well worth its $20 price point. At a minimum, give the demo a go.
While the game is truly
While the game is truly beautiful, it has one big problem that will not be obvious from the demo - at the end you have to play a minigame where you have to shoot "viruses". And honest to god, it is the most horribly programmed game I have EVER laid eyes upon. It's not that it's horribly ugly (which it is), or horrible to control (your character walks towards your mousecursor and also shoots towards your mousecursor, however the levels do not scroll but pageflip), but that it is programmed SO badly that it is quite possible to get stuck between a wall and an enemy. Which leads to you not being able to move, the enemy not moving, both of you not being able to kill the other and the only way of escape to abort the game and try again. I had to play this atrocious thing three times until I got through it without being stuck.
Machinarium
What a beautiful design for a game. This really is a nice break from most of the other online games. Thank you for your description and complete details. I will be playing this one as often as I can.