This post is from the now defunct website “A GameDev Plays…”, copied here for posterity
Hand drawn puzzler Machinarium is definitely pretty, but the challenges fail to engage.
A poor robot dumped in the trash has to return and save the big robot city. This is achieved by solving a series of puzzles using point & click gameplay. Machinarium is a gentle game, that can be played at any pace and provides both hints to the solution or, after a mini-game, a complete walkthrough. All the problems fit thematically with the story and robot city world. The art is notably different and interesting. However, after a couple of hours I got stuck, and upon utilising the walkthrough discovered the the rules of puzzle solving had changed. This is greatly annoying. I prefer to solve the brain teasers myself, but this seemed to require a jump in logic or to cheat. Perhaps this is standard for the genre (I am not particularly experienced with them), but it stopped me moving any further.
Machinarium is out on the Steam store for PC and Mac at US$9.99. It has been bundled.