Hopefully by now, you've played Amanita Design's marvelous point-and-click adventure/exploration/music-time story-thing Botanicula. But I'm entirely open to the idea that you have not—and so is Amanita, who have now made the first section of the game playable for free through their website.

You may recall that earlier this year I said Botanicula so charming that it stole Julia Roberts away from Pretty Woman-era Richard Gere. That about sums it up. You really should play this game: It's got a great sense of humor, beautiful art, and one of the best and most distinctive soundtracks of the year.

Don't take it from me! Head on over to Amanita's site and play the game for free. And bear in mind that there's much more to the full game than the bit in the demo; all sorts of hidden joys and fun digressions. You'll see. Go play.

Botanicula Demo [Main Page]

The bleeps, bloops, and grinds of chiptune music have evolved from a technical necessity to an aesthetic choice. Musicians like Jim Guthrie and Anamanaguchi have spent recent years repurposing vintage digital sounds to create beautiful, human-sounding work.

While the contemporary video game soundscape is a wonderland of lovely synthetic sounds, it's easy to forget that the human side of audio—human beings recorded with microphones—can feel vital, beautiful and timeless.

Anyone who played SimCity 2000 remembers the bizarre, charming music. I bet you also remember that "zzt" sound effect that played every time you planted a new power line. It was the weirdest sound effect, even at the time, because it's clearly just a dude saying "zzt" in to a microphone. "zzt." "zzt." "zzt." That hilarious monotone, until you forgot about it and it became part of the game's unique sound.

I asked SimCity creator Will Wright about that sound, and he told me that in fact, it's his voice.

"I remember that well," he told me in an email. "That was actually just a recording of me making the sound with my voice. I recall that it was intended to be temporary but later we tried some other sounds and everyone liked how funny the first one was, so I kept it in."

I love that story, at least in part because I've seen that very thing happen so many times—what was intended to be a temporary track winds up making it to the final version because it captured something special and unrepeatable. That one sound effect ties Wright to the game in a personal, almost physical way. Every time you lay down a power line, you hear Will.

"Zzt." "Zzt."

I admire and welcome that type of real, human sound in video games. The clapping of hands, the cheering of voices; the air moving around live instruments, the human's breath hitting a microphone pop-filter.

It seems fitting that Fez and Botanicula came out so close to one another. Rich Vreeland's Fez soundtrack is a lovely digital creation, a synthesis of synth tones that creates a warm, dream-like atmosphere.

The soundtrack to Amanita Design's wonderful Botanicula, while equally lovely, almost stands as a perfect inverse of Vreeland's Fez soundtrack. That's because the music and all of Botanicula's sound effects were created by real instruments and human voices. Two specific humans, actually.

The soundtrack was recorded by the Czech band DVA. In slavic languages, DVA means "Two," which reflects the band's personell: Bára Kratochvílová plays saxophone, clarinet, and is lead singer, while Jan Kratochvil plays guitar and controls loops. The soundtrack, which you can listen to here, doesn't really sound like any video game soundtrack before it. It's lovely. Listen to the embedded music below and ask yourself: Does this sound like the soundtrack to any video game I've ever played?

In addition to a good amount of vocal work, "We used one czech banjo (it sounds like banjo, looks like banjo, but the system and numbers of strings is the same as guitar), saxophone, guitar, clarinet, bass clarinet, melodica, lot of pots from the kitchen, toy piano, and one old a little bit out of tune piano" to record the game's soundtrack, Kratochvílová and Kratochvil told me in an email.

90% of the sound effects in the game were recorded by DVA themselves (a whole bunch are created entirely with their voices), and 9.9% are bird and nature sounds recorded up in the mountains near Prague where they work. (They didn't elaborate on what the remaining 0.1% of the sounds are.) The process sounded simple enough: Botanicula animator and designer Jaroslav Plachy would send them the animations from the game, and they'd record the audio over them and and send them back.

"Music in the game works like lego(s)," Bára and Jan wrote. "You have motherboard – for example in the 2nd level, pure sounds of nature. In some situations after a click, you start to play bigger "lego cube" - music, and after the next click you've started to build something like a "Lego sound tower."

That's not particularly different than the sound design of any other video game, but for that one crucial thing—most of these sounds are human voices layering on top of one another.

Amanita's Jakub Dvorsky echoed Jan and Bará's laid-back post-mortem. "There was no [explicit] decision to make the sound effects human-generated," he told me in an email, "and we didn't tell the musicians how they should create all the sounds and music. They had complete freedom and we were absolutely happy with what they created. Sometimes it's better to let things take its natural course."

