The dashing Da Vincis of Amanita Design have announced Machinarium 2, a sequel to the 2009 puzzle adventure young master John Walker called “a sort of beauty that games are almost never graced with”. I haven’t played the original Machinarium, but I have played Amanita’s splendid living object platformer Creaks, and in general, I would quite like to go to bed with the entirety of their art team. So here’s me sternly ordering myself to finally play Machinarium while we wait for the follow-up, which doesn’t have a release date yet. But does have a trailer.
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The new game once again features two robots, Josef and Berta, who are making their way through a world “inspired by old master drawings and Renaissance landscape painting”, in the words of the press release. But this time, you’ll switch between them, using their different abilities to solve puzzles. There’s still no text in Machinarium 2, with robots communicating through speech bubble icons, symbols and gestures.
“After escaping the city of Machinarium, Josef and Berta crash-land in the barrens,” the devs explain. “Climbing down a cliff, they find a hidden valley home to two peculiar robot tribes: one living in the Elektrona monastery high on the rocks, the other in the city of Oilton below. Both are slowly running out of power.”
They’ve got OG Machinarium composer Tomáš Dvořák back to do the soundtrack. There’s also full gamepad support from the word go, but you can still fall back on ye olde point-and-click if you prefer.
Why are Amanita making a sequel, 17 years later? It seems to be a toss-up between ‘alas, the Reaper’s hand doth tighten on our shoulder’ and ‘the Reaper is also coming for the rest of youse’. “We’re not getting any younger, and the world seems to be ending, so if we were ever going to make Machinarium 2, now is the right time,” explains Amanita CEO and game designer Jakub Dvorský. “We’re also grateful to every player who waited patiently all these years. We couldn’t have done it without them.”
Read more on Steam. Whomst amongst you was alive and capable of playing videogames when Machinarium first graced shelves? If you’d rather get your eyeballs into something fresher, Amanita’s latest release is Phonopolis, a dystopian avant garde city game that borrows a bit from Karel Čapek and George Orwell.
