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We’re lucky to have folks like Amanita chugging along with their uplifting titles, providing some much-needed charm and painless puzzling to indulge in. It spawned two sequels, both paid products on Steam that expand the world and mechanics pioneered so finely here.
#SAMOROST 3 REVIEW FREE#
The mix of mossy wood and porous stone and corroded metal make each location look just familiar enough, but remixed in a way that piques the imagination as a fantasy painting would.įor a free game, Samorost displays a mastery of its quaint art style and pleasing game design. Samorost’s lively asteroids are combinations of vector-drawn creatures and blended photos of real objects, giving them an unearthly substance. The art style makes it a little difficult to pick up on some of the smaller clickables but that’s literally the only complaint I’ll level against the visuals.
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The design could be frustrating if it weren’t so charming, and without failure states or penalties you can indeed just click until you get it right. You’ll be growing strange plants and swatting space lizards to make roundabout paths and transportation for your gnome, in ways that are only apparent once you get them rolling. It’s definitely stumbling, because Samorost’s puzzles don’t much resemble ones you’d recognize. The whole game is designed to let you click around and marvel at the sights, eventually stumbling your way through the obstacles. You’re not limited in any way in where or what you can click, and there’s no way to mess up a puzzle by experimenting. It could be anything from pressing a button or wiggling a wire, to moving a mountain or feeding an alien critter. You don’t control your demure friend either, instead clicking on parts of each scene to set events in motion that will help him along. Your little gnome occasionally says things like “He’s in the way” to help you out with some of the puzzles, and there are a few numbers to parse here and there, but for the most part this adventure is purely visual. That’s about as far as I can flesh out the story, because like all of Amanita’s games there is no significant text or dialogue. Only when his home is out of harm’s way can he return to his simple life of tiny stargazing. He’ll also suss out the many devices that keep the place running, both natural and constructed.
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Along the way he’ll encounter the strange and unique creatures that call this invading asteroid home, enlisting the help of some to reach his goal. Taking off in his tin-can rocket, he sets about diverting the hurtling stone before both minuscule worlds are pulverized. A peek through his telescope on this one particular day reveals that another verdant bit of space debris is on a collision course with his home. On a lush, mossy asteroid drifting through space lives a tiny gnome.
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Samorost is the first of those, and in capturing what makes Amanita games so special it remains an important title for anyone to partake of.
#SAMOROST 3 REVIEW SERIES#
Before they took you on journeys through mechanical metropolises and arboreal architecture, though, they made a series of quaint little jaunts through space. Machinarium and Botanicula are two of the happiest, most entertaining point-and-click adventures to be found, achieving that distinction without use of text or dialogue to convey the hilarious events that unfold. I bring this up every time I talk about an Amanita game, but there really aren’t any other developers around that infuse so much pure, undiluted joy into their games.
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