FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Homecoming]

Damn, this is quite the short and sweet journey you've crafted here! Well, sweet as in it is a very memorable and powerful experience, not sweet for the actual content, which is anything but (and I wouldn't have it any other way, gimme that raw darkness)!

From a technical perspective, there's a lot to like here. While typical visual novels are just talking heads over static backgrounds and can be rather stale and lead to emotional disconnect due to the limited poses not having enough variety to match all the nuances, this blows them outta the water with an impressive amount of stylish animations and various effects that only serve to elevate the emotions on display and give it a real cinematic flair overall that enraptured me.

The content was also some pretty powerful stuff, and despite the game being rather short, I felt like it didn't feel too much like it was on 'fast-forward' and lacking punch from such an aspect as I've seen happen to other short stories. There was a lot to resonate and feel familiar with, and it was certainly interesting how, without much context or a peek into their history, it can be easy to initially side with the mother in feeling like the protagonist is overreacting, but at the same time when you hear the mother say that she wants to, sigh, not bring up that 'gender' stuff, you can take a guess that there's a lot more of that faux-politeness dogwhistle old-people-stuck-in-their-ways just-asking-questions sexism that's been going on for years which is much more frustrating and realistic than your typical overt screaming sexist strawmen depiction.

The ending is a bit of a surprise: when I first experienced it, it was definitely a 'wait, what, that's it?' moment. I mean, don't get me wrong, I wasn't expecting everyone to talk it over, reconcile and walk into the sunset, but boy was it weird as heck how sudden of a stop it was! Still not quite sure how to feel on it. Part of me wants to feel like it was very intentional and powerful, similar to something like how No Country for Old Men also chose to omit showing certain scenes and denying the audience closure for reasons, but another part of me feels like the story just hasn't, I dunno, emotionally closed the loop or whatever. Pondering on it.

It's silly and you're probably sick of hearing it since you've ever acknowledged it in the description, but yes, it does almost feel like this game is more movie than game. No, not every visual novel needs choices and paths and puzzles to qualify for game status or anything like that, but still. I mean jeez, you can't even control the text in the game: it proceeds at its own pace and won't fast-forward if you try to click while it's filling out, for example. Anyway, it's not that important and I could be missing the point, but would love if there was some more powerful use of the medium to elevate this experience somehow. Obviously you can get more creative, but maybe it could be something like presenting nice and mean dialogue choices when talking to the mother but being unable to click on the nice ones to represent the inner turmoil: I remember Night in the Woods doing some scenes like this, like when Mae was drunk and trying to talk to Bea and despite best efforts to say good things they just didn't come out right.

So yeah: high-quality experience overall, love the effort into the cinematics, love the raw personal emotions, puzzled at the ending and wish there was more story and gameplay but still found it memorable nonetheless. Thanks for sharing, and if you watch the review, I'm hoping it will be amusing to watch an old fool like me try to keep up, haha! Ugh, this brings me back to playing games like To The Moon and missing obvious elements...ok I'm rambling sorry

Side-note: I was fine with it at first, but now my brain keeps seeing the little nose shade spot as if it was a mustache. Everyone's got mustaches! C'mon, brain, reset already and see it like it was before!

Bleak-Creep responds:

As far as the text speed options go, I'm very amateur at programming in Flash and setting this up the way it is is about the extent of my abilities. I did have Intrapath to get the audio to sync properly when moving backward on the timeline, and I know he could set up text speeds too if I had him go back.

At some point I do want to go back in and add a few little branches to the narrative; not anything that would change the destination, but in the way of little asides that would just give folks a way to discover more about the background of the characters and their relationships. I think it would help it feel a little more "game-y" too.

I also really like the suggestion of making some dialogue choices that you can’t actually pick too. I’ll probably have to incorporate some of that when I go back in.

As for the ending, I've gotten a lot of comments about that one, but I really liked the idea of leaving things just as messy, if not even messier, as they started. There's not really any easy answers to be drawn from a situation like this, but I really just wanted to lay out each of the pieces for the audience and have them determine what "should" be delivered in Clara's speech.

Thank you for playing too! I was hopeful you might like this story, because I know in the past your critique was always that they were a bit too simple, so I'm happy to know I've finally muddied it up enough. :)

[Eat Spajeje 2: Back for Seconds]

Heh, amusing little April Fool's game! Good for a brief little chuckle at its goofy and energetic presentation and concept, but if I were to be serious, there's not much to it. Wish the feeling of eating spajeje was a bit more fun and responsive where I could control the tempo of bites directly with my clicks like a typical clicker game: didn't like how I needed to wait until the bite was completed to click again. Looking forward to Money Man!

