FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Sentient Cleaning Device]

Wow, quite the unique game! Fascinating 'limited perception' idea for a horror game that somewhat reminded me of games like Scanner Sombre or Perception, or many others that use mechanics like camera flashes for lighting dark areas.

While you'd think having to slowly print a black and white pixelated image every few seconds would be incredibly tedious (and in a way, it is) I was nevertheless enthralled at the novelty of navigating the world in such a unique way. Really impressed at the commitment to the bit as well, even modeling certain aspects like how turning while the picture is printing will distort it with new data, and having a great soundscape that helps for determining your location. All in all felt very slick and well-made!

Speaking of the soundscape, the other thing it does well is creating a very spooky game. Never being quite sure what you're looking at or hearing due to the low-quality distortion, worried what might show up on your next picture, and even second-guessing yourself at whether something moved or if it was just your imagination: the game had me on tenterhooks the whole time for some sort of big twist.

If I were to have any complaints, it's that the game did feel a bit short, one-note, and lacking some sort of story with an impactful end. As I just said, the game does a great job at delivering a dreadful atmosphere, and while part of me is glad that it didn't jumpscare me or anything, I was a bit disappointed that there wasn't some sort of cool story progression with events like maybe once you're done cleaning and go back to the charger, suddenly you notice the door is now closed, and then you notice the body gone that was there before, and so on and so forth.

But then again, I do kind of like that it just asks questions and doesn't provide answers and still scared me even without destroying my ears, so maybe it actually should be considered a positive that it tricked me into being scared when there was nothing to be scared of? I'm rambling: whatever, neat game!

[Dude - The Deck Swabber]

Hey, pretty neat game! Feels like a legit bootleg NES game that you'd see from some company like Color Dreams or Wisdom Tree. For the most part the game feels pretty well-constructed and delivers some decent sokoban-style puzzles. I was impressed at how some levels intuitively taught certain rules from their layouts, like how sponges work in that they can stop you from sliding (but be careful of the fact that you still push it a tile in doing so).

Now, as much as I liked it, you'll notice that I compared it to bootleg games instead of proper games you'd get from Konami or something (boy, times have changed huh). And that's because it is a bit lacking in some regards:

For one, it is quite a drab game due to a lack of juice. I was disappointed that certain actions like using a sponge on a oil spill just had the sprites immediately disappear: would've much preferred if it produced a satisfying soap bubble explosion sprite and a pop/wiping sound effect. Similarly, it'd be cool if when you finish the objectives of a level, the bucket sparkles or glows in a pleasant way, similar to when you collect everything in a game like Solomon's Key. Little things like that would help to liven up the game considerably.

Another aspect that bothered me slightly was the pace and difficulty curve of the game: it just didn't feel like it was delivering a solid and addictive engagement due to the difficulty suddenly dipping back down at times, lots of puzzles having too much wiggle room, and the game not introducing enough new mechanics or twists. I imagine it eventually gets better, but I found myself getting a bit tired around level 10 or so due to the slow pace.

It's still a nice game, but if I were to be brutally honest, I'd say it is merely nice, instead of being something great or memorable. Not a crime or anything, but it did make me wish for more!

RichardOz responds:

I thank you very much! Regarding the rest, I totally understand the examples you gave and what you said and I personally agree with it in part, I don't agree with it fully because there are two factors about it, the first factor is that the game is a game for NES and that alone means really optimizing everything to the maximum to have a good product, visual effects, sounds and all, the second factor is that although you can do something more elaborate even for NES I couldn't do it because basically I am not a programmer but a cartoonist and animator, I used a game engine which made the development of the game even more limiting, I love to work on the details when I make something so believe me when I say that I did everything I could to be able to take advantage of the game engine to the maximum, you can try the engine yourself.

Regarding the difficulty of the game it was intentional that you had to have easier and harder rooms to detach yourself from the world and experience 30 minutes of carefree play as Dude, he doesn't care if something in a room is too dirty or not too dirty, while whistling he cleans up and is carefree, this let's say was the main purpose, to play and relax without having to think too much, so well-balanced difficulty without rage or anything like that, there is to consider that the game doesn't even have a save so you would have to complete everything in one run and so increasing the difficulty would have stressed the player, which I was trying to avoid
I will play difficult games, but that's not it.

