izigame.me

Played this yeeears ago and on a whim for this New Years Eve did a play-through again like a decade later. Probably one of my favourite point and clicks! There is a great balance of exploration and examining your environment against playing structured puzzles and mini games so it never really gets boring or samey. I beat it today in 7 hours too so it doesn't overstay its welcome or anything, which I think this genre can quickly do.
Probably my favourite thing about the game is it's vibe/atmosphere. Play this alone with headphones on and minimal distractions and you'll get absorbed in this bizarre landscape that is kind of creepy, kind of sad and often very cute. It's super captivating to me. A rusting city populated by robots that act oddly like people, and a charming little plot of us getting back to our girlfriend. It can be slap-sticky and often playful too, which really helps to make the rundown and broken world pop. Oh and the music, which makes up most of the atmosphere, is out of this world good. It incorporates all these haunting ethereal sounds that match the techy-robotic-engineering theme of the game. Like static white noise and record skips, dial tones, digital beeps and boops. When I first played this game I'd never heard anything like it, it's like it's own genre. And suddenly a piano will come in and it's gorgeous.
I also like how playful this game is with the tropes of the genre. We all know how stupid and overly "lateral" a lot of point and clicks can get. Puzzles so inscrutable and bizarre that you could never guess them without spamming clicks everywhere and just seeing what happens. Machinarium does this too but in a very obviously referential and lighthearted way, and it builds over the course of the game. Probably the best example I can give you is later in the adventure, where they are being extremely cheeky and on the nose. You'll see a giant padlock you need to open, and find a hidden key nearby. But what's this? The key doesn't open the giant padlock. It instead opens a small cubby hole with a can of ice spray so that we can instead freeze the lock and smash it with a hammer. Totally unnecessary trolling done for the fun of it and it's delightful.
Despite what I've just said there, everything in the game is very fair, there is a good hint system in place for if you get stuck. It's mostly full of sincere puzzles that make total sense and you feel smart for clearing them. My favourite puzzle is probably a bay full of crazy twisted pipes and you have to figure out where to place some wrenches to stop the water flow by tracing their routes with your finger. It's a simple idea, no harder than one of those crayon games you'd get when sitting down with a kids meal at a restaurant as a child, but with the ante upped. The idea of that puzzle is quite representative of most of the game, it's a love letter to whacky maintenance engineering.
No side achievements or anything, good for a few hours and then you put it down again. Beyond buying this for myself, I'd say it's also a good gift for any younger people (or otherwise) who never really tried a point and click adventure and want to know what it's all about. Really good entry point to the genre!