Ant responds:

Yeah it’s just an April fools game, nothing special here.

[Wibby's Adventure]

Hmm, this game does have a lot of potential going for it. The intro was certainly memorable with the way the music cuts out and blood goes everywhere when you munch your first enemy, and there were other moments of horror intrigue like the second phase of the final boss. The system where you can modify your attacks by combining passives like some sort of Noita spell-crafting was interesting too. There's also booba, for what that's worth.

However, I just found the game to be incredibly half-baked and very frustrating. Controls were a nightmare, particularly with the way jumping works where you have no air control and bumping into a wall completely kills your momentum. Enemies were inconsistent with their contact damage and have slow annoying AI. Camera could get really unfair with allowing enemies off-screen you shoot you or pits being placed right past a transition so you can't react. The spell-crafting system was confusing to figure out with no tutorial or tooltips and felt overly complicated and unnecessary for such a simple game. It was easy to lose power-ups and have no way to get them back, leaving you soft-locked in situations like boss fights (thank god you can at least walk past the tree if this happens there).

All in all, it feels like a game jam experiment that wasn't finished properly and just feels pretty bad: as much as I was intrigued to see what was going down and get to the ending, it was too frustrating.

[Piñata Poppers]

A decent Suika Game clone with some nice art and effects (I like the fusing animation), but nothing exactly memorable at the moment as it's essentially just a reskin. I was hoping that the pinata theme might mean that there is something about breaking them or whatever to add a bit of unique spice, but no, it's ultimately just a visual theme without gameplay consequence.

The game is also a bit glitchy as I got a double game over, once when the game ended and then again shortly after when I was on the title screen and I guess the game kept going? Also the score text is a bit too difficult to read as its bright yellow on bright blue: better contrasting colors or outlines would help here.

At the end of the day, it feels like the kind of mobile game that is made to trick older folk into buying thinking it's the original, or the kind of game you make for your programming 101 class as a first step into game dev. Not bad, but not good either, just serviceable.

UnitedFailures responds:

I appreciate the constructive feedback :)

We originally had a pinata breaking mechanic but removed it because it disrupted the natural difficulty escalation of the game. Maybe will bring it back if we think of a good way to integrate it in.

Our next update that we'll release this weekend will mostly just be implementing the feedback provided by other commenters and patching some bugs (like the one you experienced o_o). Updating the score text is also a good suggestion, I'll take a look at that.

[Nereus]

Pretty neat little arcade game! I had some decent fun, but it didn't take too long for me to get sick of seeing the same geometry over and over. What made it even more awkward was the fact that the random generation would feel very silly, like showing you a chest that you have no way to unlock because you haven't lucked upon a key yet. Another awkward aspect was how every power-up was placed right before something that required its use, turning something that should be exciting to figure out where to use to a rote act. Sure, if you play long enough it starts to bring out some challenging setpieces, but they were few and far-between and it only made the return trip all the more dreadful.

Not bad, but sometimes I wish this was a more hand-crafted precision platformer as it doesn't have the variety to make this endless runner work for me.

[Boxling's Garden]

Hmm, not sure what to think of this as it feels rather unfinished at the moment, like a prototype for a Slime Rancher-esque farming game, but which hasn't closed the loop yet to create an exciting sense of progression. It's cute and all, but it doesn't take long for gathering money from planting seeds and selling boxlings to feel pointless as there's no long-term goal or purpose to build up to. I know it's a game jam game so I'm not expecting a lot due to the small timeframe, but even regarding that, game jams are mostly about experimentation and finding out a rough draft for a great game loop, and that hasn't been established yet here, so it's a bit of a miss.

[Dungeon Heart]

Hmm, it's a decent sokoban-style puzzler with some striking presentation that unfortunately might've hurt my feelings on it as while the stylish visuals really give a great first impression and build it up as if it's going to have some sort of story or sense of importance to it, I couldn't help but feel disappointed when it ends just as it's getting started introducing a new mechanic and with no sense of resolution. It's not necessarily bad or anything, but it's also not that great or memorable, ultimately feeling 'ok' or 'serviceable'. Feels like it just needs a bit more meat on its bones, like some sort of final level where all the mechanics get combined, and some sort of ending story cinematic.

