FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[2-Bit Explorer]

Yowza, I loved 1-Bit Explorer a lot and this seems to be much of the same, but with some interesting improvements and quality-of-life, such as the ease of inventory management, active item usage, and new camera that allows for big spanning environments instead of just room-by-room. I'm definitely down for it, and I immediately got addicted to exploring and solving the various puzzles, some of which are the obvious ones that require items, but others more subtle and knowledge/observation-based such as noticing that eyes point towards illusion walls: clever stuff! It's definitely pretty intimidating what with the big map and the tons of spots I'm going to have difficulty remembering to go back to once I get something, necessitating loads of backtracking, but I'm all for it!

Overall I'm very pleased and looking forward to playing more, but if I had to have any feedback so far, it'd be some minor things like:

*While using the items such as the sword more directly is nice, it's a rather slow and stiff animation to do so: makes me much less inclined to cut all those bushes as it can be so tedious, and because it shares a button with interaction, it can also be very awkward when you're trying to do so but end up pulling out the sword instead. I'd hate to see someone be so annoyed with how slow it is that they don't experiment enough to realize you can chop ivy to reveal doors, for example!

*Movement can be a bit too fast at times: sometimes I like it because it means it's much less tedious to explore the world and backtrack everywhere, but other times I hate it because I go a bit too quickly when I'm trying to delicately weave through pitfalls and other such traps.

*As said, the game can be pretty dang overwhelming at times: so much to see and do makes it so easy to get lost and lose track of whatever you were doing. There's also plenty of times where I'm not quite sure whether I don't have what I need or I do but I'm just not doing it right (so many unsure dead-ends) or times where I don't know the effect of what I've done, like turning in the music box to the sister. Not sure what's needed here: maybe some sort of 'last item received', or a journal or map or whatever? Also might just be what it is and you gotta deal with it, haha!

Great stuff you got here!

[Inn & Out]

Oh man, I was really psyched to play this game as it gives a great first impression from recreating classic retro arcade vibes so accurately...but I unfortunately ended up feeling really let down!

There certainly is a lot of craftmanship on display here and I do think that, in a vacuum, it's a pretty neat arcade game with a lot of pizazz to it. But I couldn't help but be flabbergasted when, upon completing the first level, the second level was exactly the same as the first! It doesn't even stop there, as the third and fourth are the same as well too!

I can understand having the same general level layout recycled a few times, but you need to shake things up someway to give a sense of progression and spicy variety! You know, change the location of the doors and powerups and enemy spawns, increase enemy density, decrease amount of powerups, and for gods sake, change the AI! I was going crazy with the way the game kept giving me deja vu: every level it was watching the mouse and porcupine come down the elevator and go to the right, then the roach comes down and goes to the left, and then the bee, over and over and over, it's the same damn pattern every time! What's the point in playing!

Yes, eventually it does shake things up by introducing a bonus level and finally changing the level layout with something new afterwards, but it takes way too long to do so, and on any other day, I would've quit before getting to that point, safe in my assumption that the game just keeps looping the first level forever!

It didn't help either that the difficulty of the game felt very strange as well: powerups seemed to be in too generous of a supply and made it too easy to clear the board of all threats. The only difficulty of the game was the fact that it doesn't give you a good signal to let you know when your powerup is about to run out, such as through blinking.

I also wasn't a fan of the controls in some instances. For example, I disliked how delicate you need to be when going into elevators, having to come to a full stop and then hitting up after waiting a moment: feels very unresponsive and awkward. Why can't I just hit up when I'm running past an elevator to get into it smoothly, similar to how I can close doors by hitting the button when running past them? There's also a weird bug where you can get stuck on stairs, and the way your forward momentum is immediately killed when you jump and touch a wall is super annoying, especially in the bonus stage.

So yeah, unfortunately, this feels like a real case of style over substance for me: it looks pretty, but the gameplay just isn't fun and is incredibly repetitive. As a big fan of games like Mappyland and Tapper and Burger Time and so on, this should've been right up my alley! But that's all the more reason I'm so critical of it in failing to live up to them.

[Toilet Paper Please!]

Hmm, it's got some stuff going for it that surprised me, but I'm not really feeling this game that much, unfortunately!

As said, while it is a rather simple game, it did surprise me with how it changed things up in some of the later levels with different mechanics being introduced and some interesting level layouts, such as the various power-ups like the toilet flush and when it opened up the side walls to let you cross-over. I also liked some of the nice touches like how your character gets... progressively messy as they take damage: much more interesting than your typical health bar.

But overall it just feels like an overly simplistic, repetitive and boring game that can't shake the feeling that it was something created in a 'programming 101' class. The first impression was pretty bad, where you go through several levels which are way too easy and dull, to suddenly having an incredible difficulty spike in the form of swarms of crap, whereupon it suddenly goes back to being easy again for several levels, all while never introducing anything significantly new to keep my interest: it just felt like the overall quality was bad and the game was not crafted with a good sense of flow and progression to it.

