Amanita design, a group of Czech video game designers, are the masterminds behind the point and click puzzle games Samorost 1, Samorost 2 and Machinarium. The landscapes are unusually eerily beautiful–in the Samorost games , many of the landscapes are actual photos of moss patches, mushrooms or logs blown up to look as though they are the entire landscape (left). The music, created by Floex (aka Tomas Dvorak), complements the landscapes perfectly.

The puzzles require thinking and a bit of patience. Each screen involves figuring out how to get to the next one by clicking on machines, insects, fishing poles, small animal–basically anything on the screen. Sometimes it involves keen observation, sometimes it involves clicking in non-intuitive places. It can get a bit frustrating when you can’t figure it out (at which point you can google the name of the game plus the word walkthrough for help, e.g. ‘samorost 2 walkthrough‘) but they’re good fun for a Sunday morning with coffee and breakfast or maybe at work when you’re trying to look deep in thought.

Of the three games, only Samorost 1 is completely free. You can play the first chapter of Samorost 2 for free but it then costs $5 for the full game. There’s a free demo for Machinarium, Amanita Design’s first full-length game, after which the full game costs a measly $20 which it’s easily worth. I would suggest starting with the demo for Machinarium. If you enjoy it, you can either buy it or try some of the other games. Despite it being free, I might leave Samorost for last (or at least once you’ve tried the free bits of the other two games). It’s a bit more challenging and I get the feeling that a lot of the things they learned designing that game went into making the other games better.

Here’s my favourite ambient music from Samorost 2: