The (presumably) alien protagonist and his pet dog.
Samorost, Samorost 2, and Samorost 3 are games released by Amanita Design.
Samorost features a gnome who, upon discovering a floating planet on a collision course with his own planet, flies there in his space rocket in hopes of stopping the menace somehow.
In Samorost 2, a pair of aliens kidnap your dog, and fly back to their own planetoid. After chasing after them, sneaking in through the front door and through some passages, you trap the fat alien in his own trap, and head for the surface. On the way home, your spacecraft runs out of fuel, causing you to crash on another planetoid. You and your dog find a sleeping taxi driver, wake him up, refuel his ship, and return home.
Samorost 3, released in late March 2016, has our intrepid hero finding a magical trumpet and goes on a quest to return said trumpet to its original owners.
These games provide examples of:
- Alien Animals: Many critters on the planets resemble animals on Earth.
- Art Evolution: The worlds have gotten increasingly complex and beautiful as the series has grown, while the gnome and his dog have the same simple designs as always.
- Baby Planet: All of the planets are more like Worlds in the Sky due to their tiny size and odd shapes. The one the gnome lives on is made of wood.
- Beautiful Void: None of the NPCs present in the game provide meaningful social interaction. Instead, the surrounding world focuses on the strange and beautiful scenery.
- Fetch Quest: Some NPCs ask for an item or a task from the gnome in order for him to proceed.
- Medium Blending: The background is photorealistic and animated with pivot-style animation, the main character(s) are simple 2D designs with frame-by-frame animation, and Thought Bubbles and menus consist of just lineart.
- No-Dialogue Episode: There is no dialogue throughout any of the games. Samorost 3 uses icons rather than words for the game's menus, making it accessible as a game regardless of language.
- Organic Technology: Spaceships made out of driftwood!
- Point-and-Click Game
- Rube Goldberg Device: Several of the puzzles require aligning objects in just the right way as to set off one of these.
- Scavenger World: The technology NPCs have are all primitive, amounting to not much more than mechanical contraptions. For some planetoids, it's a wonder where they get the metal at all.
- Scenery Porn: The planets are created using photomanipulation and so are immaculate.
- Shareware: Samorost is entirely free, Samorost 2 is trialware, and Samorost 3 is entirely paid.
- The Unintelligible: Every character speaks in grunts, or, if a more complex idea needs to be told, through a visual Speech Bubble.
- The gnome does say "yoo-hoo" when cheering and "no-no" when Informing the Fourth Wall.
- World Shapes: Most of the worlds the gnome visits are organic in shape, resembling unshaped rock, wood, or crops. Round planets are in the minority.
The first Samorost features:
- Colony Drop: What threatens your planet.
- Macro Zone: The forest area definitely feels out of scale.
Samorost 2 features:
- Bilingual Bonus: Several level codes and song names are Czech words, many of them referring to the level you're on.
- Living Gasbag: The fuel for the taxi is harvested by feeding flying seals and collecting a gas bubble they release.
- Planet Looters: Downplayed. Two aliens come to the gnome's home planet to loot his fruit trees and kidnap his dog.
- Slipping a Mickey: The snailman drinks from the bucket of water, but it needs to have the "salt shaker" plant add stuff to the drink, then heated up.
Samorost 3 features:
- Bamboo Technology: The spaceship the gnome travels in is cobbled together from, among other things, a mushroom, bathtub, and plastic bottle.
- Callback: The planetoids of the alien worlds from the previous two games can be seen through the telescope, depending on its orientation.
- Cool Starship: Made from a mushroom, the top of a plastic bottle, and the controls from a crane!
- Cool vs. Awesome: The climax of the game features an aerial battle between a greatsword-wielding robotic knight and a three-headed firebreathing metallic dragon ridden by an evil monk.
- Early-Bird Cameo: The protagonist from Chuchel appears post-game through the telescope, floating through space.
- Easter Egg: The game has a few after completing the main storyline.
- Some of the planets revisited show spirits happy.
- The remains of the slain dragon can be found throughout the worlds.
- Pointing the telescope left after game completion replaces the planet seen with a cherry.
- The dream the gnome has at the end features him partying with some of the NPCs he met along his journey, as well as Josef from Machinarium, another of Amanita Design's games.
- Fallen Hero: The antagonist was one of the good monks. But he wanted to control all magical music instead of creating it together. So he built the mechanical dragon out of robotic watering can, attacked his comrades, took two of their magical flutes (the last flute got lost in the scuffle and found its way to the protagonist) and went on a rampage through space.
- Gotta Catch Them All: Various optional sidequests have you collect spirits as you go along.
- Guide Dang It!: To a slightly lesser extent than the previous games in the series, as this one makes use of the hint-system introduced in Machinarium. The entirely visual style of the in-game help manual, however, can still make it difficult to figure out what to do—leading to some amount of madly clicking on everything until something happens.
- Hope Sprouts Eternal: The branch on the Log Moon that had been scorched into ashes sprouts green leaves again post-game. The spirit who inhabits that branch is very happy.
- Instant Expert: The gnome finds a mystical trumpet and quickly learns how to use it. But after all, it is magical.
- Magic Music: The trumpet allows you to communicate with various helpful spirits that inhabit the many miniature worlds you visit.
- Mechanical Monster: A robotic, three-headed, fire-breathing dragon is this game's antagonist.
- Playable Epilogue: The game remains fully explorable after completing the main objective, and in fact the monks give the spaceship an extra part to let it roam more easily. This allows the player to pick up missed achievements and interact with characters who will react to the villain's defeat.
- Schizo Tech: One of the planets the gnome visits is The Shangri-La, with Ghibli Hills and Perfect Pacifist People monks inhabiting it. These are also the same people who award the gnome with a Cosmic Ring (read: rocket booster) after defeating the dragon.
- "Simon Says" Mini-Game: One of the hidden achievements requires the player to copy a parrot's chatter by clicking on nearby critters that make a similar noise.
- Theremin: This is the corresponding instrument to the Cosmic Ring achievement.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: At one point, the gnome has to grow a mix-and-match plant, which, in the inventory, will cry out if he tries to use it in any way. The gnome has no problem grinding the plant into mush even as it screams.
- Wrap Around: Most of the planets and moons have cliff-like edges or other barriers, preventing the gnome from going around. The lone exception is the blue moon, where going off-screen to the right brings him around to the same screen at the very left, and vice-versa.
