Part 2: Submachine 2: The Lighthouse

Part 2
Submachine 2: The Lighthouse

♫ Thumpmonks - Submachine 2 - Menu


(Click here to play the game yourself.)

Let's jump right into it. This game starts with a cutscene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duXp7wnziu8




Where the hell am I now? An arcade machine? And what's this in my pocket?


You can try pressing the buttons of the machine, but they don't seem to do anything. Checking our inventory, first of all, we find this game's help screen. There's also the Wisdom Gem from the last game, and the diary page.

The little red marble is a 'Secret'. You can collect 20 of them in this game, and they have no purpose other than bragging rights, at least in this game. They can be quite hard to find. In fact, there's one right here in this room.


In case you didn't see it, it was sitting where the two rocks meet, to the right of the machine. Yes, they are tiny. And I suppose the fact that these screenshots are about 40% smaller than the game itself doesn't help. Let's go left.

♫ Thumpmonks - Submachine 2 - Forest


RTL
We're going left, which means that the room with the phonograph is directly left/west of the starting room. The room with the up arrow is one further to the left. Last update, I posted the pictures in chronological order, which causes their positioning to be wrong. I know that's confusing. This time, I'll post them in the correct relative positions, and add a RTL note if we're moving right to left. I hope that clears up some things.

This area is known as the Lighthouse dungeon. The track that's playing right now is very similar to the sounds at the end of Submachine 1.


The Wisdom Gem goes into this device. By clicking on that pearl, a ladder drops in the previous (up arrow) room. But there's no point going there right now, as the next level is still blocked off. Let's go further left and take the stairs there.


There's a Cog Wheel on the ground here, and a Secret in the chair. We collect both.


Backtracking through the ladder room, we go back to the phonograph room. The Cog Wheel allows us to take the needle off the drum. This does two things: it unlocks a ladder on the next level and it makes the forest soundtrack stop. Instead, the main music of this game starts playing.

♫ Thumpmonks - Submachine 2 - Digouts
Seriously, listen to that. It adds so much atmosphere to the game. Pointing and clicking just got a whole lot creepier. And if you can't get enough, there's an extended edition of this music in the OST.


Anyway, time to take the ladder up. There's not much to see beyond the left plank. To the right is some kind of weird machine.

What's this? A power station? Some kind of transmitter? The levers seem to be stuck, but something's written there.




Up another level, there's a pipe we can enter to the left.


RTL
The key in the upper pipe can't be reached from here, but all the way to the left we grab the Room Key.


Further up the ladder, the way left is blocked by a locked gate. To the right we grab a Fork, and another Secret hidden on the pair of bricks to the top right.

I suppose I can try eating pudding with this fork. Let's hope this place has a fridge.

---


And with that, we climb up to the next part of this game: the Lighthouse basement. Climbing the ladder all the way up, we find a lamp we can turn on. There's a bunch of them in the game, and they're just there for aesthetic reasons. They aren't used in puzzles.


The tunnel to the right leads to a cave-in and some... thing? Get used to seeing cave-ins, the series is called Submerged Machine for a reason. We can't do anything here yet.


The room left of the first room of the Lighthouse basement has a very sneaky Secret, hidden behind a slightly cracked wall tile. Let's go further left before we take the stairs up.


I can change the switch on this viewer, but it doesn't seem to do anything. The next Secret sits on the height adjustment knob.

The only place to go is further up.

Yet another Secret in the rubble, to the left of the plank in front.

---


This area is the Lighthouse's first floor. Don't mind the message in the first picture, it's still from the previous room. There is a new Secret here, on top of the lamp. We'll get back to that metallic door later.

How big is this place, anyway? I can't even tell if I'm still underground or not.


In this room we can grab a Pamphlet. I think the typos are fixed in the HD version of the game.

This place is a tourist attraction? Or it was one. It looks abandoned now...

