FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Gunka]

Hey, this is a pretty neato arcade game! It's rather simple, but the physicality of swinging around the ball and chain is incredibly addictive, satisfying, and deceptively deep: for example, you can choose to thrust it forward instead of swinging it around to avoid collateral damage, but it can be tricky to pull off. I wish it had a bit more to it, like more enemy types, boss fights, or whatever, but what's here is fun!

As a side note: I felt really silly once I realized I could just walk over the cats to pick them up and get them outta the way. I thought I just needed to avoid them, but it was a nightmare when so many were on screen at once!

[Bloodlust: Santa Monica (Definitive Edition)]

Wow, pretty neat game! Always interesting to see how creative demakes get in representing the original material, and to see Vampire Bloodlines recreated as a point-n-click adventure is neato: reminds me a lot of SNES Shadowrun which I loved back in the day!

For the most part, the game is cool in a lot of ways: a very rich world with loads of interactions and flavor text, tons of quests and character choices, solid presentation and intuitive design, and so on and so forth. It feels really professionally done! Having said that, though, there were a lot of pain points that stood out to me that got in the way of the fun:

*The biggest problem with the game is the dialogue/text system: it commits the cardinal sin of making it so that when you click when text is filling out, it skips to the next line altogether instead of just fast-forwarding the current line to be completely filled out, then requiring another click to go to the next line. Because of the way its setup here and how text-heavy the game is, its so tedious to have to wait for the text to fill out.

*While I like that the game is incredibly rich with interactions, it can be a bit much: there's so many unimportant people to talk to who say unimportant junk, and get us involved in unimportant quests. I know people enjoy sidequests, but I'd like if they at least stay somewhat aligned with our main goals and vampire culture in general: why the hell is my character offering to help out people with so much meaningless garbage? Don't they have more important things to worry about?

*Some of the puzzles are pretty dumb. For example, there's a dog supposedly blocking the way to the suites, but really he's off to the side: can't we just walk right past him? Even if he was in the way, why in the world can't we distract him with the steak or a frisbee?

*I tried playing as a Nosferatu, but was really disappointed. In the original Bloodlines, playing as Nosferatu makes you approach the game in a completely new and fresh way, having to sneak around through sewers and such. In here, all that happens is everyone gets spooked when you first see them, but are easily convinced by a silly excuse. It's really tiresome to do so everytime and a complete waste of an interesting setting.

*Quest log progression is a little weird in that it shows you information you shouldn't be aware of yet. For example, I haven't even read the note yet, but it's already showing me my next steps of meeting with Mercerius at the suites. Likewise, I went over to the beach during my exploration and suddenly got a new quest telling me that Mercerius wants astrolite from the beach: I haven't even met him yet so why would I know that???

*I really wish that the game told me right at the start that I couldn't save when playing the browser version! I just wasted like 30 minutes, only to realize that I wasn't going to be able to save!

The game definitely has a lot of potential, but some of these errors are pretty major. If they get ironed out, I think this could be excellent!

emontero responds:

Thanks a lot for your feedback! I'll try to address all of the issues in the following update.

[The Bugs Manor 🦋 - Prologue]

Hmm, seems like this could be a decent horror adventure, but I didn't find this prologue that helpful in giving me an idea on how the game is going to play, as it is way too hand-holdy, never allowing me to explore or do anything beyond exactly what it prescribes. The story didn't sell me that much either, being a haunted house lorded over by this jackass who is using monsters to raise dead family members and all those classic cliches we've seen done to death. All that left was the general presentation, which to give it credit, did seem pretty good in terms of pixel art.

If there was one notable aspect, it would be the inventory/interaction mechanics, where it has you hold down the triggers to grab hold of objects. This could be interesting as it could add some nice physicality to handling objects beyond just stuffing them into a pocket dimension inventory as most games do. Unfortunately it seemed a lot more simple than I liked: I thought each trigger would represent a hand, but everything seemed to require both triggers to be held, even when they were activities than can be done with one hand, like opening the cabinet doors. Also, it was quite awkward and tiresome to hold down the triggers when moving around.

As much guff as I'm giving it, I do think the game could shape up into something nice, but I'd say that the written description did a way better job at selling me on the game than this prologue did, because it at least gives me an impression on what the intended gameplay is!

