So, Submachine: Legacy was released yesterday, and I beat it about an hour ago, after just over nine hours of playing.

Review in brief: I liked it. It was good. It feels like a fitting send-off to the Submachine series (or this first phase of it, at least), though I won't go quite so far as to call it a "definitive edition" of the games.

Of course, there's more to my thoughts than that, hence the rest of this post. This review will be spoiler-free, though given the nature of the games there's not much to spoil. I'll also be assuming you have no idea what I'm talking about, so first, a quick history lesson.

The Submachine series is a series of (initially) Flash-based puzzle games produced by the Polish game developer and artist Mateusz Skutnik, consisting of 10 games in the 'main' series, released between 2005 and 2015, as well as 3 'spin-off' games, and one 'non-game experience,' for lack of a better term; this last item was also the final Submachine-related work to be released (or, in this case, finalized), being declared finished in December of 2017.

The first game, retroactively titled Submachine 1: The Basement, was, at its core, one of many 'escape the room'-style flash games, which abounded on sites like ArmorGames, Newgrounds, and Kongregate at the time.

However, as the series went on, the barest breadcrumbs of lore in the first game grew into a great web of narrative, held together by notes from multiple different (and sometimes unreliable) authors, and the games transitioned from being mere escape rooms into a unique form of puzzle game, held aloft by Skutnik's masterful hand-drawn environments, which benefit from his training as an architect.

I mean just look at that.

With the death of Flash, the availability of the games diminished greatly, available only through purchase on Skutnik's website, or via large collections such as Flashpoint Infinity. The 'non-game experience' I mentioned earlier, Submachine Universe, remained available through itch.io as well.

But now, nearly six years later, comes Submachine: Legacy, a remaster/re-release of all prior works in the Submachine series, available on Steam.

So, with all that preamble out of the way, my thoughts.

Submachine: Legacy is, ultimately, just the original Submachine games bundled together into one program, with some graphical updates here and there. But it's not merely the same games as before; there have been some changes and additions.

On the UI side, your cursor lights up when hovering over an interactable object, which makes looking for things much easier. The cursor also indicates where you can exit a room, and (in some cases) which item to use in a given context (hammer, karma water, etc.) That's a fairly simple change which I think makes the games much better, and more fun to play.

There are short sections linking the main games, or "chapters," which are quite nice. Also very nice are the detailed landscapes now viewable through some windows and telescopes.

There are a few changes I am slightly less enthused by, though. Submachine: Legacy, to my surprise, incorporates most (possibly all) of Submachine Universe; however, presumably due to reasons of copyright, the multiple user-submitted theories that festooned the walls of every room have been replaced by architectural sketches.

Likewise, some of the puzzles have been simplified. In some cases this is perhaps warranted, such as with the rotating wheels puzzle (I'm not really sure what to call it) near the end of Submachine 2: The Lighthouse. In other cases, however, I think it makes the series lose a small amount of its charm - I am specifically thinking of how the pieces of silverware that are used in some of the earlier games as makeshift wires, bridging broken electrical connections, have been replaced by new power relay items. These are both fairly minor changes, but they did disappoint me just the smallest amount.

The only changes that I had a distinctly negative impression of were in sound design. Specifically, both the 'item picked up' sound effect and (especially) the 'electrical connection made' sound effect went on for far too long, and, in the latter case, was rather overused.

It's for these reasons that I can't quite call Submachine: Legacy a 'definitive' edition of the games, though it does come close, and I would recommend it for newcomers to the series (the price, for reference, is $25)

Submachine: Legacy also has new content for the long-time Submachine player (which, let's face it, is likely to be most of the player base), involving over a dozen monoliths scattered throughout the games, and a genuinely brilliant new puzzle. For the sake of a spoiler free-review, I'll say no more, though do note that (I think) it is possible to accidentally reset the monoliths, so be cautious.

Submachine has been a major factor in my life, and this feels like a fitting send-off to (this part of) the series, and I eagerly await the next installment in the series.