Machinika: Museum

Machinika: Museum is a fun little puzzle game where you work as a museum worker of some sort that studies and repairs artifacts. Only this is the future, and the museum is full of alien artifacts. One late night, you suddenly receive a huge shipment to go through, so it’s time to get to work.

Find it on Steam.

Machinika: Museum is a first person game, though you don’t have free movement. You can click around to look at different angles, but the game will place you. This means you can focus on the object in front of you and knowing you won’t miss anything from the wrong angle because the game won’t let you go places you don’t need to.

From then, you must figure out what each artifact you’re given does. They’re deactivated and broken apart, so you need to piece them together and then try to turn them on. You can’t understand the alien way of doing things, do you have to just try things out until something clicks. The game is all about figuring out just what these strange devices do.

It’s not quite so random. The devices do help lead the way on what to do. There are a variety of mini-puzzles to solve in order to fully repair and activate each device. Just have a keen eye, some logical thinking, and persistence, and you can figure out the strangest of alien artifacts.

Though there is a mini puzzle before each alien artifact in which you need to unbox them. The people shipping you these things decide the best security is to make the boxes hard to open. It’s also fun and interesting, though.

The game isn’t too long. There are 9 chapters in all. How long the game takes, though, primarily depends on your puzzle-solving capabilities. The various devices are different and intriguing. You go through many kinds of puzzles, and sometimes, you need to use different tools to help such as a tiny camera to see inside the devices.

I do question the security of these alien artifact researchers. They’re just sending these to some backroom of a museum with little security. You are the only one there, so no one is keeping an eye an anything going on. And you’re supposed to randomly activate all these devices to figure out what they do. Yep, just one guy in the workshop playing around with potentially dangerous alien technology. Surely nothing will go wrong.

Machinika: Museum is a fun puzzle game where you need to put together and activate alien artifacts. And you must do so all with minimal instructions. It’s mostly you and your thoughts, though your thoughts in game does provide some hints.

A sequel is coming out, and I hope that will be another fun puzzling time.

Find it on Steam.