kup ten komiks / buy this book

sample pages | trailer | unboxing

na co patrzy Blaki?  | ciekawostka scenariuszowa

Po dziesięciu latach Blaki powraca! Nie do pomyślenia, ale w międzyczasie rzeczywiście dziesięć lat przeleciało… Czy jest sens jeszcze do tej serii powracać po tak długiej przerwie? Cóż, wszyscy jesteśmy starsi, świat jest inny, okoliczności są inne, tylko Blaki ten sam. To jak te stare kapcie, te najwygodniejsze.
64 strony komiksowe, tym razem w kolorze (przygaszonym, stonowanym, ale zawsze).
~
Recenzje:

• Dominik Szcześniak
• Robert Popielecki
• Sensu Stricte
• Piotr Nowacki
• Migawki Literackie
• Bajkochłonka
• Wombai
• Lubię Komiksy

~
detale wydawnicze:
Ostatni Blaki
Autor: Mateusz Skutnik
Wydawca: Timof i cisi wspólnicy
Cena: 60 zł
ISBN: 978-83-67440-98-1
Format: 210×290
Oprawa: twarda
Liczba stron: 68
Druk/barwność: kolorowy
Zalecane dla odbiorcy: Młodzież i dorośli
Komiks nr 460
Wydanie: I
Data wydania: 16 września 2024
~
Teraz mogę już powiedzieć, że jest to jednocześnie najlepszy i najważniejszy album komiksowy w moim życiu. Nosiłem go w głowie przez ostatnie pięć lat nie wiedząc, czy uda mi się go kiedykolwiek zrobić. Fakt, że teraz mogę go przekazać w wasze ręce jest dla mnie bardzo ważny. Czy trzeba znać poprzednie tomy, by ten miał sens? Nie. To samodzielny album. Jeżeli nigdy nie czytaliście Skutnika a być może chcielibyście spróbować, to to jest ten album, od którego bym proponował zacząć.
25.IX.2024

Pogodził się z własnym losem? Ostatnie myśli Blakiego.

Kiedy Blaki, główny bohater komiksu Mateusza Skutnika, po wymierzeniu ostrej krytyki w facetów, którzy chodzą z parasolami stwierdza, że bardziej upokarzające jest chyba tylko biegnięcie na tramwaj i pyta, „czy nie można przyjąć swojego losu na spokojnie i z godnością”, to ja przypominam sobie, że to również moje motto. Czasami, kiedy wracając z pracy widzę nadjeżdżający 159 i jestem od trajtka o szybki sprint, mówię sobie w myślach „po co będziesz biegł? Nie wygłupiaj się i pogódź z własnym losem”.

Nie biegnę, godzę się, czekam na następny.

A kto mnie tego nauczył? Otóż ta dewiza zalęgła mi się w głowie po przeczytaniu któregoś z wcześniejszych tomów Blakiego – chciałem nawet sprawdzić którego, ale ten komiks miał tyle formatów, tylu wydawców i tyle razy już się kończył i zaczynał, że zrezygnowałem z poszukiwań. Zakładam, że skoro ta sentencja towarzyszyła mi przez wiele lat, to pamiętam ją dość dobrze. Czy jednak to małe deja vu podczas lektury Ostatniego Blakiego (wyd. timof comics) to oznaka tego, że Mateusz Skutnik teraz, na sam koniec, zaczyna się powtarzać?

Blaki to specyficzna postać, która już wcześniej wspominała, że nie ma nic więcej do powiedzenia. A później wracała i gadała dalej. To taki bohater filmów Koterskiego, tylko niedookreślony gatunkowo – Blaki nie jest człowiekiem, a takim yodopodobnym ludzikiem, który ciągle narzeka i wyraża swoje zdanie na każdy temat. Lub raczej wyrażał. Bo w tym tomie coraz częściej powątpiewa i milknie. Blakiego spotykamy tym razem na etapie codzienności, którą dzieli ze swoją rodziną – ta codzienność bywa zabawna i wzruszająca.

Blaki od dawna nie jest już samotnikiem, którego przygody polegały na patrzeniu się na pranie. To bohater, który jest już w takim wieku, że coraz częściej podaje w wątpliwość swoją przydatność dla świata; który ma swoje lęki i którego życie nabiera pięknych kolorów tylko wtedy, kiedy w sklepie, zupełnym przypadkiem, dopadną go zapachy przeszłości. Blaki wie już wszystko. Jest na granicy. Kiedyś jego myśli wypełniały całe strony pięknie zarysowanych plansz, teraz – czas na reset. Na ciszę znaczącą więcej niż milion słów.

Też liczysz schody, jak wchodzisz na swoje piętro? Wychodząc z mieszkania przekręcasz klucz w zamku dwa razy? Masz czasem ochotę wyrzucić te przeklęte pudełka po lodach przez okno? Jeśli tak, to Ostatni Blaki jest komiksem dla Ciebie.