While about the fact that I bored you already at room 10 I am sorry, I will work and study even more to improve my next games, you can already have a look at my portfolio, follow me on twitter or join the discord to stay updated on the next news about Dude - The Deck Swabber and other games

"merely nice" is not so bad for a small game of this scale! I thank you again!

[Cursed Dreams]

I really liked the concept behind this game: going into the dreams of each family member who has their own themed minigame is promising for helping to keep things fresh and interesting with a lot of variety. And I did like that walking around the house wasn't just a vehicle to get to the family members: there were a lot of interesting interactables with fun flavor text for people who want to explore!

But at the end of the day, all of the minigames felt incredibly simplistic, bland, and one-note: sure, there were a lot of them, but it was a real quantity over quality situation where none of them were particularly fun or deep, all of them feeling like they put the bare minimum effort in design. Some of them at least kept things short to match their mechanical depth, but then you had games like the sister's top-down shooter which overstayed its welcome: seeing that I had to kill 100 dolls made me practically quit right then and there. If I were to sum it up, this felt like a clone of Action 52: more games doesn't always equal more fun!

Pitigamedev responds:

Thank you for the detailed feedback as always. I hope one day I will make a game you will 100% enjoy.

[Parking Ticket Mayhem]

Hah, quite the amusing game! I've always thought that if I were rich, I'd love to have a room filled with breakable objects and weapons where I could de-stress, so the idea of creating a rage game is right up my alley. And considering we're on Newgrounds, this feels like a close brother to the Assassin games where you can really get out what's grinding your gears.

At the same time, however, the game was a bit less satisfying than I hoped. While it was amusing to smash cars and even discover that I could smash buildings and shoot as well, the amusement was short-lived as it soon became quite monotonous due to the lackluster feedback and rather shallow world that doesn't allow for much creativity. Even more disappointing was that, after taking the time to smash everything, the only reward afterwards were just more of the same cars falling from the sky to smash once again, instead of something new or game-changing.

I understand this game likely didn't have lofty ambitions or anything and I don't mean to be down on it, but it's a great concept and I would've loved if this game just had more to make the act of smashing more satisfying. More detailed damage modeling, hit-freeze and knockback and screenshake, more explosive effects, charge attacks that absolutely blow shit away to a ridiculous degree, more fun toys to wreak house with: just take everything to eleven, like a modded version of Teardown or Saints Row!

Anyway, hope you're feeling better now that you got it out, haha.

Raccoon-Formality responds:

hey, yeah, i made a comment on your youtube video but i'll just respond here also.

thank you for playing, i really appreciate that and the feedback. I made this game in a week right after finishing another project so yeah it's not exactly my magnum opus.

i am feeling better but i do still have a lot of rage for a continuation at some point. i want to do like a directors cut and release it on steam or something, idk, i'm really just going with the flow.

also, i'm quite new to newgrounds lol, I usually just post my games on itch.io but this one was doing very well on itch so i thought i'd try some other platforms as well. So yeah, i am not very well versed in the LORE of newgrounds lol.

anyways, thank you, have a nice day

[Ruby & Rusty Save the Crows]

Wow, quite the impressive game: legit feels like a real Nintendo platformer you'd find in the wild, down to the great ending credits that showcase all of the monsters you encountered!

I have to admit, I had a rough time at first due to the game feeling overly laggy / delayed / clunky / awkward, a feeling that unfortunately seems quite common with these GB Studio games: I know it's likely an intentional engine limitation, but it nevertheless bothers me as it led to a lot of unfair feeling deaths and difficulty with the controls. To run salt into the wound, there were a lot of those flowers that were hidden behind one-chance enemy bounces that, while understandable given they are an optional challenge, really ruffled my feathers, haha.