As I speak with more and more video game sound designers, I keep noticing that the most interesting sound effects are the ones that they've concocted in the most personal ways. So many games use complex digital processes to build massive, cinematic, or retro-sounding game soundtracks.

Hearing DVA's work on Botanicula was a sharp, almost bracing breath of fresh air. I immediately thought of Will Wright's "Zzt," which remains one of SimCity's most iconic sound effects nearly 20 years after SimCity 2000 came out.

I hope to hear more game soundtracks embrace the human, living side of audio. The worlds that game designers create are limited only by imagination. So too are their soundtracks. Technology makes all sorts of fantastic sound design possible, but let's not forget that the human voice is capable of a great many wonders all on its own.

"Zzt."

"Zzt."

"Zzzzzzzzzt."

UEFA Euro 2012

Released: April 24
Critic: Frazzi (Metacritic).

• "Lets also ignore the fact that Metacritic user reviews are often avenues for trolling."

• "Be smarter than me and not waste your money on this absolutely cynical release from EA. "
Score: 3.

Critic: uk_friday (Metacritic).

• "EA clearly have committed suicide with this product and heads should roll."

• "Players disappear from your squad during the tournament and new players arrive ... Did they miss the plane? Did they just go home and sulk?"
Score: 1.

Prototype 2

Released: April 24
Critic: Prototype 2 (Metacritic).
• "As I learned from Mass Effect 3's review, the ending is everything, have you seen this game's ending? the ending was terrible!!!"

• "It all builds up to a Final Epic Battle of simple quick-time events"
Score: 1.

Botanicula

Released: April 20
Critic: eastrazor (Metacritic).

• "**** **** **** ! Boring"

• "**** for kids !"

• "I fought that it will be funn or even hard but this is game for not too smart kids."
Score: 0.

I think that Botanicula, the new game from Machinarium indies Amanita Design, is freakin' wonderful. I already wrote about why I like it, so read that if you're wondering about the game. Short verzh: If you have a heart and like lovely and funny things, you should play it.

Botanicula comes out today, and as part of a promotion, the Humble Bundle guys just let us know that they have created a special bundle just for the game. They also sent this goofy-ass video to promote it. Heh.

You can pay whatever price you want (!!), and if you do, you'll get Botanicula as well as Aminata's other two games, Machinarium and Samorost 2, both of which are great in their own right. You'll also get the soundtracks for all three games, which are all so good that they're pretty much worth the price of admission on their own.

If you pay more than the average price, you'll also get the (probably weird and delightful) Czech film Kooky, with art direction by Amanita's Jakub Dvorsky, as well as Windowsill, another point-and-click game from Vectorpark.

The kicker is that not only will you feel good about yourself for getting a bunch of great games for basically no money, but you can also pat yourself on the back for saving the planet—you'll have the option of donating a portion of your purchase price to the World Land Trust.

So what are you still sitting here for? Go do this thing. Play Botanicula!

Humble Bontanicula Debut [Humblebundle.com]

The Splendid Botanicula Overflows With Weapons-Grade Joyfulness

Joy is a terribly underrated commodity in video games. Most of the games I play inspire all kinds of feelings-stress, tension, exhilaration, frustration, even less-celebrated but still mentionable sensations like "comforting routine" and "empowering murder-fantasy."
There aren't all that many... More »

There aren't all that many games that make me feel really, truly joyful. Botanicula is one of them.

Argh, this game. This game! It's basically a government-created smartbomb designed to deliver a payload of exuberant joie de vivre from your hard drive straight to your brain. Except it wasn't made in some government lab—it was made by actual people who put their actual selves into it. The result is a gorgeous, hilarious, endlessly creative, warm-hearted thing.

Botanicula, which comes out tomorrow and costs $10, is basically a point-and-click adventure game for PC, Mac or Linux. You'll be able to get it from Steam, the Mac App store, from GOG.com or direct from the developers.

In it, players control a group of five little nature-dudes who live in harmony on a giant tree. I call them "five little nature-dudes" since each one is different and it's not entirely clear just what they are. There's the little one-winger dragonfly dude, the little branch dude, the little(ish) fungus dude, little mushroom dude, and little glowing nut-dude.

Uh oh! Some scary black spider-things that more or less represent "evil" arrive and start sucking the life out of the tree. The head little nature-dude, (glowing nut-dude if you're keeping track) sees a vision and decides to get his little dude-friends and set out to stop them.

This is all conveyed without words—just like Machinarum, there's no talking in Botanicula, just goofy sorta-speak from various characters as well as visual representations of text that play like little cartoons.

