Machinarium 2: Jailbreak!

Aha! I have managed to figure some stuff out! But not without some serious difficulty at first.

The furnace room, an early puzzle, truly stumped me. Turns out you can mess up your game pretty easily (although I forgot that I could have gone back to a save game). You have to figure out how a conveyor belt works. It has three levers that control it, but you can't bulldog your way through it. Each of the levers has an up, a down, but also a halfway point. That gives far too many positions to just bulldog your way through, and you have to figure out what to do with it before you really know how you're going to use it. I do not think it's a fair puzzle.

(forgot to take a screenshot, so I grabbed this from a YouTube WT)

I did well by myself in that scene until I got to that part of the puzzle. Looked it up. OK, that told me the purpose, so I was able to figure out some stuff with that knowledge. But the second part of the puzzle is to tinker with some wires. There are four. You have to just pick the right one. I didn't. There is a way to fix it, but only if you pick the correct wires to begin with. So the fix didn't work either.

I went back to the start and replayed until I got there, and then followed the WT, which got me out of the jam. Shouldn't have had to do that. (Well, I should have reloaded my saved game).

I'm doing far better now! We wind up in a jail cell. There are only so many things you can do, so I was able to figure it out. Got through the whole scene on my own! Felt great!

The jail. You can do it!

Now I'm in the next scene. At first I was completely stumped, because there just didn't seem to be anything to interact with. I'm trying to get by a guard without him seeing me. I've figured out the first part—I have distracted him. Now I clearly have only a certain amount of time to do the next action. I can see where it is but nothing works. Ergo, there's something else I have to find. But at least I know what to do now.

Don't let the guard see you!

Update: Ah ha! A little more poking around and I figured it out! I first wound up in the jail cell corridor and set a timer there. I don't know what it controlled, but it must have worked because I have truly escaped to the outside!

Set the timer on the left

And I'm out!!

So this indeed is turning out to be a fun game! It's marvelously imaginative, and playable anywhere on earth because there is no language. The characters "think" in pictures.

So far, except for the unfair furnace puzzle, this is really great stuff! Average playing time for this game seems to vary from about 5 to 10 hours. So it isn't a 40-hour marathon like some of the classic adventures, but it certainly packs a lot of fun into the time! I'm so relieved that I seems to be able to figure it out now, although no doubt I will face some daunting puzzles again soon. So! Onward!

Next entry.