In spite of all that, though, I kept playing this game all the way to the end as it just feels so darn professionally made: gorgeous graphics, great level design with so much variety in obstacles and mechanics, a nice balance of difficulty where levels are nice and bite-size while also containing tons of bonus challenges, cool boss fights, and overall a very charming and cute aesthetic. Well done!

[Square Ways]

Decent little arcade game: I like the minimalist and stylish presentation and the bits of juicy effects here and there like how it flashes when you die for example, but while it can be good fun for a bit to maintain your course, weaving through blocks as it gets faster and faster, it quickly becomes old and I didn't feel compelled to play it more than 2 times.

Wish it had a bit more meat to it, like perhaps not only increasing speed, but also changing up the obstacles or introducing new mechanics and so on. It also didn't help that some of the effects, like the zoom-in on turning and then subsequent zoom-out when finished turning, could be a very nauseating back-and-forth when you are making minor adjustments to your turns: it's not a problem for big turns, but those rarely happen.

Also, of all the words you could've chosen for hi-score-keeping, why "higher"? I would've accepted "high" or "highest" as they are both appropriate, but "higher"? It's like you chose the worst option you could've! It is a silly thing to nitpick, but I just found it amusing.

[Fall from Space]

Hmmm, this is quite the interesting Fallout/Zelda 2 adventure you got here!

Was definitely quite impressed with it in a lot of respects, obviously starting out strong with the very stylish and cinematic (albeit a bit over-indulgent) opening that plays when you start. But the game itself also had such a huge scale and variety to it: side-scrolling action sequences alongside top-down exploration, so many people to talk to and objects to examine with loads of flavorful text, a huge world map with all sorts of locations and random encounters, tons of secrets hidden around, lots of quests and unlockables...it goes on and on! Clearly, a lot of effort and love has been put into crafting a huge adventure here!

Having said that, though, the game also felt incredibly awkward, stuttery and laggy to play at times. Combat was particularly bad feeling with no satisfying and intuitive feedback to it: just made me never feel like I was connecting with my blows, and I was constantly getting surprised when I got hit despite being so far away or giving my best efforts to dodge the telegraphed attacks. While combat was the worst, the awkwardness also extended to other elements, like the pause menu taking so long to come up after a press, dropped inputs, or weird collision detection and such. I understand these might be limitations of the engine, and while you have my sympathies, it doesn't stop it from feeling bad nonetheless.

Apart from that, there were some other minor complaints, like how tricky it can be to keep track of quests: it seems like the log only tracks your main quest, but none of the other quests like tracking down the child. Yes, if you go back to the quest giver, they'll likely tell you something about what your current setup is, but still, that's so inconvenient and they didn't always provide all of the details you needed.

I dunno, I'm a bit mixed on this one. Like I said, I really appreciate this huge world you've built with so many characters and quests and such, but as much as I wanted to keep going, I couldn't get over how sluggish and bad the combat and general movement felt: it just sapped my motivation. Almost felt like the game would be much better if it scrapped combat and just stuck to exploring: perhaps that might better fit the limitations of the engine, assuming there is no better way.

JoelJGames responds:

Hi, thanks a lot for taking the time to leave so much feedback. It's really useful.

Lag and sluggishness I'll have to put down to perhaps taxing the Gameboy hardware a bit *too* hard, it's built to run on the 1989 OG Gameboy so I'm limited to how fast it can run in general and in New Grounds it's the ROM running in a Gameboy emulator (so replicates how it would be). It'd (hopefully) be more impressive running on the original device, but I'd still like it to be enjoyable in the browser!

Saying that, I'm going to make a note to look at how I can improve the responsiveness of the combat as while not modern console comparable, I'd like it still to be fun! The impacts in particular, I'd like them to feel more meaningful.

The pause menu has a wait before it, it was to work around a bug if someone pressed it straight away so I'll make a note to see if there's a better solution than that so it doesn't suffer on every press.

More detail in the log I agree with this too, I'll try and get some more guidance in there for the missing child quest!

Thanks again for the feedback

[TYP-HORS-DISSEY]

Quite the goofy little game! Love the concept of racing being done through typing and I love all of the kooky effects and juicy presentation, but ultimately my experience with this was a bit rough and left me kinda unsatisfied.