Chciałem jeszcze powiedzieć, że ta piękna tragikomedia po 23 latach dobiegła końca w sposób godny, ale nie zdążę. Spieszę się na trajtka. Nie planuję biec. Ale też nie sądzę, żeby na mnie zaczekał.

Dominik Szcześniak.

visit bundle page

Your fondest gaming memories, remastered. Relive the glory days of browser-based gaming with this bundle of classics, modernized, remastered, and rereleased in their ultimate forms. Let the lead fly in the customizable 2D shooter Strike Force Heroes, lovingly reforged by its original creators. Take in the stunning, spooky vibes of the hand-drawn puzzler adventure Submachine: Legacy. Ensure humanity’s survival amidst the zombie apocalypse in the three-part Last Stand Legacy Collection, complete with slick upscaled art. Pay what you want for all these classics and more, 8 in total, and help support charity with your purchase!

Mateusz Skutnik’s excellent Flash series re-emerges to live on in an enhanced, cohesive singular adventure.

If the name Submachine conjures up fond memories for you—if you spent the decade between 2005 to 2015 spelunking through the subnet and trading theories while you waited for the latest installment of the original free Flash series—then you likely already know all you need to about Submachine: Legacy, the revamped and updated omnibus of designer Mateusz Skutnik’s semi-legendary trans-dimensional odyssey: that it unites the ten original chapters into a single cohesive package; that the graphics and puzzles have received a fresh coat of paint and quality-of-life tweaks; that this new and definitive presentation will allow Submachine to persist in a post-Flash world.

If none of that means anything to you, though, don’t worry: Legacy ought to be as accessible to newcomers as it is to die-hard, there-from-the-start devotees. Though the original is now almost twenty years old, Submachine: Legacy is no museum piece; it’s an astonishingly intricate and beautifully crafted journey into a strange and unexpected setting that shows almost none of its age. If you like your puzzles difficult, your obstacles frequent, and your narratives ambiguous, you’ll understand right away why it’s endured for so long.

The story begins with the (silent, nameless, faceless) player character stepping into an elevator that travels deep underground, letting out in the basement of a subterranean lighthouse. Your immediate goal, insofar as you have one, is just to explore and find out what makes the place tick. There are odd devices and mechanisms everywhere, and solving the complex puzzles of their function produces clues to a larger picture. Scattered about, you’ll find notes by a mysterious person (or persons), alluding to somebody named Murtaugh, formerly the lighthouse’s keeper. It seems Murtaugh made a shocking, paradigm-shifting discovery, the nature of which is initially unclear but which concerned an energy he dubbed karma.

Harnessing and manipulating karma allowed Murtaugh to enter the subnet: a vast, otherworldly network of buried mechanical structures—submachines, short for subterranean machines—linked together by portals of karma energy. Murtaugh became obsessed with exploring and mapping the subnet, and led numerous expeditions to that end. That was long ago now, though; his current whereabouts—along with those of his many team members—are unknown. While he and others can, at times, communicate directly with you—both by leaving notes and, occasionally, via computer terminals you stumble across—you appear separated by space, time, and other more mysterious factors. Eventually, of course, you’ll find your own way into the subnet, and it’s only by following in Murtaugh’s footsteps that you’ll have a hope of seeing the surface again.

As in the lighthouse, there are notes laying out scraps of Murtaugh’s story tucked away throughout the subnet. Many of these are entirely optional to collect, and easily missed if you don’t keep your eyes open. The more you read, the more familiar you’ll become with some of the subnet’s other (unseen) explorers—most notably Elizabeth, Murtaugh’s dearest friend and philosophical opposite who became entangled in his grand plans—but your progress is rarely dependent on how much you’ve pieced together about your predecessors. Either way, you’ll probably finish the game with plenty of questions left over; Submachine has had a very active community for almost twenty years, and they’re still posting theories about what it all means.

With narrative taking a backseat, the game’s primary emphasis is on exploration and puzzle-solving. The subnet itself is gigantic—the game’s marketing promises a mindblowing 1900 rooms—but the process of exploring is rarely too daunting, with a first-person slideshow presentation that makes it easy to move from room to room. It’s also its own reward, with Skutnik’s lushly colored backgrounds blending bold, almost Beardsley-esque linework with a barely restrained cartoon sensibility that evokes Gahan Wilson, all without sacrificing the legibility of explorable environments. Meanwhile, the ambient score by The ThumpMonks and Marcus Gutierrez thrums and buzzes like an unseen electrical current running beneath it all, periodically bubbling up to life in moments of ethereal awe.

Making your way through is straightforward thanks to a simple, one-click interface typical of the Flash era that produced it. Your cursor glows over hotspots and screen exits, letting you click to interact. A right-click pulls up an overlay displaying your inventory, where you can select an object to bring out onto the main screen or (via a context-sensitive cursor within your inventory) examine a note you’ve picked up.

