FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Trial of Temptation]

A pretty funny and goofy game! A little letdown that it wasn't much more than a visual novel/choose your ending, and that it didn't attempt to make any real non-obvious tricks that you could potentially fall victim to (Earthbound did this type of trial way better for example), but it was still a funny experience. Not to say that it doesn't justify being a game or anything, as I liked how there was stuff like secret endings being influenced by walking away from it all and the like which were fun to find. I also appreciated that the game offered little niceties like being able to skip the intro which helps you unlock other endings on replays without fuss. Short and sweet, but I can't help wishing it was a mallet-based platformer where you dodge temptations that I thought it was going to be at first (but I guess that's my fault, haha).

[Had]

Not too shabby: certainly not a bad game, but I have to admit I felt a little let-down compared to other Kultisti games, as unfair as that is to influence my judging. I still had a pretty good time and found the game sufficiently polished/juicy and a with a decent amount of mechanics, but I really had to force myself to finish this one since it just felt like a less interesting version of these small platform Kultisti games I've seen many times before (I know it's not exactly the same but it's just similar vibe and aesthetic). It didn't help either that I found the jumping frustrating at times since it was difficult to keep track of the characters shadow and position due to how dark and tiny everything was.

At the very least, it was interesting to see it tie back into epolevne: is this the start of the kultisti cinematic universe?

[I Wish I Were the Moon (remastered)]

Quite the interesting puzzler! Was fun to try and figure out the hidden interactables and mechanics behind this weird little game to solve the clues that were put forth. It's like an interactive painting: a nice, cute, short and sweet experience.

[ART TELEPHONE: Holiday Edition]

A bit of a weird experience. I mean, it's a nice art gallery, I suppose, but I felt like it didn't do any work to establish what the context for all of this was, it didn't present itself in an interesting or cool manner to show how it transitioned (maybe fades on top of each others drawing would've been better than slides), and I'm not sure why this is even a game instead of just a single collage art piece on the art portal. At the end of it, I just felt confused, like I was seeing someone else's inside joke. It's like, I was hoping I would get to play Newgrounds version of Gartic Phone, not just see someone's else single set of results: I'm sure everyone who participated had fun, but...

[Starhop]

Cute little game! It's rather short, but it was pretty tough to justify that. Though having said that, unfortunately I did feel like it was somewhat tough in a 'you win if you get more of this enemy than the other type of enemy' RNG kind of tough. Definitely an interesting example of difficulty and risk management in that you have to build your own challenge by adding enemies just to gain money so you can reach the finish: challenging stuff! Could do with a little bit of maybe more tutorialization, and it probably would've been better as a longer game with different enemy types and a more fleshed out strategy/concept and such, but it was short and sweet considering the time limit and could definitely see it being revisited.

[Plug In]

Wow, really neat puzzle game! I like the concept behind it and the various innovations it kept bringing around! Different lengths of cord to contend with, pathing to wrap the cord to keep it elevated above obstacles, plugging and replugging to power things or shock enemies, using the cord as a bungee, bouncing cords, throwing the cord, and so on: this game kept my attention enraptured though the constant evolution of mechanics! Definitely some excellent examples of pacing and level design.

If I had to give it a bit of flak, it'd just be a few nitpicks: it'd be that some of the presentation isn't that great, such as the HUD (especially the way the rope percentage keeps flickering about) and menus being quite bland, and that some of the puzzles, while cool, do kind of solve themselves at times by just instinctually taking the most complicated path, if that makes any sense (maybe there should be more traps and such to force you to ensure you understand it and you're not just autopiloting, but it is kind of just at the beginning). But again, it's all good!

[Taiga Voyage Prototype Demo]

Definitely has some potential, but it's currently a bit of a mixed bag for me at the moment!

The best thing on display here I felt was the charming story and world. Don't get me wrong, it ain't perfect as the story does start a bit slow and unexciting (woo, find a necklace, who am i even?), and doesn't really do anything after establishing the whole knight story, but the world was fun to explore, in particular because it has a lot of objects you can examine with a ton of great flavor text, as well as a lot of NPCs with funny dialogue and nice graphics/presentation. Definitely some solid work there.

One thing I felt should be done is to update the journal. I love the journal as I always find it great when the game helps by keeping notes and synopsis so you can always come back after a break and figure out what's going on. The problem here was the journal didn't update as you made progress: it should definitely add/update text as events unfold, like "a guy at the bar said he saw a slime in the east take the necklace", "the slime bounced away to the north when I tried to take the necklace from it! there's a rock in the way though..." and so on.

In terms of parts that bothered me: the combat system was criminally boring at the moment and an absolute relic. Apologies, but I have a vendetta against these overly simplistic battle systems that just devolve into attack-attack-attack over and over, and right now, that's all this system has. It's painfully outdated, especially since even the most old-school-esque RPGs coming out nowadays have a bit more neat things going on in their combat (like bravely default with the brave/default system, or SMT with its press turn system). You absolutely have to have something more interesting going on with the combat here, or if the combat is going to be this painful and not a focus, maybe have a more interesting way of avoiding it (like sneaking up before or hitting them pre-combat to get an advantage). I was surprised that I didn't see some sort of Undertale-esque system with the combat, given the whole story started off with a divide between genocide and pacifism!

