Samorost 3

Samorost 3 is a point-and-click adventure game about finding magical flutes on fantastical worlds. You journey across surreally twisted celestial bodies, collecting items and solving puzzles in order to return the flutes to their rightful owners. Samorost 3 is one of the flagship titles of Amanita Design, and it features the studio’s signature highly-textured environmental art.

You play as a curious gnome who has been living on a small, mossy asteroid. One day, a flute falls from space and lands in front of your doorstep. Determined to find the flute’s owner (and what lead to them losing the instrument), you begin assembling a spaceship out of scraps and traveling from asteroid to asteroid, eventually facing down an unexpected danger. There’s no text anywhere in the game, including the menus; elements of a backstory are recounted by an in-game graphic novel, and characters only communicate through pictorial speech bubbles.

The gameplay will be familiar to fans of traditional point-and-click adventures: in order to make progress, you’ll need to explore a number of screens, collect items, and interact with non-playable characters. The flute provides an unusual additional mechanic, as it can be used to listen to specific objects in the environment and then play back their sounds to trigger events. Puzzles are modest in difficulty and mostly self-contained, making this a more accessible entry point to Amanita’s catalog than other entries such as Machinarium.

Samorost 3 is the first full-resolution downloadable game in the series, following the popularity of Samorost 1 and 2. It is a loose continuation which does not require playing the previous episodes. The animations were built using Flash technology; they feature a flat-color protagonist interacting with incredibly detailed, photorealistic backgrounds whose surreal shapes evoke fungus, dead vegetation, and rusted machinery. This striking blend of digital paintings and textured photographs is a hallmark of Amanita Design, who took inspiration from the strange and sometimes disturbing visuals of classic Czech animation. The studio also created a rich soundscape of organic, often musical foley sounds, which is fitting for a game about musical instruments.

This description was written by Gwen C. Katz and edited by Oriane Tury.