Amanita Design has been crafting these beautiful, dialogue-free adventure games for a while now, and each one has emphasized exploration, visuals, music and little self-contained brainteasers over more traditional point-and-click inventory puzzles. They rose to fame with 2009's Machinarium, concerning a tiny droid who foils the terrorist plot of a trio of bad robots while discovering and rescuing the love of his life. However, before that came the first two Samorost games, which were relatively obscure save for the fact that Samorost 2 was part of the first ever Humble Bundle (the first Samorost was a student project of lead designer Jakub Dvorský, and is currently available for free on Amanita's website). The Samorost games feature a small character dressed in white who lives on a tiny green planetoid in a system full of equally small and unusual heavenly bodies. These planetoids defy any conventional ecology, instead representing a whimsical storybook quality akin to something like The Little Prince. Through clicking on their surroundings, the player discovers any number of interactive hotspots, though many are simply there for window dressing. Others involve a little experimentation to figure out the underlying puzzle, which is then solved to either produce a key item or open the way forward.

Samorost 3, which is far larger and more attractive than the two previous games but otherwise maintain the same spirit, follows this pattern of figuring out puzzles - many to do with music, or observation, or clicking and dragging objects around - to make progress. The big change is a celestial trumpet that falls near the house of Samorost's protagonist, and he soon discovers that not only can it hear distant sounds but can also hear the "spirits" of various living and inanimate objects. Using it to converse with these spirits, he learns their predicament, clues to nearby puzzles, and what threatens the peace of this cosmos and how this danger might be thwarted. As with all of Amanita's games, there's no dialogue, so these clues and stories are delivered via ideograms for the player to construe from context. In this, the game accentuates its storybook facadé, as well as presumably saving the studio some time and money translating everything from their native Czech.

The environments in this game, as they have been in all of Amanita's games, are absolutely stunning. The level of detail is incredible, as you wander around these intricately designed landscapes and poke around holes and fixtures to see what reacts to your prompts. It's not just the visuals though; the game has a stronger focus on rhythm and sound than Amanita's previous adventure games, and is prone to little musical interludes which are frequently the focus of any given puzzle. Tapping a quartet of workers, for instance, until they're all drumming, humming and tapping to the same beat allows them to work faster and complete their goal, which provides the player with an item they need to progress.

There are points where the game is nigh inscrutable, and that's when the in-game hint book comes into play. You need to solve an additional puzzle to even open the hint book, but in doing so you get a small picture guide for everything that you need to accomplish on the immediate screen: that includes story-required puzzles, but also the optional ones which do nothing but convey achievements and give the player a little extra sleuthing to do. Length-wise we're looking at around 4 to 6 hours to complete, which suits a game like this perfectly.

It might be fair to say that Amanita Design games are a lot like Wes Anderson movies: there's an amiable lightheartedness to them that others might parse as twee, and you immediately get the sense of where the designers' hearts and souls are at with the level of loving detail that has gone into their environments and their musical choices and their crafting of a narrative. It also means that you know precisely what to expect from a new release, and whether or not it is likely going to appeal to you. As a huge fan of Machinarium and Botanicula, I would say Samorost 3 is Amanita's best yet, if only because every game they put out seems more confident, more picturesque and more charming than the last. They have their chosen instrument, and they continue to fine-tune it.

Rating: 5 out of 5.