Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

With Samorost 3 out last month, hopefully interest in creators Amanita Design is high. Perhaps you missed their utterly lovely Botanicula [official site]?

… [visit site to read more]

From the team most famous for Machinarium, Aminita Design, comes the third game in the Samorost series. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of the first two – they were both tiny Flash games. Samorost 3 [official site] is a full-length, full-screen adventure that requires no prior knowledge. How does the adventure/puzzle game hold up at this scale? Here’s wot I think:>

… [visit site to read more]

Just as night follows day, just as dog follows rabbit, just as Shia LeBeouf follows Daniel Clowes from a safe distance, a nomination for the latest game from Amanita will, it seems, always follow the announcement of another Independent Games Festival. This year, the makers of Botanicula and Machinarium are taking their charmingly odd, experimental puzzle-adventure Samorost3 to the show, where it’s nominated for Excellence In Visual Art and Excellence in Audio. This is their fourth game to bag a nomination – will it join its three predecessors in winning a prize?

We shall see. In the meantime, let’s have a chat with Amanita’s lead Jakub Dvorsk about how Samorost 3 is and isn’t like its much-loved forerunners, the role sound plays in their games, and their status as veterans of the much-changed indie landscape.>

… [visit site to read more]

2015! That’s an insane release date for a videogame! There won’t even be PCs by then. We’ll all have Google Glass injected into our eyeballs and iPhones surgically implanted up our bums and Microsoft Surfaces built into our toilet seats. That’s definitely the future. Everyone will want closed, locked, tyrannical software ecosytems by then. Why, PC gaming has died 42 times this year alone, so God only knows how bad it’ll be in 18 months’ time.

Hopefully Machinarium and Botanicula developer Amanita Design will be able to port their long-awaited second sequel to lovely, gently psychedelic pointer-clicker Samorost to Smartwatches and curved televisions BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE. Meantime, I’m going to watch Samorost 3′s first-ever trailer just before I take my PC to the dump. (more…)