My only problem with this game is that the game being over if you take a wrong turn once is ridiculously unfair. If going the wrong way merely restarted you at the beginning of the same level, or even the previous level, that wouldn't be so bad. There could still be a 'sudden death' difficulty option for those who enjoy that sort of thing.
The problem with skipping the little treasure chests, and just going for the lever and the one big, armour-containing chest on each level, is that you wind up not getting tools or tonics out of the little chests that are skipped... which leaves you far more likely not to make it to the end of the game without dying. Unless you have absolutely miserable luck at finding items with enough detect and/or dodge buffs, you'll do far better to open every chest. Sure, some might have only a handful of gold, but it won't cost you more than maybe a minor wound to get to the vast majority of those little chests. A -1 to health in exchange for a +3 health tonic is a great deal.
PatKDay, if you don't like the genre, you can't judge it fairly. That would be like me playing a FPS game and down-rating it for "too much shooting!" People who like point-and-click exploration/adventure games love this series, nearly universally. The puzzles are strange, yes, but not "illogical" as you claimed; they contribute to the very surreality of the Submachine games that so many people find appealing. Your claim that it was difficult to distinguish between background and interactive objects was also rubbish, as the cursor changes when it moves over any such objects. I didn't see your first comment, but given the rude tone and absurdity of your second one, I imagine I would've downrated it also. People downrate comments that are unhelpful, obnoxious and/or misleading in their characterisation of the game; your second comment, at least, contained all three of those flaws. Don't chastise others for giving your comments the ratings they deserve.
The glowing box went into a box-shaped hole, Sarth. You probably saw it and didn't think to put the box there, like I did, and solved the symbol puzzle with just 4 clues. For everyone else, there's a fantastic walkthrough over at the Casual Gaming site, jayisgames. Well-organised to allow you to find just the clue you're looking for without having to ruin all the puzzles for yourself. Just search for Submachine there, and walkthrough/review articles for all the Submachine games will come up. (I'd just give the URL, but I think that would break a rule.)
Main Menu > Options > Music [ ]On [o]Off <=
NOW will all you simpletons STOP complaining there's "no mute button"? How do you manage to dress yourselves without help?
It says right in the game info that "Bear and Cat" has gameplay like Zuma, so all of you thinking you're clever for pointing it out... well, 'clever' isn't exactly how you look. I wondered if this particular Zuma-clone might be stolen (in the literal, actual-designer-gets-no-credit sense) myself, but all I see is a bunch of accusations with nothing to suggest any proof beyond "it looks just like Zuma!" If it is stolen, I'd be the first to report the game for infringement. Guessing and prejudice aren't actually evidence. By the way, did anyone else find the alleged Cat? All I see is the Bear.
Incredible game. Don't be put off by the monochrome graphics; there's so much more here than meets the eye. Some screens could have stood to be less dark, but since the cursor changes over hotspots, that was at most a minor annoyance. I only needed the walkthrough at all because it wasn't obvious to me that I could slide and otherwise reposition character strings in Code Recognition mode. Piecing together the story was an adventure in itself. My only regret is that Kong won't let me give this game a rating higher than five stars!
This might just be me, but resizing does not seem to be working. I wasn't able to adjust either height or width up or down. ⊰⊱ With sounds, some less-basic graphics and maybe a cursory storyline, this could be a much more interesting game.
Just like any other game here, if the game area and/or chat area are really small with lots of white space around them, hold down Ctrl and press + until you get the desired size. (Ctrl - will make them smaller.) Much less time-consuming and annoying to others than complaining that "they" made the boxes the wrong size.
For anyone who couldn't figure it out, the "hippocampus" in the instructions is what most English-speakers call a "seahorse" -- the vertical "fish" you get no points for catching. Stick with the horizontal fish and you'll be fine.