Botanicula comes to us from Amanita Design, an independent Czech game development studio headed up by Jakub Dvorsky and Tomas Dvorak. Amanita is probably best known for their fabulous and too-often-overlooked adventure/puzzle game Machinarium. Have you played Machinarium? Good god, what are you doing with your life, etc. Go play it, etc. It's on like every platform known to man.

Where Machinarium relied on ingenious (if at times very difficult) puzzles roadblocking your progress, Botanicula is much more exploration-focused and, perhaps, approachable. I've been moseying through it and while all of its puzzles require brainpower and creativity, they're nothing close to the difficulty of Machinarium. They are fantastically creative, though—the game found a splendid number of ways to use my Macbook's trackpad, backing up Tim's notion that the apple trackpad is the best game controller yet made.

Botanicula feels designed to draw you into its world and, once it's got you there, to delight the living shit out of you. The world is organic and real-feeling from the first moment of the game. The art and colors are vibrant, soft, and lush. The puzzles and sequences themselves are all unique and memorable—you'll never repeat a single action, and each each new area and challenge arrives at new creative heights.

This game has been realized down to its tiniest details—many of the best gags are easter eggs that have no effect on the game whatsoever. (Watch out for the penguins, is what I'm saying.) The character animations are so good, so funny, that they recall Pixar's best and most charismatic silent beings—say, the robots of Wall-E. Each character was animated with flawless comedic timing—a pause here, a beat there—that makes every tiny movement a pleasure to watch.

On top of all that, Botanicula is possessed of one of the most creative and endearing soundtracks I've heard in ages. And that's not just my well-documented bass clarinet bias talking.

All of the sound effects and music in the game were created by the band DVA, who for the bulk of their sound rely not on instruments or samples but on human voices. Almost every humming insect, growing flower, and plunking, crashing sound effect was created by a human voice. It gives the game a loopy, child-like energy that in this age of (don't-get-me-wrong-lovely) chiptunes and electronically augmented sample libraries. It feels damn near sweded.

Friendly John Walker at Rock, Paper Shotgun observed that the soundtrack recalls the (hip! good! worth checking out!) band The Books, and he's spot on—from the moment the game started, I felt as though I was playing a video game version of The Lemon of Pink.

Curses. I don't want to get sidetracked on the soundtrack just yet. For now, just… the soundtrack to Botanicula is pleasing, hilarious, winning, touching, and flat-out gorgeous. It sounds entirely unlike every single other thing ever.

To sum up, here are some 100% true facts about Botanicula:

• Botanicula is so adorable that it can only be controlled by picking up a puppy and moving its puppy paws on your computer's trackpad.
• Botanicula is so funny that after they played it, the cast of Parks & Recreation said, "Wow, that's pretty damned funny."
• Botanicula's music is so good that the people who wrote the theme song to Parks & Recreation said, "Wow, that is some damned good music."
• Botanicula's sound effects are so good that you won't even notice that a lot of them involve a dude making chewing sounds in close proximity to a microphone. You'll even think it sounds cute.
• Botanicula is only on PC but feels destined for the iPad, so you should play it so that in six months when all the iPad people are freaking out you can be all hipster about it.
• Botanicula is so charming that it stole Julia Roberts away from Pretty Woman-era Richard Gere. He was pretty pissed but reported that he "couldn't stay mad at [Botanicula]".
• Botanicula is so organic that it won't deign to be sold in Whole Foods. It is so organic it lets out a quiet-but-not-that-quiet snicker every time someone brings up The Omnivore's Dilemma at a dinner party.
• Botanicula is so clever that it snuck up behind the raptor that snuck up on Muldoon in Jurassic Park. "Clever game," said the raptor.
• Botanicula is so damned good that it probably won't even wind up on Metacritic.

And so okay, yes, it won't be to everyone's taste. It's not exactly that difficult and there's not as much "game" to it as there is to many other games.

Vampires and Republicans probably won't like it. It'll probably go over the heads of most babies, and Vulcans won't see the appeal. Ditto serial killers and dead-but-actually-secretly-comatose soap-opera characters and people who paid to see Stan Helsing in theaters.

But whatever, I'm not talking to those people. I'm talking to you.

Botanicula is so good. You should play it.

Man, I want to play Botanicula. Amanita Design won me over forever with their splendid adventure game Machinarium, and I've been looking forward to its follow-up Botanicula ever since I first heard about it.

Today, Amanita announced that Botanicula will be released for Windows, Mac and Linux on April 19th. No word on an iOS release.

Take a look at this trailer and you'll see what I'm talking about. Can't wait for this one.