I wanted to keep playing so I could get to some of the later stuff, like the boss fight which is hinted at in the screenshots, but as said, I just couldn't bring myself to continue as the level quality felt so out of wack and inconsistent, mostly trending towards being too simple and boring. If the levels were to be redesigned to have a better sense of escalation and introduce more unique mechanics, I think this could be decent.

[Knight and Prison of Ice]

Hmm, there's a lot I do like about the game in theory, but something about the execution left me a bit cold, if you pardon the pun.

I do find the whole combat aspect of summoning your sword to make it hit everything during transit to be rather creative and fun, and the additional powerups you can acquire add a bit of variety. The subtle way that the turrets have symbols above them to let you know their shot pattern is also very nice and makes things feel fair. I also found the world, while simple, to have a certain amount of cool flair, like the way you reset by stabbing yourself with the sword. Certainly has a lot of potential!

As said though, I don't know exactly what it is, but the game lost me rather quickly and I just didn't find myself that compelled to go back and replay much. Maybe it's just a bit too dull or not juicy enough: the constant turret enemies can be a bit boring, and the dungeon rather repetitive and plain, and the combat doesn't have enough depth. There was also some annoyance where I would get hit by things I felt shouldn't have hit me, such as the tiny lingering darkness particles from the wrath of the dungeon: feels like those things should be superfluous and I should only have to dodge the main body or a significant mass of the darkness. It was also awkward how you could get hit by the wrath of the dungeon when you're standing above it: it's like yes, in a 2D sense I'm technically overlapping with it, but in a 3D sense I shouldn't be getting hurt because I'm not making contact with it, I'm only 'behind' it, if that makes sense.

voidgazerBon responds:

I truly appreciate your feedback. It's very helpful! Thanks a lot.

[DARK SWORD: The Light of Ainn]

Nice to see work continue on this game, but my review is mostly the same as it was before, albeit maybe a bit more positive.

I certainly do enjoy what the game is going for: the dark, brooding atmosphere is very mysterious and intriguing, the bosses are challenging and have all sorts of crazy patterns to contend with, combat is cool with a nice layer of strategy due to a back-and-forth between melee and ranged to manage energy, and so on. It's also got some nice touches like collectable lore and subtle effects like the way your character explodes when you're out of energy to help signal that you're out. it's basically a nice boss rush game, reminiscient of Titan Souls, Shadow of the Colossus or Furi!

However it still does feel rather clunky and unpolished. The hitboxes and the graphics for certain elements felt really awkward and inconsistent which led to a lot of confusion as to where objects actually are in space, making me take damage when I thought I shouldn't, or not being able to hit an enemy that my sword looks to be making contact with, and so on. It's important for a challenging game to be really airtight and polished with its controls and systems to feel like its fair, and this currently doesn't feel like that.

In the more minor aspects, I find the text very difficult to read as it looks to have lost a lot of definition from compression or something, and I also find it really awkward how you can control your character still during transitions or menus and so on when you shouldn't be able to: for example when I'm at the shop and clicking on buttons, I shouldn't be hearing my little guy swinging his sword around. There's also some weird bugs, AI glitches, sound balance is off, and so on.

I still think the game is rather fun and impressive and somewhat acceptable in its current state, but I can't help but want more from it. It's definitely getting there bit-by-bit and I'm looking forward to seeing the final version of this!

[Mimic Lens (Dungeon Crawler Jam 2024)]

Hmm, I do like what the game seems to be going for here, where you're exploring this dungeon and collecting audio logs that provide clues as to ascertain the target you need to photograph: it's like an interesting fusion of a detective game with a dungeon crawler!

However, it definitely felt rather clunky with its execution. It was difficult to figure out how anything worked without any sort of instruction or tutorial, and the game just lacked a sense of polish and a lot of features felt superfluous or unfinished. There was a lot of lacking quality-of-life features as well, especially around the logs: when you're trying to check on something specific, it was very annoying how there was no text transcript or subtitles for the logs, and you couldn't use the timeline bar to skip ahead, and you couldn't turn it on and listen while you're moving around since it stops right when you close the journal.

The fact that it was static was a disappointment as well: if it could somehow be constructed so that there were random clues, targets, dungeon layout and so on, it would be more exciting and replayable instead of a one-and-done and exploitable through brute force trial-and-error. I could really see this game becoming something like Shadows of Doubt with enough time!

Not too bad for a game jam game as while it didn't necessarily prove its concept (most likely because it bit off more than it could chew in the short dev time) it was enough to be intriguing, and that's better than getting something that's more technically competent but boring.

[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.