Unlike other point-and-clickers, where you can mouse over everything on-screen to see what can be interacted with, Machinarium only lets you tinker with things that are within reach. Working out where to start unravelling the sequence of cause and effect becomes more of a problem, and the game's strict limits on what you can investigate make progress even harder. Having snuck past the gates, and been unceremoniously incarcerated by the bullying robot bad guys, escape leads you into the city proper where puzzles begin to stretch across multiple screens, piling on top of one another like waffles.

Things soon open out though, and in doing so some of the game's oblique nature begins to act against it. Puzzles are restricted to just one screen, calling to mind the familiar truncated explore-and-click aesthetic of old, and it doesn't take long to work out the sequence of actions needed to shunt your robot pal a little closer to his goal. To begin with, the influence of Samorost - the earlier Flash game by creator Jakub Dvorsky - is hard to miss. It's a streamlined procession of smaller brain-teasing chunks which lead seamlessly into one another while keeping their mysteries neatly separated. Once a puzzle is overcome, items are automatically discarded, so there's none of the inventory bloat that other adventure games suffer from. Inventory puzzles are the game's main currency, but it has a refreshing disposable take on this old genre standard. He must find his way back home, rescue his girlfriend and prevent a gang of robot hoodlums from setting off a bomb. It's the tale of an adorable little robot, cast out from a mechanical city by accident. As amusing as Telltale's Sam & Max games have been, a few hours in Machinarium's arcane steampunk world makes you realise just how far the genre has wandered from its traditionally ruthless roots. The old-fashioned sort, where one screen can keep you stumped all weekend, where having a notepad to hand is a good idea and where every door and hatchway is guarded by some fiendish puzzle. Machinarium is a point-and-click adventure.