My initial experience was one of absolute confusion where I just couldn't figure out how to play. I kept typing in spur, spur, spur or faster, faster, faster over and over and it seemed worse than just plain mashing, though even with mashing being better it never gave me a win no matter how hard I tried, only incredible hand pain. Then I tried to experiment with the yeehaw command which seemed borderline exploitative at how quickly it can get you back in and got annoyed at how everyone else could instantly punch me off my horse if I get within their range: so confusing!

Eventually through some experimentation I discovered that the trick was to go back and forth between typing commands and mashing: from there getting first place was not too bad anymore, just a matter of looping faster, mash for a bit, faster, mash for a bit, and so on, maybe mixing in some yeehaws and punches if I can.

It was an interesting adventure to get first, just not sure how to think of it since it resulted in so much hand pain, haha. I think its a cute and funny idea, but I guess I wish it just had a bit more substance to it: feels like just a single minigame within an entire bimsy game, I suppose. But most likely it is just a fun little experiment and I do like the idea behind it, even if I wish it had a bit more.

[THREAT != CONTAINED]

Not too shabby execution of your classic "avoid the stalker while collecting macguffins" horror game! It's not exactly the most original thing, but nevertheless I found it to be a decent short and sweet spooky adventure: of note is that I found the presentation and graphics to be quite cool, especially all of the various caged monsters (almost made me feel like I was viewing an art collab) and I appreciated that you didn't utilize ear-shattering jump scares! I also liked the small touch of being able to race by the guy at the start to interrupt him: always cool to see a skip mechanic be modeled in-universe!

If I was to have any complaints, it would primarily be that I could barely understand a single word that anybody said: would really help if you had some subtitles, or at the very least reduced the distortion that's present in everyone's dialogue. And in regards to skipping the dialogue at the start: as I said, its cute that you can do that, but it also might've been better if it just starts you off in the power room on subsequent plays?

Frosty responds:

Thanks for the reviews as always!!

[Mosa Lina Demo]

Wow, quite the interesting experiment you've got here! Only in the indies would you see a strange game like this, and I found it rather novel.

The fact that success is not guaranteed, your tools are limited, and its all up to you, can certainly be quite intimidating, but more so incredibly refreshing and stimulating, as there is something quite nice about a game that isn't afraid to let you own your mistakes and not baby you. It reminded me a lot of games like Psuedoregalia which allow you some wiggle-room to use the tools you have to sequence-break, getting past obstacles you're not 'supposed to' using your creativity and skill: those times were very memorable for me more so than the typical curated experience a game provides, just like how I really enjoyed my time here trying to desperately solve the puzzles however I could.

It really made me think about game design a lot as I played. Survival horror games, for example, while saying that you need to conserve your supplies, will nevertheless do everything in their power to ensure that you don't softlock yourself into an unwinnable situation, ultimately making the genre be a rather hollow experience if you don't play along and pretend to not notice. This game, by breaking those conventions, is brutally honest and inspiring how it leaves it up to the player to decide, similar to how Bennett Foddy pondered whether the obstacles he was making in Getting Over It were truly unwinnable, or if he was just not being creative enough and should leave it up to the players to see if they can overcome against the odds that even he might not be able to. Basically, this is the Action Park of video games: wild and unsupervised!

All pondering and chin-scratching aside, however, would I actually buy this and keep playing it, at the end of the day? Mmm, probably not. I'm not saying it's bad, but the biggest strengths of this game, being its lack of guarantee of success, its limited ammo, its wibbly-wobbly physics, are also its greatest weakness, as it can make any mistake feel so punishing, unfair, and just make the game feel pointless and have you give up. Combine that with the lack of some sort of greater long-term goal to strive for, as well as not having any sort of tutorial and explanation for the tools (still don't know what the green box flash gun is) and there's just not much motivation to keep me going. That's just me, however, being brain-washed to treat video games as designed to grant me validation, instead of it coming from within: I'm sure gamers more inclined to speed-runs and exploits and glitches and such would love this!