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I can't even speak...

If I describe how awesome this is, all the awesomeness will burst out and cause the world to drown in it. I expected this to be the climatic finish. Instead you lined up all of our fragile-china theories against the wall and took to them with a sledgehammer. You, sir, are God of the portal.

So it's 2011....

Where's 8 already!!! Lol j/k. Been a follower of your games for quiet some time and have only been satisfied thus far. I shall await patiently until 8 comes out.

Some may not agree

It is good to see you back in action so soon. While I admire the change from A.-isolation to B.-plot twists, there is something else I cannot ignore. The environment was rich and beautiful and the ambience was atmospheric as ever. The presentation is excellent, but presentation is only the front page.

What I found to be lackluster were the puzzles. The rune hunting was simply a lot of memorizing (or writing down) and trekking back and forth. Compare this with the simple yet ingenuous puzzle solving you had to do in Submachine 2 just to get the lever out of that glass case.

I know you still have it in you, Skutnik. I saw the Looping Sphere in the Subnet interactive. If you need any help or ideas with puzzles at all, say the word. I will even sketch some out, although I am not nearly as good as you are with digital drawing.

finally

been waitin forever
i gave it without playing it yet

An Apparent New Direction

First, let me just say that I absolutely love this series. I find these games are incredibly engrossing, enjoyable, well polished, and most of all profoundly imaginative. That said, I feel that I should offer at least some constructive criticism regarding this installment. I always found that the best part of the series is how ``paranoid'' it makes one in the sense that one is never certain of whether or not each environment is mundane, supernatural, etc. One is never quite certain how much is magic and how much is madness. This particular chapter in the series kind of disolves this a bit by making the supernaturality of the environments patent and therefore diminishes the strangeness of everything. ``Oh, it IS magic...'' I thought at one point. Probably the most compelling part was not the glowing plants (which again, kind of disolved the spirit a bit) but was the pamphlet that essentially reduced the mysterious lighthouse to a tourist attraction. Toward the end of this game, when one once again is crawling around in cramped, mechanical quarters, I felt that the true spirit of the series returned. These are just my personal views.

I imagine that the one sheet of paper which said something about ``the loops are black holes'' was a referrence to the holographic correspondence principle established by Susskind et al. This would seem to imply that the world of submachine does not take place in the far reaches of some ``galactic fringe'' but rather on a lightlike surface that bounds the universe. I suppose that this then conflicts with the notion of journeying ever outward, and the referrence was probably meant to be taken lightheartedly within the constext of the series.

Lastly, if I am not mistaken, the prevous installment ended with the adventurer drifting into the abyss in a metalic cube. I would have very much liked to see the cube sitting somewhere at the start of this one, rather than to just be facing a ruined teleporter, powering down from a recent use.

The music was also great once again. I must say though that the high-pitched whine in the audio track for the first section was so abrasive I muted the adio outut on my computer.

It was a nontheless supurb effort all around.