Point and click adventures have enjoyed a massive resurgence recently with iPhone iterations of Beneath a Steel Sky and Monkey Island currently selling like hotcakes on iTunes, as well as a string of superb newcomers such as Zombie Cow's hilarious indie project Ben There, Dan That! True to the staples of the genre, any good point and click developer worth its salt will deliver a game world rich in history, interesting characters, smatterings of humour and a novel's worth of narrative. But what happens when you take away the latter and present the same experience without anyone uttering a single word? Machinarium may deliver a point and click title every bit as slick and enjoyable as its peers, but it breaks one of the key conventions of the genre by being entirely mute, save for the atmospheric soundtrack and odd sound effect. The result is every bit as emotive and haunting as any text or dialogue-heavy game available today.

Created over three years by independent studio Amanita Design, the painstaking hand-drawn visuals have a distinct Tim Burton quality, also appearing similar to David Hellman's stunning artwork for 2008 cult hit Braid. The brief intro sequence depicts an eerily silent and barren land, save for the looming robot metropolis on the horizon, rusted and crumbling beyond whatever prime it once had. It's a bleak image, made all the more unsettling due to the minimal soundtrack, begging you to question what happened to all the humans who perhaps once lived here. Suddenly, there is a break in the stillness as a garbage ship flies across the sky to a nearby dump, tipping out a heap of scrap metal including the body parts of Machinarium's nameless robot hero. While the little chap never utters a word, he's instantly likeable with two eyes that sort of look in different directions, a habit of being incredibly clumsy and a penchant for eating inventory items.

The story that follows is incredibly heartfelt, as the courageous robot overcomes hurdle after hurdle to reach the heart of the city, foil a robo-terrorist bomb plot and get the girl. Your first task is to help the disassembled robot get back to one piece, by bartering with a metallic insect to get his leg back and constructing a magnet grappling hook to fish his detached arm out of a pond. While these initial tasks are relatively simple, many of the puzzles in Machinarium do fall into the common trap of having ludicrous solutions, hindered further by hiding invaluable objects out of plain sight. It is often much easier to walk around each screen, clicking every inch of the environment to uncover useable items or points of interest, rather than toil over pre-planning each solution in the first instance. In many cases, common logic simply doesn't apply, unfortunately diluting the sense of strategy and problem solving.

Where similar titles let you click on every potentially usable item on screen at any one time, here you must get the robot in range before points of interest become selectable. It makes sense that, physically, grabbing an item from the opposite side of an area would be impossible, but it does make the game a lot harder at some points. Also frustrating is the inclusion of items that must be clicked several times before it reveals its true purpose, meaning you can potentially hammer your mouse over an object a few times then give up, assume the item is worthless and, by doing so, miss a valuable piece of the puzzle. However, these are relatively minor niggles when stacked up against the many areas where the game excels.

While you will come across a slew of usable items along the way, inventory clutter is thankfully kept to a minimum even when puzzles branch out across several screens. This allows the game to zing along at a pleasing pace, moving away from laborious, multi-faceted puzzles found in some genre counterparts. Moving away from a reliance on inventory items, height is an interesting concept thrown into the mix to keep puzzles taxing. You can stretch the robot's body to make him short or tall, letting him scuttle under small spaces or grab out of reach items. One notable screen sees the robot squeezing out of a dank prison cell and escaping through a sewage pipe, only to resurface underneath a table next to a gun-toting robot that will shoot you on sight. Knowing when to poke your head out of the manhole to grab useful items and when to duck down is the key to success here, adding a sense of urgency and tension to a puzzle that could have happily remained slow and laboured.

Of course, the addition of height-based puzzles requires you to think even further outside of the box, but again falls into a trial and error process of clicking on every possible point of interest at every possible height. It's a shame that some essential items are poorly sign-posted in this manner, such as painfully small switches that can be hidden in plain sight for ages until you happen to hover your pointer over it by sheer luck, but again these brick wall moments are few and far between. The addition of puzzles that don't require items to solve is a neat concept, such as re-wiring circuit boards and working out the correct position of switches, adding another layer of thought to the process.

Juggling so many puzzling elements at once is not a radical departure for the genre, but it can test your patience and thought process to the utter limit in some instances. So if you really do get stuck, a helpful hint button in the top right of the screen can be used once per screen to give you a brief visual clue to help you on your way. Rather than serve as a cop-out, this single clue only usually points you in the right direction instead of solving the puzzle for you. If you are absolutely, hopelessly stuck, the entire walkthrough guide can also be accessed from the menu, but at a price. To unlock the guide book you must complete an infuriatingly difficult mini-game in the style of arcade classic Scramble, where you must guide a floating key through a cavern riddled with jumping spiders. The game is nigh-on impossible in an attempt to dissuade you from using the guide at all and, to be fair if you are willing to toil over this mini-game for ages then you might as well just get on with the puzzle instead.

Perhaps the biggest draw of Machinarium is its astounding aesthetic quality, recognised recently at the 12th annual Independent Games Festival where it scooped the Excellence in Visual Art award. The broken and decaying robot city is a wonderful backdrop for the robot's quest, complimented by Thomas Dvorak's unsettling and beautiful soundtrack that together make for an engaging experience. While the lack of dialogue is incredibly powerful, plot devices are delivered through a series of animated thought bubbles that are just as touching and emotive as the core story. An incredibly powerful moment sees the robot thrown into a dank jail cell surrounded by darkness. The poorly-lit cramped room is the only thing visible on screen, really hitting home the sense of isolation and hopelessness of the robot's predicament. It's a touching moment helped along by the minimal bass soundtrack, breaking every so often with chilling, indecipherable robotic chatter.

Machinarium is a solid and thoroughly enjoyable point and click adventure and while it's not without fault, these are passing annoyances rather than sticking points that will sour the experience. This is quite clearly a labour of love for the seven-strong Czech studio, made evident throughout every painstakingly intricate screen and touching flashback from the plucky and instantly loveable lead. There is a real sense of achievement here each time you crack a puzzle, comparable to figuring out a solution in Braid or Portal, making the slog more than worth it. The only real issue is the poor signposting which might result in some players gazing blankly at the screen, concocting ludicrous solutions when really the answer was simple and staring them in the face the whole time, or hidden under another item. But to overlook the game based on such trivial setbacks is to miss out on one of the most breathtaking point and click games available today.

Reviewed by Dave Cook for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).