Moonth responds:

Hi, thanks for the feedback.

I'm sorry that the prologue didn't convince you, I hope you like the final game more.

It's true that the story is a cliché of the horror genre: "kids exploring a haunted mansion and discovering the horrors it hides." But I don't think that's bad per se, I've tried to give it narrative charisma through the characters and the setting, but I can understand that there are people who don't like the story for lack of originality.

The full game will make more use of the object interaction system, and I'll also put in the possibility of changing the control from needing to hold down the button, to simply pressing the button to grab/drop an item, for those who find it annoying.

And of course, you will be able to explore the whole house, including the areas that are not accessible in the prologue, so I hope that exploration will be more interesting.

[TAMAGARASHI 1.1]

Interesting experimental horror game! I think I might like it more in theory than in actual execution, but still, not too shabby!

From what I can gather based on my own playthrough, it seems like the intended experience is for you to be creeped out by the situation and just try your best to treat him as nicely as possible, keeping him fed. This eventually results in the prisoner escaping and you being perfectly fine with this, as it was a messed-up situation. Be free!

However, upon seeing that what you got is just one of the many potential endings, your gamer instincts activate, making you seek completion above all else. I gotta get all those achievos! So, you start experimenting: what happens if I don't feed him? What happens if I feed him rusty nails and glass? What about these weird pills I found in the corner? Is there a way I can keep him down just enough so he doesn't escape, but doesn't outright die?

This cycle continues until eventually you take a step back and realize what a crazy nutjob you've become: before you were a nice guy, but now you've embraced the torturer role and become in sync. It's a tale as old as time, seen most famously in games like Undertale's genocide route: just because you can, doesn't mean you have to strive for 'completion'.

So yeah, I like what the game seems to be going for, but it stumbles a bit, in my opinion. I know it's part of the process, but the game just feels so repetitive and simple, and I was really let down with its lack of reactivity since it made the world seem so flat: would've much appreciated if the victim would change their talk response upon being fed, and based on what they were fed. Also, the game just can't help but give the twist away with these hints and tooltips that prod at your guilt, which makes it hard to take it seriously: subtlety is a lost art. Still, not too bad for a short adventure, and a nice proof of concept that can be iterated upon!

[ZOMBIES CAN SING TOO!!!]

Hah, this was surprisingly pretty fun to play around with! Gives me Mario Paint vibes, in that it's not only a neat gadget for making music, but it also has a very whimsical and goofy interface design that makes the act of pressing buttons fun in and of itself. If I were to have any feedback, it would be that it'd be nice if a few of the performers were a bit more subdued and subtle: it felt like everyone was trying to be the leading man when its good to have some backers instead who just deliver strong beats. It's all good, though.

['Lair of the Missing Sock']

Not too shabby!

On one hand, it's a pretty bog-standard action platformer: bit janky and rough, lacking any sort of special spice or quality-of-life features like being able to peek downwards. On the other hand, though, the art and story are very goofy and lively, there's a good variety of enemies and level design, and the boss fight was pretty cool.

Basically, it's not necessarily something I'm going to remember or recommend to people, but it's not something I'd kick outta bed either: it provides a decently fun short adventure and has enough potential that I'd like to see how it evolves in your next installment!

Butzbo responds:

Thanks for the review! Good to know of the aspects of the game which stand out post experience, and others that can be further developed.
Thanks for playing, and great to see you're still at it! (:

[The Device: No$ Ghost Finder]

Hah, this was quite the experience! Not necessarily all in a good way, but a memorable experience nonetheless.

First impressions were a bit rough. For one, call me paranoid, but I'm always a bit reluctant to give out location information and other such data, and two, I had no idea the game was meant to be played on the phone only: my attempts to play it on computer just had it error out for location permissions, not giving me any sort of direction to change devices. It may seem obvious, but I was quite confused for a good few minutes.

Anyway, eventually I sorted everything out and got my own little ghost detector on my phone! It didn't seem to be doing any that special except barking out random garbly words now and then, but I was of the impression that there must be some sort of cool AR puzzle game at play here: maybe if I get the readings up to 100 or so, it'll give me a clear ghostly message that I need to use the symbols on the phone to decipher which will point me to some sort of location/website which I then solve using yadda yadda yadda. So, I set forth into the neighborhood!