Occasionally, and with no apparent rhyme or reason that I could discern, your cursor will transform over certain hotspots to resemble a specific object you have to use there: the glowing silhouette of a hammer, for instance, or a screwdriver or other tool. If you don’t yet have the object in question, it’s helpful to know what obstacles you can’t tackle yet, but it’s inconsistently applied and adds little enough to the game that I’m hard-pressed to explain why it’s there.

The lack of a “show all hotspots” feature can also lead to a fair amount of pixel hunting in the subnet’s more cluttered crannies (especially if you’re trying to rustle up all the game’s many secrets), and there’s no way around that besides perpetual vigilance. Still, most chapters are geographically restricted enough that retracing your steps to figure out what you’ve missed isn’t too taxing. (The massive final chapter is another story, but more on that in a bit.)

More inconvenient are those screens where an exit blends too well into the background, but since the game lets you navigate with the arrow keys as well as the mouse, it’s not as big a problem as it could be. (Pressing an arrow moves you automatically to the next screen if that direction is available—whether you as the player know how you got there or not.) Some might have preferred more explicit signposting to begin with, but to me it feels in keeping with the subnet’s inscrutable character that movement itself should prove puzzling from time to time.

And puzzling is certainly the operative word here. Submachine: Legacy is jam-packed with puzzles, in such volume and so many different varieties—elaborate locks to tease open; strange, busted contraptions to reassemble and operate; logical challenges to unravel strand by strand—that it can sometimes feel necessary to make a checklist, lest you lose track of which found object or number sequence you need for which arcane doohickey. If you’re stuck on one obstacle, there’s almost always another to ponder just a few screens away. You may struggle for a time with how to solve them, but you’ll never lack for places to try.

Some puzzle types are unique to particular chapters. Chapter 3, for instance, involves using a gadget to navigate the X-Y coordinates of a seemingly endless series of looping corridors. Chapter 4 sees you tracking down three-digit codes to activate a network of teleporters that unlock isolated locations. There are frequent inventory puzzles, as well, ranging from straightforward find-valve-to-open-pipe types to ones that require more creative thinking. With very few exceptions these are logical and well-constructed; the few that truly stymied me usually hinged on the realization that I could take something I’d mistaken for a background detail.

As I mentioned, there are many, many secrets to uncover. Some of the notes shining light on Murtaugh, Elizabeth and company are hidden in a way that defies immediate notice, and the moment you spy one is immensely satisfying. There’s also, however, a sort of unspoken secondary mission baked into Legacy that many players might overlook entirely, as the game itself never tells you to go looking for it. This involves collecting a number of “micro stabilizers” hidden carefully throughout each level, which, when united, unlock secret areas containing strange monoliths. The more monoliths you activate, the more you’ll be able to access in the optional level “Shattered Quadrant,” which is available through the menu. This level, based on a side game in the original Flash series called Submachine Universe, offers a huge number of locations to explore via teleporters (similar, but not quite the same as the ones in chapter 4). Taken alongside three other optional levels—likewise accessed through the menu—it can add significantly to the main game’s roughly fourteen-hour runtime.

There’s no doubt that Submachine: Legacy offers both quality and quantity, but…well…there really is an awful lot of quantity in some places. The tenth and last of the main chapters is bigger and longer than some full games, with what I’d estimate to be a few hundred screens to traverse all on its own. (If it turns out I’m wrong about that, then I apologize profusely for not counting myself, with the caveat that I won’t do it next time either.)

While this allows for complex, multi-stage puzzles that span many locations and require thoughtfulness, creativity and careful attention to solve, it also makes for a tremendous amount of backtracking. There’s no map, no fast travel option, and few shortcuts; the game more or less sets you loose and trusts you to figure out for yourself how to keep it all straight. I’d highly advise taking notes and/or mapping it out yourself as you go; it won’t make you have to backtrack any less, but it will help keep you oriented and might make you feel a bit more like a real adventurer.
Final Verdict

Submachine: Legacy asks a lot of the player: a lot of attention, a lot of time, a lot of thought, and a lot of travel. In return, though, it has an incredible amount to offer. The narrative is both intriguing and unobtrusive, allowing you to take or leave as much as you want while you get down to puzzle-solving. The puzzles themselves are almost uniformly excellent, while the art and music are perfectly suited to the aura of mysterious foreboding that infuses each chapter. This is not a game to be approached casually or without the full complement of one’s faculties, but the subnet contains such an embarrassment of adventuring riches that it’s no surprise people have spent so many years jumping at the chance to vanish there.

Submachine: Legacy combines and brings all the episodes of Mateusz Skutnik’s classic Flash series into the 2020s with updated graphics and puzzles, trusting players to overcome its difficult-but-fair challenges and showing the world just how richly deserved its cult following is.

87%

by Will Aickman

I wrote first part of this story in 2017.
I just wrote the ending to this story now, in 2024.
This comic book will be drawn and released at the earliest in 2028.

Don’t ask me how to write.
I don’t know.