Amanita Design

Spoiler warning, we're going to talk about almost everything we can in this game, so if you haven't played this game yet and want to, maybe come back later and you can share your thoughts too.

Today we are talking about Phonopolis by developers Amanita Design, who you might be familiar with, as this is the same studio that made Machinarium, Samorost and more.

If you know their other games, then you will likely enjoy Phonopolis too, as it has all the charm of a typical Amanita Design game.

My name is Felix.

It means luck.

Speed run tech.

I was like, surely you just put the jelly in it.

Tell Amanita Design,

I would definitely...

amanita design so that's the the the indie because i think in an indie episode we should talk about the publisher not absolutely if we know more about it that's fine but like at least mention them amanita design

yep yeah

amanita sounds like a girl's name do you want to go

Yeah.

it's just like okay i'll play what i can and and this game was good for that because it's set it's set between like well it's split up into like like little chapters where it's like okay day one morning day two evening day three night it's stuff like that and it's so i could play one of those and just like yep that's a good place to put it down even if it only took me five minutes it's like cool i want to go to bed anyway it's a good place to leave it off um but yeah it was good i enjoyed it um it's just a nice comforting thing to go back to um because i haven't been playing games for ages as we said it's summer so um probably not the best time for me to enjoy games but um there's that uh amanita design game that came out a few months ago that i bought so yeah i i i think i'm setting them back into my you know go-to's where it's a rusty lake game and a amanita design game and that i think even yeah they speaking of the amanita design game it's called Oh, I haven't heard of that.

I think it's basically like 1984, like a very kind of dystopian, oh, these speakers dictate to us what we should be doing, everything like that, very Big Brother-esque.

And this has got like voice acting, which I don't think any of the other Amanita design games have had.

other than like you know weird little robots or insects making weird sounds um like actual you know voice lines and stuff like that so yeah i just started it it's got like this kind of paper crafty look because i think they did make like actual paper cardboard sets

wow okay

They're smart enough for me to find pleasure in solving and also simple enough that my seven-year-old can click around and either blunder through something or have that moment of, oh, I've got to pull that first and do that.

it's great and then on top of this you have this visual layer which is just gorgeous however we are so spoiled in video games and sort of the techniques that artists can use that you don't actually kind of notice uh the intricate way this world has built right on a superficial level you just look at these screens you don't notice they're made of cards you just think they're beautifully painted like all of Amanita Design's previous work.

It's flat 2D stuff.

The way they've got around this is if you click in parts of the world that isn't a hotspot and hold and drag left and right, you can shift that perspective slightly left and right.