[Space Girls Can't Swim]

This cute visual novel starts off pretty strong with a neat intro, a goofy story and some gratuitous cheesecake, but once I got to the end it ultimately felt a bit unsatisfying and shallow, making me feel like I got clickbaited by booba: a tale as old as time!

That's not to say that the game doesn't show some good effort and design, as there definitely are some aspects that are pretty cool. For example, while it starts off slow, the game really picks up in the amount of unique images and graphics it showcases during the story, which is much more enthralling than just looking at people posing all the time in front of a static background. The story was quite amusing in general, the minigames were an interesting activity, and I also thought that the way the game will continue the story from a loss is a lot more interesting than just giving a game over or restart.

However, as said previously, it started to fall apart for me. The story just felt overly shallow and simplistic with problems being introduced and resolved faster than you can blink, and choices felt pointless, sometimes literally, such as choosing who to explore the hotel with. Considering it's a game about making choices and seeing all the different endings, it's completely absurd that it doesn't have a skip or save/load function to get past stuff you've already seen before. And while I don't like to harp on about typos, this is a visual novel which is all about text, and the script was absolutely flooded with errors: hell, it even got one of the main character's name incorrect constantly (Constella, if you're curious)!

CubePunks responds:

Haven't heard anything about typos - It's 32 full pages of text, if you spellcheck the game we'll give you credit.

[Lumera Numbera's PUZZLE POP]

Wow, this was a fantastic and cute little puzzler! Not even quite sure what to say: overall the experience feels very well-crafted in all aspects and I immediately got addicted and just kept on playing! It was quite challenging to rewire my brain to start combos using numbers instead of 1 and 6, as well as utilizing loop-arounds and reverse order. I do like some of the subtle things like how, if you're in the middle of building a combo while time runs out, it will immediately spend your current combo instead of just making you lose. The satisfying way building higher combos results in higher-pitched sounds is a classic, too. Well done!

If I had any complaints, it might be that the tutorial is a bit too quick, only explaining the bare essentials. Don't get me wrong, I like how lite it is and understand that a big wall of text of all sorts of rules will immediately fly out of the players head, so its better to just get to the fun stuff, but I had a lot of confusion understanding why sometimes I was suddenly able to chain similar numbers, and what the heck the gems do and how they are created, and so on. But then again, I feel like I did learn everything about the game, so maybe it was alright and I'm just being silly? But still, even if you don't make it part of the tutorial, I wish there was some sort of optional 'how to play' or 'codex' menu I could willingly access to learn the deeper aspects instead of just relying on potentially washing some of my games to experiment and learn.

[Lampyrinth]

While it does have a certain nostalgic old-school Flash appeal to its visuals and gameplay, I found this pretty underwhelming, as the gameplay has no spice, no sense of challenge, threat or engagement to it, but rather tedious busywork as you just walk around the maze, pull a lever to get a key, go back to that same lever to pull it to open the way to the key door, unlock it, and so on, over and over. It just felt so tiresome.

Considering 'lamp' is in the name, I was really hoping that the game was doing something unique with light and shadow: perhaps the lamp would serve as a time limit, perhaps you would reflect light off mirrors to solve puzzles, or use the light as a limited resource to fight enemies, and so on. Instead, the only thing that seems to happen is mazes get so dark that you can't see the effects of buttons and levers you use, adding even more tedium and backtracking to a game that already has it. Sure, it's impressive with the way shadows are generated by the light, but that only makes this game a neat tech demo, not fun.

Obviously my heart goes out to you that the game files were lost so I'm slightly forgiving of elements like the FPS counter getting in the way, but I still want to be honest with what we got, and if I'm being honest, the core gameplay would likely still be quite unappealing to me even if it got polished up a bit more. It's not necessarily bad, but not really good either, just merely serviceable.

I did like some of the small fancy touches it had, such as the way menus are actually levels that your character moves around in to select options.

Veinom responds:

I was going for Zelda-like dungeon puzzles, but with a lay-back feeling, simple controls, without time restrictions or enemies. The challenge is to reach the end and find all the fruits and diamonds. You also need to be fast, or you lose points.

The game loop might seem a bit boring to you, but it was mainly made for people who like searching for secret items, while using their memory and thinking, in any pace they see fit. Thank you for taking the time to tell me your constructive thoughts.