Gorgeous robot adventure Machinarium modernized with new engine and more

Czech studio Amanita Design has updated Machinarium, one of the most beloved and acclaimed graphic adventure games of the past decade, refreshing it with major new features like a new engine and gamepad support.

“We’ve reprogrammed Machinarium from the scratch,” said Amanita in its Steam Community announcement of the game’s Definitive Version yesterday. The original game ran in Flash, which didn’t allow it to scale well across screen sizes. Amanita has replaced it with a custom DirectX-based engine that works well on modern high-resolution displays, even in fullscreen view.

Other additions include gamepad compatibility, which allows for playing Machinarium in Steam Big Picture mode. The game explicitly works with the Xbox 360 and Xbox One controllers, and offers “experimental support” for others. There are also 12 new Steam achievements, Steam Cloud saves, Steam leaderboard functionality and localization into 14 different languages.

There’s one major drawback to the Definitive Version. Because it is a complete reprogramming of Machinarium, it is not compatible with save files from the original version of the game — in fact, it will delete them all. Amanita gave advance notice of this issue, and noted that the Definitive Version includes a feature that’s meant to soften the blow: Lost Save, which lets players jump straight into six different points throughout the adventure so they won’t have to replay the entire game.

Machinarium’s Definitive Version is now available as a free update on Steam, but only on Windows PC. The game’s Mac version is sold on Steam as well; the update is coming soon on that platform. Machinarium is also available on a variety of other platforms and digital storefronts, and Amanita said it “will soon start updating the game on other outlets.” The Linux version, however, is “gonna take us a bit more time.”

Amanita originally released Machinarium in October 2009 on Linux, Mac and Windows. The studio announced in July 2016 that lifetime sales had topped 4 million copies. The game is currently discounted by 75 percent to just $2.49 in this year’s Steam Summer Sale, which ends July 5.