It didn't help either that the combat was painfully slow at a grander level as well: experience points and money was gained at an absolutely glacial pace and made the whole thing even more tedious, forcing me to go back and forth between the bed. I know there are some old-school die-hards that might go for this slow burn and long grind (modern games do tend to give power too quickly and too easily, I'll admit), so its up to you on whether you want to keep that, though.

Anyway, that's the gist for me at the moment: a charming world with some fun dialogue and characters, unfortunately with no great story hook and a painfully slow and repetitive combat grind that isn't worth it. Hope to see this get updated into something great though!

Azeleon responds:

Thanks for playing, and I really appreciate the detailed review!
I completely agree with you on the story and combat; one reason why I decided to ultimately start over was because of the basic and disordered story, as well as the plain, slow combat. I'm glad you enjoyed many of the other aspects though, I've always been a big fan of interactive objects in the world and interesting NPCs in games myself.
There will definitely be improvements to everything in the full game for whenever that comes out in the future, but for the time being, thank you for testing this little demo and giving your input on it!

[Peter the Ant VS Pico]

Haha, fun little game! While it is rather simple in terms of gameplay, I just as well found it rather addicting and fun to get good at dodging the hammers and rack up points to get new characters. For what seems like a joke game, I appreciated the amount of subtle moves (standing up, quick falling) that you could do to dodge skillfully and the energetic/goofy presentation to it all, including the charming dynamic music.

That being said, at the end of the day, the game lost its appeal rather quickly. For the most part, I'm not a gacha guy, but even if I was, I feel like the game didn't provide enough interesting differences in the characters I unlocked (cmon, I got the FunKing and he doesn't even have his iconic sounds, or a derivative thereof?), nor did it have an explosively satisfying unlocking animation when rolling the gacha, to keep me going in that regard. Looking past the gacha, I also found it frustrating that the game didn't seem to reward me for getting further or getting more skilled: I expected to start getting a coin multiplier if I held on for a long time, but I didn't, and that killed my motivation since then it seemed pointless.

Anyway, a good time was had while it lasted. Happy Peter the Ant day!

[One More Hint]

Bit of an odd duck, this game. For one, there was a lot of control issues with this game that really annoyed me. For one, I couldn't even start the game for the longest time since it didn't accept my inputs: for some reason, it expected me to hold the Z key to start instead of just pressing it. From then I did notice that inputs always felt really laggy and delayed, so maybe there's something weird going on at the core for reading inputs. Learning the game was weird as well since, for some reason, despite 'One More Hint' being the primary title game, the tutorial initially teaches you one of the other games instead: why?

Anyway, looking past the initial confusion and wonky controls, the game itself was also a bit mixed. I did like the concept of reading through various clues to find out the culprit, and I liked the little touches like the culprits speaking as you hover over their options. However, and maybe this is just me being stupid, but the clues didn't make much sense to me at times. Mostly they always felt like vague, emotional, circumstantial statements, instead of laws or facts that you can deduce from, and I never felt I could use them to reach a solid conclusion (maybe that's 'realistic' but doesn't make it fun). It didn't help either that the game kept paging away automatically while I was still trying to read the clues, making the whole experience even more frustrating. Would much prefer if the clues would fit on a single page or if we could control when it flips pages. It's kind of pointless as well since if you fail, you can just go back and eliminate the answers one-by-one since the puzzle doesn't change and it'll reward you the same in the end anyway.

[Haccer]

Pretty fun game! I definitely feel like there is a solid concept at its core: the depleting energy forces you to dig as fast as possible to keep it up, but that makes it so that you need to think fast, either avoiding bombs when possible or ensuring you don't trap yourself in a position where you get screwed by a bomb wall/chain reactions. There was some minor confusion at the start where I didn't know why bombs only blew up bombs and me and not the ground surrounding them, but for the most part it was all good.

As nice as the core was, though, I did find myself losing interest rather quickly. Obviously this isn't that bad since it's not the most complex game and nothing lasts forever, but I didn't stay with it as long as I thought I should. I think it kind of came down to the randomness of the game and the lack of a sense of progression. While most games start easy and slowly build up the challenge by introducing more types of obstacles in more complex patterns, this seemed to just be totally random, sometimes starting very overly difficult. And as neat as the screen rotations were, it kind of felt like they should've lead to more, or maybe not rotate at all to change the direction up instead of return to status quo. Second was that it kind of felt like the game switched between modes of whether it was just a rapid-fire action game where you go fast and cut around bombs, or a puzzle game where you get dead-ended by a bomb wall you need to defuse in a careful manner: both were nice, but sometimes it felt like the game leaned on one side harder due to the RNG, making it feel odd when the opposite reared its head, I dunno.

AnderssonKev responds:

First off, thank you for playing my game! The points you bring up are very valid. I think that if I would take the concept and improve it I would work in the progression so it's not a risk of it being filled with bombs early on. Then introduce some visual changes as you get deeper and possibly add some new smaller obstacles so you feel that things are getting different. Also work on the timer a bit so it's okay to stop and "solve a scenario"