Machinarium: its lineage, descendants, and standing in Japan
01What this origin is
Machinarium, developed and published by Amanita Design and released in 2009, proved that a point-and-click adventure could tell a complete story without a single written word. Its small robot never speaks, nobody in the rusting city speaks, and everything the player needs, motive and memory and joke and instruction alike, arrives as drawn images inside thought bubbles. The achievement was not the restraint but the substitution: it demonstrated that pictures could carry the informational load that dialogue normally carries, and that doing so made the result more legible rather than less. It is the origin of the lineage of wordless adventure games, and of the design insight that removing language does not remove meaning but relocates it into movement, framing and drawing, where players turn out to be perfectly capable of reading it.
02Sources
03Buried gems that carry this root
Dear Flower Buried gem
A hand-drawn, monochrome puzzle adventure in which you move a character through a world and solve what is in front of you, and the store page states the decision that shapes everything else in one line: there is no text and no dialogue in Dear Flower. None. The developer explains why in the next breath, and it is a designer's reason rather than a shortcut: without words the player has more room to imagine, and the feeling that comes out of that is one only a game can produce. Everything is hand-drawn, characters and backgrounds and cutscenes alike, and the store describes the cutscenes as made one frame at a time with feeling put into each. You play three characters, and the point of that is not variety but perspective: the same events seen from three positions, and watching how each one's view of it changes. There is a distinct soundtrack doing the work that dialogue usually does. Made by Popiicorn Game, whose Steam presence is exactly this game and its demo, with a personal Gmail as the contact. Priced at ¥1,200, it is at 94 percent across 18 reviews (17 positive, 1 negative per Steam's own review API), a paid title, not free, fully launched and not in Early Access, with no AI-generated-content disclosure and Steam's content descriptors completely empty. Now the number that made this worth writing up. Steam lists this game as supporting more than a hundred languages, from Japanese and English through to Cherokee, Quechua, Wolof and Luxembourgish, which sounds absurd until you remember there is nothing in it to translate. A game with no words is, technically, already in every language. And of its 18 reviews, 13 are in Japanese and 4 are in English.