It is finished.
December 21, 2015 3:27 PM   Subscribe

It began in September 2005. Nobody could have foreseen that a story would unfold at all, let alone the one that did. Today, it ends: Mateusz Skutnik's Submachine 10: The Exit. (Don't play until you've finished 1 through 9 first.)

Other games by Skutnik:

Daymare Town series (his Polish-only comic book set in the same universe, Morfs, will be translated into English and released as a webcomic, Daymare Morphs, starting in January 2016)
10 Gnomes series
Covert Front series (episode 5 coming 2016)
Where Is series (Where Is 2016 coming December 28)
Pastel Games (Skutnik and Covert Front writer Karol Konwerski's game dev studio - of note is the beautiful Trader of Stories: Bell's Heart, which has a sequel, A Grain of Truth)
posted by BiggerJ (9 comments total) 27 users marked this as a favorite
 
These seem like some fun escape room ames, but can we get some more context?
posted by Going To Maine at 3:47 PM on December 21, 2015 [1 favorite]


Aw, man. Submachine comes to an end? It's like the end of an era.

I have to say, though, as much as I enjoyed the games, I only managed to complete a handful of them.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:05 PM on December 21, 2015


Context: A story slowly unfolds of people trapped in a massive autonomous network of structures and machines, and of one man in particular, an amputee whose phantom limb is very real. It's Lost meets Myst (there's a reason why the Subnet spinoff has a Room 815).
posted by BiggerJ at 4:41 PM on December 21, 2015


Skutnik is a pretty singular Flash game creator. I'm not so sure I'd call his genre "escape the room" though, it's very heavy on hidden object and not so much on logical puzzles, which I think make the best sort. But he takes the hidden object to a new level, where the purpose of the object (and the name of it), when you find it, is deliberately obfuscated, so one is as a result completely without context and is forced to experiment blindly to get anywhere, like if you were parachuted into a land where you had to acquire a new language before you could get your first meal. Add "twisty passages, all alike" and you get a result that is equally frustrating and ragequitty as it is engaging.

I ragequit, then came back to it and quit again after I got a little annoyed at the backtracking. I may come back to it when I get around to a digging up a pad of graph paper.
posted by Tad Naff at 5:09 PM on December 21, 2015 [2 favorites]


such weird serendipity that this should get posted as i was literally, not five minutes ago, wishing there was another one of these games since i've finally gotten a handle on how to solve them and here it is. stop reading my mind!
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 10:27 PM on December 21, 2015


Thorzdad: There are plans for more spinoff games, starting with Submachine: The Engine.
posted by BiggerJ at 11:31 PM on December 21, 2015


Aw man, these are my favorite games even though I'm terrible at them! I beat 9 with a heavy reliance on a walkthrough as I just kept getting lost and forgetting where I still had Stuff to Fiddle With. It appears from other reviews that 10 is absolutely massive and maybe I'll need like a map and Evernote to make my way through this one.
posted by muddgirl at 7:47 AM on December 22, 2015


A story slowly unfolds of people trapped in a massive autonomous network of structures and machines,

I was going to post an AskMe looking for a game that would scratch the the trapped-population itch I've gotten from reading a series of novels about people trapped in small environments (Wool, Seveneves, Aurora, etc.). Thanks for this.
posted by BrunoLatourFanclub at 9:32 AM on December 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


As much as I enjoyed playing Submachine 10 and felt the impact of having actually escaped the subnet after first moving through pieces of all the previous games, I found the ending wanting and the revelations incomplete. I had been eager to learn what theories about submachines and the network would be confirmed, and was left still feeling confused. For people coming back this way, the Wikia might be useful for browsing information about the games, the theories, and other concepts.
posted by koucha at 2:24 PM on December 31, 2015


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