Machinarium is set in a wonderful mechanical city of robots. There's no spoken dialogue, but none is needed as you help your robot save the day. The imaginative setting offers a reflection on our world and foibles. The game is worth playing for the scenes you see alone.

The gameplay is mainly traditional inventory based Adventure gameplay, but has two arcade sequences. "Machinarium" is implemented in Flash, and the user interface is at times a bit clunky. There are inbuilt hints, and also a help system - which oddly has to be accessed by beating an arcade game so I found it unusable. The puzzles hark back to the golden age of Adventure games, and are nicely nontrivial.

The robot has to be within reach of a hotspot before the cursor will indicate it is a hotspot. Particularly when holding inventory items it can be unclear that the game is indicating an interaction is possible. The robot only has a few places in each scene he will stand in.