“The player should feel that every character has its own story and place in that world, even if it’s not expressed in the game itself,” Dvorský continues.īut Machinarium and its world are, if nothing else, meticulously designed, its life and characterization are often tucked into small corners of the world. “There’s no deeper meaning or message hidden in the story, but we know much more about the Machinarium world, its history and about all the characters than what you can learn in the game. Like most artists, Machinarium designer and Amanita Design founder Jakub Dvorský hedges his bets when it comes to criticism of his work: “Of course, you can interpret any way you want,” he tells me. It turns Josef’s final act from one of charity or empathy to something more complex. This little discovery is perhaps best described as a plot twist, but it informs and reflects every other part of the game, from its setting to its puzzles to its genre, smoothing out Machinarium’s rough edges and giving its mechanics a context beyond point-and-click tropes. The elephant in the room is that Josef, too, may have been brought to the city as a slave at some point in Machinarium’s mercurial backstory. It also suggests that the Royal Robot owns the downtrodden robot from the foyer. The scene establishes a power dynamic between the Royal Robot and our mechanized hero: Josef is a servant, and we’re in the presence of what passes for aristocracy in a mechanical dystopia. They exiled Josef, forced his girlfriend into indentured servitude, strapped a bomb to the tower and damaged the Royal Robot badly enough to leave him in a vegetative state. A short scene informs us that Josef and his girlfriend were responsible for cleaning and maintaining the Royal Robot’s home until the Black Hat Gang stormed the palace. Josef climbs to the top of the tower, where he finds who is colloquially known as the Royal Robot. Machinarium effectively marries its setting to its puzzle design, but Josef’s interaction with the little gray robot places the game in a broader, darker context. In a way, the game is about restoring order, about creating verifiable, reproducible outputs from very specific inputs. As the name suggests, the world of Machinarium is populated exclusively by robots, their city a collection of pipes and cogs and levers and dials and cranks.Īs such, most of Machinarium’s puzzles involve fixing things: completing electrical circuits, repairing clogged drains, untangling wires. Machinarium emerged in 2009 as Amanita Design’s breakout point-and-click adventure game, noted for its minimalist story, lush, pencil-drawn art direction and moody, evocative atmosphere. Perhaps he is a slave, a victim of robot imperialism. This robot seems to be imprisoned in the tower. If Josef interacts with the robot on the shelf, the poor thing tells a piteous story: a group of soldiers – the same type of soldiers guarding the gates of the city – colonized his radish-shaped home planet and carted him to this tower in pieces. But this tower is relatively posh: red carpets, crystal chandeliers, big game animals stuffed and mounted on the walls, signifiers meant to remind us of stately Victorian gentlemen. He is, like most things in Machinarium, dingy and decrepit. In the foyer of the tower, at the foot of a grand staircase, a small, grey, destitute robot sits on a perch in the wall, his head bowed, his eyes closed. He uses a roll of toilet paper – why do robots need toilet paper? – to rappel down the tower and defuse the bomb before continuing on his way.
At the end of Machinarium, the mechanical protagonist Josef climbs a large tower to which the Black Hat Gang has strapped a bomb.
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