By the way, adding this pamphlet to what we learned from the diary page last game, this Kent has both a waterfall and a lighthouse. The wiki editors did their homework, and apparently there are several places called Kent in the US and the UK that have one of them, and some that might have both, but there's no perfect match. I think it's most likely the in-game Kent is just fictional.

Let's look at the nice picture on the wall, and then go further right.

I don't think it's normal for heaps of soil to come in through a first floor window. But there's a Secret sitting on the triangular stone to the right, so I don't mind.

Let's return to the stairs from the basement and go further left.

RTL
There's another sneaky Secret on top of the window frame. And two more rooms to explore.


Behind the left door there's this reading room. Let's turn the light on and read that note.

Cross-dimension door? Whoever writes these notes is making less and less sense.

We'll see some more of Einstein the cat later. He's my favorite character.


The right door is locked, but we can open it with the Room Key we found in the pipe down in the dungeon. We get a Sewer Key from the hook. You can try to open the tap or flush the toilet, but it turns out there's no water.

Before we explore the rest of upstairs, let's go back down and check out the Lighthouse sewers.

---

♫ Thumpmonks - Submachine 2 - Sewers


RTL
We passed the entrance earlier. The sewers are actually quite large and complicated, it's easy to get lost. Screenshots would just be confusing, so I grabbed this map from the wiki and edited it a bit.


We enter at the top right. The place marked 4 is where we grabbed the room key.


3 is the key we couldn't get to before. It's the 2nd Floor Key. 1 and 2 are both Secrets that are easy to find if you explore the sewers well.


In the dead end at 5 we find a Positive Coil.


The letters indicate rooms. There's a horizontal tube with something inside at C, and some kind of panel at B. The panel is a puzzle. If you push a button, all buttons in a + shape around it light up. It's one you can get stuck on for a while, but if you know the answer you can solve it in four moves.


This opens up the other tube, allowing us to grab the Switch Handle.


Finally, room A seems to be part of the dungeon. It has a Secret in the little cubbyhole to the right, number 12 in case you haven't been counting. There's also the Letter to Liz.

The note writer seems quite serious about his dimensional pathways. I've seen so much strange stuff already. Maybe they aren't crazy after all?

We got both a name and an initial here. I think we can conclude Elizabeth is a friend or a relative of 'm'.


We're done with the sewers now. Before we can go to the second floor, it's a good idea to make a quick detour to the crawlspace in the basement, to insert the Handle and pull it. We'll see what that does in a bit.

---

♫ Thumpmonks - Submachine 2 - Lighthouse


This is the actual Lighthouse tower. We grab the Negative Coil lying at the bottom before we continue up.


We use the 2nd Floor Key from the sewers to open this door. Let's go to the left first.


Now, this is interesting. We found the second part of the diary. Have the complete entry:

Why the hell would anyone want to bury an entire Lighthouse? Seems I'm really stuck in here. Let's hope the tip is still above ground. It has to be, because I can still breathe, right?

And more and more pieces are coming together, but every piece is also making the mystery greater. At least we got a name now. Our note and diary writer is a guy named Mur.

Confusingly, Mateusz, the game designer, also went with the nickname of Mur in these early days, making fans think the character was an author-insert. Later on Mateusz made clear he doesn't consider Mur to be very much like himself. For one, Mateusz never claimed to have a third arm.


RTL
We can turn on the radio to the bottom right. It's mostly static, but sometimes a small shred of music or speech comes through. Nothing comprehensible, though. To the left, we can find the Movie Memory.


I'm going to skip the right door for a bit and climb the tower further instead. The switch in the basement we pulled earlier turned that ladder 90 degrees, so that we can climb it. Up here, let's go left, and climb the ladder there.


A four-digit number puzzle, just like in the first game.

By now, we've seen all the clues required to find the answer to this one, so I'm going to end the update here, and leave it to the thread to find the answer. If you know, please give others an opportunity to guess as well. Use spoiler tags if you like.