Eventually though some hot and cold deduction, I was able to get my ghost detector all the way up to 99.9, which seemed like the highest it could get! Unfortunately, all that I encountered was a fire hydrant: no ghosts, no special message, no puzzle, no nuffin'. None of the random words that were popping up during my walk seemed to have any sort of significant pattern or spooky message either. I suppose this is accurately recreating toys of old, but it didn't make it any less disappointing.

So yeah, a bit let-down, but nevertheless I admire your creativity with this and hope you continue to experiment: last year's phone adventure game was great, for example!

alsoknownas1 responds:

As always, thanks for the review. Getting your feedback is honestly one of our biggest motivations to qualify for monthly voting. You always engage with a project on its on terms, from striving epic to ersatz happy meal toy. Apologies that it took a bit of unraveling to figure out which of those we were going for this time. We always try to take all of your feedback onboard, but communicating that better will definitely be the key takeaway for our next more esoteric project, and there will be more. We're definitely going to continue to experiment, rest assured.

We're forever grateful for you championing GoTW. We have a bunch of super special projects coming up, but we're definitely still working on larger scale projects in this coming year.

It might sound funny, but apologies for your taking a--perhaps--needless walk. :) Hopefully, it was pleasant despite the absence of ghosts.

[Scary Scuffle 3D]

Hmm, seems like it has the potential to be a fun, goofy brawler, but in its current state, it's more like an early alpha or prototype, lacking a unique angle or significant pizazz.

As said, there's a decent foundation here: I like the different arenas and running around chucking objects at each other and all that jazz. But the game always seems to devolve into a messy brainless mashfest, as the movesets don't seem to have any sort of real strategic depth to them. Why bother blocking, for example, if you aren't able to gain any sort of advantage against an attacking player for making a smart decision? You may as well just attack him as well and slap it out. Would definitely love it if characters had their own special moves, and if the arenas had special events that would happen to help increase the chaos and push players together more, such as meteors raining from the sky in the UFO level and so on.

I realize that my feedback probably isn't ideal because I came from this at a single-player angle, but I still think most of it is applicable. Still, something to consider, as human opponents could change some things around (but not that significantly, in my opinion).

DaemonPlus responds:

Thank you for the well thought out feedback! Very close to my postmortem of the project too. I wish we gave ourselves more time... But learnt SO much under pressure. :)

[HALLOWEEN HUSTLE!]

Hmm, the nostalgic vibes in this are quite strong: I seriously felt like I was taken back in time, so kudos on representing the era so accurately! Unfortunately, as stylish as it is, I just didn't find the gameplay that fun, with most of the games just being incredibly simplistic and unchallenging. Even worse was all the technical problems: the ant panic minigame suffered from confusing hit detection, and the final car minigame broke for me, putting me in an endless loop down an empty street. I think it has potential for a fun little adventure, but yeah, I found it way too janky and unpolished in its current state.

Also c'mon, how you gonna let us play dress-up with Appy, but then have 'em go back to being undressed for all the other cutscenes?

[ENABLE]

An all-around solid puzzle game experience! Great presentation, interesting core concept of sliding blocks which evolves in challenging ways, chill vibes, and all-together just feels smooth and polished!

If I were to have one gripe, it would be the inclusion of the time limit around the half-way point. Two aspects of this stick in my craw:

1) If you don't think about it strongly, the time limit can seem like a fun evolution of challenge since it forces you to think fast. But actually, it's a completely fake evolution that adds nothing to the challenge, because there are no actual stakes. So what if time runs out? You don't have any lives, and the puzzle will remain the same, so technically you can just take your time to figure out the steps for the ideal solution over multiple 'deaths', and then just input it at the start of a run.

2) The inclusion of the time limit adds unnecessary stress to what has so far been a chill experience. Even if you realize the time limit is just fake pressure that means nothing, you still have shattered the chill vibes with a constantly tick-tick-ticking clock going on, adding a bunch of annoyance for no gain.

So yes, while my critique of the time limit might seem like a nitpick in some sense, and the game is still plenty fun, I think it is something that should be pointed out. It just doesn't feel well thought-out, like you were scrambling to figure out some sort of way to increase the challenge and, lacking any real creative ideas, just stuffed in an ol' reliable standby.