Samorost 3, released in 2016, is the game where Amanita Design’s ideas about adventure and puzzle design get their fullest run. It is a point-and-click game with no comprehensible dialogue, and it asks you to work out the world through thought bubbles, sketches and sound.
It mostly earns the ask. The game holds a 7.9 out of 10 critic aggregate from IGDB across seven outlets, and that number lands about right for a confident, gorgeous piece of work.
Trailer, via Amanita Design.
A flute falls near the Gnome’s house
Samorost 3 opens with a magical flute landing near the Gnome’s home. He has no idea where it came from, so he decides to find out. That is the entire premise.
He talks to an engineer and asks for a toadstool rocket. The engineer builds one from parts scattered around the Gnome’s home planet. Then the Gnome flies off across space, planet to planet, meeting creatures and helping them with their problems using the flute.
The scope here is bigger than earlier Amanita games. Samorost 3 is the first full-length entry in the series and the first with high-definition graphics. Wikipedia puts the story across five planets and four moons. The game was originally scheduled for 2015 before landing in 2016.
Nine worlds, no dialogue, one flute
The game is a point-and-click puzzle adventure, and it plays like the studio’s previous work. You control the Gnome from a side view. He carries an inventory and a flute. He explores, solves puzzles and collects items he needs for whatever obstacle is in front of him.
There is no comprehensible dialogue anywhere in Samorost 3. Communication happens through animated thought bubbles and gibberish. The Gnome can communicate with the creatures he meets, and the game can also be played with a flute that is required to solve some puzzles.
The flute is the mechanical heart of the thing. It is required to solve certain puzzles, and it is also how the Gnome reaches the beings he encounters. The game’s summary describes nine unique worlds teeming with colorful challenges, creatures and surprises.
The two books that explain everything
About a third of the way in, the Gnome finds two illustrated books. They fill in the backstory, and it is a lot more than the flute errand suggests.
The flute belongs to four monks. Not long ago they lived at peace, until a giant orange space octopus came through a black wormhole and started eating planets. The monks saw it coming and consulted an engineer — the same one from the Gnome’s home planet — to build a three-headed watering spaceship controlled by flutes on its back, plus a mechanical knight powered by a black orb.
The knight dismembers and kills the octopus, then goes to sleep on a moon. The orb gets locked away under a guardian monk.
The second book is darker. One of the four monks uses his flute to create evil spirits. The other three banish him. He steals the spaceship and turns it into a three-headed fire-breathing mechanical dragon, snatches the other three flutes, and casts the monks out of their mountain castle. One flute escapes. That is the flute that landed on the Gnome’s planet.
The evil monk then uses the dragon to consume good spirits on other planets and seizes the black orb so the knight cannot be woken to stop him.
Stealing the orb, waking the knight
The endgame sends the Gnome to the monks’ planet. He sneaks the black orb away from the evil monk and uses it to revive the mechanical knight. The knight slays the dragon, presumably killing the evil monk in the process.
The Gnome celebrates by playing music with the three remaining monks. They reward him with the power to travel instantly across all the planets, and he returns the orb to its guarded storage. Then he goes home to greet his dog.
That is a real narrative, told without a single line of readable text. It is also where the game’s biggest structural problem lives. The books are the only place the octopus, the knight and the monks’ history exist. Everything you learn about the stakes arrives in two static illustrated sequences, not through anything you do.
The walkthrough that draws instead of tells
Samorost 3 includes a walkthrough available at any time by playing a minigame, and it is one of the smartest design decisions in the game.
The walkthrough is not written or spoken. It is a series of sketches describing the puzzle in front of you and its solution. You get help without being handed a paragraph of instructions, and the game’s visual grammar stays intact even when it is bailing you out.
That matters, because the puzzle logic in Samorost 3 is loose. The flute is required to solve some puzzles, but the game rarely signals how.
When a solution clicks, it clicks because you were paying attention to the art.
What 300,000 units actually measure
Samorost 3 sold over 300,000 units as of February 2017. That is a healthy number for a hand-drawn indie adventure with no dialogue, and it is worth being precise about what it represents: copies moved, not a measure of how the game plays.
What the game plays like is uneven in a specific way. Ranked by what works:
- The art and sound design — the nine worlds are the reason to be here, and the music carries the emotional weight the dialogue cannot.
- The flute mechanic — a genuine idea, and the game’s best puzzle tool.
- The walkthrough sketches — a model other studios should steal outright.
- The two illustrated books — beautiful, and a crutch.
- The late-game puzzles — the point where the game’s patience runs thinner than yours.
The top of that list is not close. Amanita’s artwork and music are the product. The puzzles are the delivery mechanism.
Where the wonder runs out
The critical consensus of 7.9 across seven outlets is not a rave, and it should not be. Samorost 3 has a pacing problem.
The Gnome is a wonderful protagonist precisely because he is small, silent and curious. The creatures he helps are memorable to me — you remember the shape and the sound of them, not anything they said. The story about the monks and the octopus is genuinely strange and worth the trip.
But the game asks you to care about a war between monks and a space octopus that you never witness. You read about it in two books. The knight you revive is a machine the game hands you at the end. The climax is something that happens near you rather than something you drive.
Compare that to the flute. Every time the Gnome plays it and a creature responds, the game is at its best. That is the mechanic the whole thing should have been built around.
Our score for Samorost 3
Samorost 3 is worth playing, and it is worth playing for reasons that have almost nothing to do with its puzzles. The nine worlds, the sound, the flute, the gibberish conversations — that is the game’s real argument, and it is a persuasive one.
What holds it back is a story delivered through static books and a puzzle system that is harder to read than it needs to be. The walkthrough sketches are the most elegant fix anyone has shipped for it.
Amanita has always made games that feel like artifacts from somewhere else. Samorost 3 is the most ambitious of them, and the one where the seams show most clearly. It sold over 300,000 copies by February 2017.
It scores 7.9 out of 10 because looking and sounding like nothing else is not the same as playing like something.
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