Great 'idle game' for playing while chatting here on Kong -- the clicking is much less tedious if it's broken up by conversation in the chat tab. Also nice to finally see a game where having a laptop touchpad is a benefit instead of a liability! I wouldn't be surprised if more than one person has broken an actual mouse trying to beat this game. I enjoy being made to go o.0, so this was good on that level, as well as qualifying as a meta-game. Not for the faint of heart, but I had fun. 7.75/10
I've loved this game since it first came out, and coming back to play it after a long enough while makes it wonderfully fresh again. Getting people to identify with such an inhuman creature should've been a lot more difficult, but brilliant character design and backstory go a long way... One of the fantastic elements I'd forgotten about was the alien language that's almost the only in-game text -- that really helps reinforce the strangeness of the tri-achnid and its world. It really boggles my mind that this game doesn't have badges, though; it seems like the kind of game that normally gets them, and certainly it would get the 100k+ plays it deserves if it had them. I suppose maybe it's an API issue, but not being a programmer myself, I can only guess. The controls are a pain and a half with a laptop trackpad, but it's not like I don't have the option of plugging in a USB mouse, so that's on me. Thank you for this fascinating visit to a deeply alien world, Edmund.
Fail, fail, fail. Glitchy animation don't even show half of what I'm meant to be aiming at half the time. Picking objects up is hit-and-miss, as is hitting villagers with objects -- sometimes even when I hit, I apparently miss. And villagers periodically survive falls that should be fatal for no apparent reason, wandering off without even a moment of being stunned. Cute idea, crap execution. Not worth the time it would take to get even the first badge.
(Part 2/2) Match-three games are not ALL boring or hated by everyone. It's true many match-3 games share very similar controls (clones of Bejeweled, Collapse, Zuma etc.), and not everyone enjoys the genre; but there are games like this one which have a new twist, as well as many thousands of people who enjoy playing various match-3 games. I find first-person-shooter games boring, myself, but I don't claim my opinion is objective fact, because I recognise that many other people do enjoy FPS games. The only game I know of that had gameplay anything like this one is Trijinx, but the physics is much more interesting in Bumble Tumble, and the controls much smoother as well. Someone else claimed that no skill is required to play Bumble Tumble... yet, oddly, their name does not appear anywhere in the high scores. I even made the all-time high scores list, which I rarely ever manage to do... and getting a high score in Bumble Tumble does, indeed, require skill as well as luck to accomplish.
Fun game! I agree it could be improved with some different power-ups, and the difficulty stops increasing fairly quickly (that would also be easily corrected by adding additional colours such as orange, royal blue, silver, and other shades of red and green) but the basic gameplay is at once challenging and relaxing. The balance between skill and luck was just perfect for my taste, and I appreciate the unlimited mode, which is perfect for playing while doing something else. A third type of mode would be welcome, but the challenge and relaxed modes are sufficient for most players, I think. It's a shame that the irony of people giving games low ratings due to their not having badges, when only games with high ratings will get badges, is lost on the very people who do it. (Part 1/2)
I thought this was awesome until my level was deleted without warning or explanation, while I was inside it editing it. A literally game-killing bug (or 'feature').
I thought I hadn't figured out the right solution. As it turns out, Flash does not recognise the correct actions for 11 or 12. And of course not everyone even owns the necessary peripheral for puzzle 13. That would be the point at which I looked at the walkthrough (tracked down for level 11, whoich I could not possibly have ever solved otherwise on my computer) and said "Are you freaking KIDDING me?" Great concept and execution, for the first 10 levels, but hardware-dependent puzzles unfortunately knocked all the stars off this one's rating.
Okay, I know I got two of the goals -- making the whole screen blue and making the whole screen white -- but I can't tell if I got him to do the widest possible split or not! There should be a badge so I can tell! /removes tongue from cheek/
 "Treasure Hunter"){kind=icon}
 "Necropolis"){kind=icon}
 "Submachine 7: the Core"){kind=icon}
 "Mastermind: World Conquerer"){kind=icon}
 "Bear and Cat"){kind=icon}
 "Cute Cat Girl"){kind=icon}
 "The Infinite Ocean"){kind=icon}
 "VDOgamez MegaMaze 1.0"){kind=icon}
 "the i am bored so i chat game"){kind=icon}
 "Cat Fishing"){kind=icon}
 "AVGM"){kind=icon}
 "Tri-achnid"){kind=icon}
 "Pillage the Village"){kind=icon}
 "Bumble Tumble"){kind=icon}
 "Everybody Edits"){kind=icon}
 "Take Something Literally"){kind=icon}
 "Testing Game"){kind=icon}