Point and clicks might have seemed past their due-date when compared to immersive 3D games but here two dimensions becomes an artistic principle. Where 3D models can be easily modified, the stylistic choices call for over an hour of frame-by-frame animation and a patchwork of photographs scanned in and cut into textures to give the game a finely organic atmosphere. What you get is a gumbo blend of old and new animation techniques. Like his previous work with Samarost and Samarost II, designer Jakub Dvorský used Adobe Flash as a multimedia platform while combining bitmap character models and hand-drawn background art to help overcome the artistic limitations of Flash. The art is cuddly but with enough cracks and pointy metal edges to make it feel like it does more than simply cater to the internet’s infatuation with saccharine Wall-E bots. With a smoggy, coffee-stained steampunk flavour the game is like an H.R.
It’s a bit of a nebulous plotline but the focal point of the game is really the artwork. You’ve been accidently ousted from your robot city and are trying to work your way back in to save your girlfriend while stopping a gang of robot hoodlums from setting off a bomb. In it you’re playing as Josef, a little scruffy robot named after Czech painter and initial inventor of the actual term “robot” Josef Capek. Where games of the nineties were criticised for being technologically dead in the mud next to their immersive 3D counterparts, Machinarium takes basic production material like Flash and pushes it to its artistic and experimental limits.ĭeveloped over a period of three years by the tiny, independent Czech studio Amanita, this award-winning game is obviously a labour of love. However in Machinarium’s case we have a game that goes beyond the safe, soft nostalgic references, helping to prove that this renaissance can go further than polishing the bits of old gold from over a decade ago. Much of that has been steamheaded by the handfuls of new episodic releases coming out of Telltale Games and the like. So really the recent release of Machinarium has come right in the middle of a small-scale renaissance of old school adventure games.
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And with the industry capitalising again and again on much-loved series from the mid-nineties we’ve had the likes of Monkey Island and Sam and Max revived and wheeled out like some aging stars in a Nevada showroom for years now. In the last decade and a half we’ve had a real increase in the market worth of nostalgic gamers. Point and clicks just sort of got stuck in time somewhere in the nineties and then never really aged.
They’re the gaming world’s Spaghetti Bolognese lodged somewhere in the back of the freezer since ’93. Hell, it took until 1997’s Blade Runner before we saw developers begin to play with real-time 3D models. Between 1984’s King’s Quest and its 1990 re-release you had a nice little advancement in graphics but beyond that the genre hadn’t really seen that much significant progress for the rest of the early nineties. The genre was always a bit rubbish at improving on itself. To be fair even around its peak the point and click industry was beginning to seem technologically stuck. And just as the graphics started to lag further behind, the love for the humble 2D adventure game became a seven-year-itch relieved by more progressive likes of Doom and Quake.
By that point the genre began festering away behind flashy advancements in graphics systems that allowed for further generations of successful 3D titles. It was hit by a kind of grass-is-always-greener philosophy and where the FPS genre was green the point-and-clicks were like trying to find golf turf in Dune. After its real peak in the lighter half of the nineties the point and click genre felt almost instantly out of date.
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