Gnome begins his journey by working out a new way to get off his home land (the red rocket was destroyed in Samorost 2, of course), which involves a perplexing series of puzzles gathering various items, then building a ship out of an enormous inflatable mushroom thing, and various bits and bobs stripped from the surroundings. That’s my interpretation of the wordless animations at least. Via the horn you learn of a terrible series of events that occurred on other floating worlds nearby, where some sort of guardian person went rogue and began using a terrifying three-headed metallic monster to destroy local beauty and eat the souls of the land. Some of these noises are mad burbling fun, but others are little tunes that Gnome can play back (thankfully automatically – despite the hefty musical focus, there’s no core puzzle that requires playing back tunes) on the horn, causing animated thought bubbles to appear giving you hints about what you need to do, or initiating events in the scene. When he picks it up he discovers that it can be used to listen to specific objects and animals. Each scene is alive with detail, hidden extras to discover, and esoteric puzzles to solve by interacting with everything you can find.Īt the start, a horn descends from the sky outside our friend’s house. But the real magic happens when you meet the game’s animals, flora and strange bearded denizens, who are the most astonishingly wonderfully animated creatures. They're textured and detailed in a way that makes them less awkwardly different from the world. However, this time out the main character, his dog, and a few other peculiar creatures, are more carefully designed.

It is without question one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever seen, maintaining that collage look of machinery and nature, photography (I think) and wonderfully rendered artwork, with cartoon characters within. By Samorost 2, things lasted closer to half an hour, and the art, animation and music had improved by considerable degrees (although the closing puzzle was a disaster). Samorost 1 is a ten minute web game that introduced the main character, a little chap in a white onesy and dangly bobble hat – apparently only ever known as “Gnome” - who lives on a small organic/metallic island floating in space.

Samorost 3 shaggy planet