A very old – or very tired – follower of the adventure genre would probably think that he/she has seen them all by the time of this game, which also happened to be around the time when the adventure genre starts to lose its influence in anywhere in the world but Europe. The next adventure game might try to include some puzzles that try to be clever but might end up mind-boggling, or puzzles that are more logical but are bland and all-too-familiar.
Amanita Design, a Czech game-developing company, seeks to throw many adventure game conventions right out the window, by focusing on charm, the appeal of the bizarre and accessibility. It is a risk, but to those jaded veterans of adventure games, it would be a risk well worth it.
It has to be mentioned here first that Amanita Design does not use terribly sophisticated development tools, which invariably leads to game software that needs to be packaged into a deployable and then placed into a user's computer through the usual busywork of installation, registration and such. Instead, they use Flash.
Therefore, the first of their games, Samorost, would appear to be little more than something that someone would have playing on their web browser when they are bored. However, if the user had hoped that Samorost would entertain and dispel any boredom, it very likely will.
(It also has to be mentioned here that Samorost is a cluster of free consecutive Flash apps on Amanita Design's website.)
From the first screen alone, Samorost would give the impression that it has thrown logic right out of the window. The user is introduced to the titular character (which is not named in-game but has since been labelled by his creators as the namesake protagonist), which is a pajama-clad space gnome living blissfully in apparently air-filled outer space on an asteroid.
Yet, the ludicrousness does not end there. Upon closer inspection, said asteroid would look like a typical asteroid, but has peculiar structures that are definitely not expected to be on an asteroid, but even these seem to blend quite well into it. There is even moss on said asteroid, which also looks like it is made of dead-grey wood and not space rock. The user may well be left wondering whether he/she is looking at a surreal piece of contemporary art (which it is).
The game designers appear to realize this, and starts the game with an arrow indicator over an object to catch the player's attention with and as a way to remind the player that he/she is playing a game. Hovering the mouse cursor over said indicator will change its appearance, which would inform most players that they are supposed to interact with the game through mouse-clicks, and they will be doing so all the time when they are not watching the consequences of their clicks.
Speaking of consequences of clicks, the first click will set the premise for the game. Samorost's home is in peril, and he sets off to prevent a disaster that would not be described here because this would be a spoiler and it would be too bizarre to put into words.
The bizarreness do not end there. In fact, it gets even more eye-raising, such as something that resembles a tobacco field being worked on by farmers that utter "weh" when clicked on, with a cameo of someone who may or may not be the lead designer at the foreground smoking what is suggested to be hookah.
In any screen after the first one, the player is not given any indicator at all. However, there would be plenty of objects and characters on screen that would attract the player's attention, and very likely his/her mouse cursor.
Clicking on some more things would move things forward. After the first few clicks, the player may soon come to the realization that he/she does not take on the role of Samorost, but rather some disembodied guardian angel (for lack of a better phrase to describe the player's actual role) that helps the rather lazy Samorost get from one screen to the next. The player may also probably realize that he/she can solve most puzzles by just clicking on things with catchy visuals, upon being stumped on what to do next.
For example, after some clicking in a particular scene, a group of lizard-like creatures would appear to move across a region of the screen from one spot to another and disappear, and then repeat the process at least until the player clicks on all of them and have them drop off the screen. Some other weird things would happen, and after some more clicking (usually on new things that appear on-screen), Samorost would be whisked off somewhere. (Some deductive thinking would suggest to the player that the lizards are preventing a denizen of another asteroid from having its meal in peace and ditching its remains out so as to attract a flying creature that would give Samorost a ride, but this series of events would only be clear in hindsight.)
However, the first puzzle alone would inform the player that while the game is rather bizarre, some puzzles require a little logical association on the part of the player, but no reasoning would be needed (and it is not recommended either, for the sake of the player's sanctity of mind). For example, Samorost needs to ski down a slope, but the direction that he would take apparently depends on a signboard above him; he could have exercised some volition, but apparently this puzzle had been introduced to stretch out the game a bit.
Yet, although this stretching may seem frivolous, it does contribute to the bizarre charm of the game. Returning to the example of Samorost skiing down a slope, if he is sent down the wrong direction, he makes a different animation; if he goes down another wrong direction, he makes another set of different animations. These do repeat until the player makes the right choice of course, but it would not take much for the player to move on to the next screen.
Other puzzles require some timed clicking, such as one where the player has to click on something to get Samorost past a creature that is blocking his progress while it is distracted by something else.
There are plenty other things that can be clicked on to enact results that would be considered red herrings by adventure game veterans, but these are usually of some worthwhile amusement in return for doing things that would not exactly move the game forward.
The game's visual designs are mainly composed of sprites occurring on or moving across relatively more sophisticated backdrops. The relative simplicity of the sprites may seem off-putting; they tend to be little more than simply drawn and coloured doodles, albeit with animations and some parts of their sprites replaced with a high-detail but static crop-out of some image or picture. The sprite for Samorost himself looks like it is made of homogeneously white shapes but with only a face to denote that he is a humanoid.
However, this visual contrast does inform the player which objects can be interacted with the cursor. Moreover, they do have some entertaining animations to show, such as an otherwise simply-drawn ant-eater inhaling and spitting out Samorost if the player has yet to remove it from the path that Samorost has to take.
The description of the sprites above does not suggest that the backdrops are just props, though most of them are. The backdrops appear to be pieces of art that likely have been made using certain software products from Adobe Systems; the aforementioned greywood-asteroid is a good example. There are more, such as a valve and half a cap of a mushroom being blended into a tree-trunk so that the result resembles a face. The valve is not just for show; it can be cranked to rotate the tree-face (as ludicrous as that sounds) to solve a puzzle.
However, some of the interactive portions of these props, and some sprites, can be rather small. For example, there are more than a few tiny buttons that the player would have to click on, such as the button that opens the door of an elevator that would be summoned after finishing the bizarre but amusing puzzle involving the aforementioned tree-face.
Every screen is also preceded with the loading of another Flash app, which apparently can only be loaded if the Flash app for the previous screen was completed while the Web browser was still within Amanita Design's URL. This ultimately means that Samorost can only be experienced online, which can be an annoyance for people who would rather have a fully packaged software of Samorost on their local computers (though this may mean that the player has to deal with the hassle of installation).
Most of the sound designs appear to be comprised of Tomáš Dvořák's soundtracks for the game. Most of these are short tunes, designed such that they can be looped over and over without any obvious discontinuity. They are usually serene, pleasant or slightly moody tunes, which do fit rather well with the seemingly laid-back themes of the game (and despite the overarching plot of Samorost's home being imminently threatened).
There is voice-acting, though this is mainly for Samorost himself and it is mostly composed of short, unremarkable lines or odd utterances like "weh" as uttered by the aforementioned farmers. The sound effects may have been derived from existing sources or even synthesized using a human's mouth, but they are otherwise still thematically appropriate for whichever on-screen occurrences that they are associated with.
In summary, Samorost is definitely far from what can be considered a typical adventure game. It offers a surreal and bizarre experience that may be off-putting to those who like rationale and believability in adventure games, and its puzzles are better solved by curiosity instead of logic and reasoning; in other words, it is not for everyone, but for those looking for a title in the point-and-click subgenre of adventure games that is very different from the rest, Samorost can offer a very refreshing and amusing experience.