FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Haunted Rooms]

Hmm, while I do think the concept has merit and the later levels showcase some of the interesting puzzles that can be wrought from the mechanics, as it stands right now, the game feels really janky and unrefined.

While it takes a moment to stop babying you, the game does a decent job of escalating the challenge of the game in interesting ways with all sorts of new mechanics and obstacles to contend with. Some of the later levels do get pretty elaborate in really interesting ways. But overall there's just a real clunky construction to it all that not only negatively affects the general feel of the game with its odd and inconsistent collision and boundaries and lackluster special effects, but also effects the puzzles themselves. It can be difficult to parse the solutions due to weird logic from the mechanics, like how you exploit the fact that flashlight users turn instantly with no transition and therefore you can stand in the gap between turn angles to illogically avoid detection, and like how the puzzle don't reset upon death, meaning you can brute force the solutions by just killing yourself to move back to the start instead of having to make your way back yourself (in fact, it seems like some of the solutions intend for you to do this, which is very weird, it's like creating jumps that require you to exploit coyote time: it's just not supposed to be done like that).

Again, I think the concept is pretty decent and does get my imagination going with ways it could be built upon, so in that regard, I think it's a decent game jam result. But as a game to play right now, its execution currently feels quite underbaked and in need of considerable polishing.

[Exit from aldilà]

Hmm, part of me is quite intrigued with the game due to the rather cool art style and mysterious story, but in general the game feels very clunky.

Some of the oddities with the game, such as the way your character has to have a running start to build up enough acceleration to jump a gap, didn't feel that bad to me and actually added a refreshing bit of complexity. Put this together with the interesting ghost platform switching and other obstacles like the moving platforms and puts and the game has the makings of a decent challenging platformer, and as said, the rather unique presentation did make me want to see what was going on story-wise.

The game is unfortunately held back by a lot of general bugginess and clunky design, however. For example, ladders felt really awkward to contend with, especially when trying to dismount from them at the top: usually a game will have an invisible platform at the top which allows you to stand up once you reach the top, but here there is no such thing, and when combined with the fact that any horizontal movement detachs you from the ladder and sends you falling, it makes for a really awkward experience where I would climb to the top of the ladder, try to dismount and end up falling all the way down. There were plenty of other weird bugs like my character not jumping when I tell them to, my character not hanging from a ledge despite me trying to do so in what seems like a good spot, weird collision boxes that make me slip off platforms, and also just a lot of tedious waiting for moving platformers to come back and let me on.

The biggest frustration with the movement is in trying to change direction: there were tons of times where suddenly my character would slide like they're on ice and have so much difficulty changing directions, and other times they'd change direction no problem. After some experimentation, I found that if you are holding down one direction, let go, and then press the other direction, you'll change direction in a quick and logical fashion, but if you hold down one direction, press another direction while still holding the other and then let go of the original, you'll do this weird ice slide where you will take a long time to eventually slow down and change direction. I feel the controls for this should be build more robustly to ensure consistency and have this oddity not occur: it's not the players fault here as they are making logical inputs and shouldn't have to force themselves to precisely hit each button to avoid potential overlap.

Definitely feels like it could be a good platformer, but the controls/physics/code for the game needs to be tightened up considerably, I'd say, before being ready for release.

[Pixel Dash 2]

Hmmm, bit of a mixed bag here, I feel! Some of the modes are pretty decent, but some of the other modes feel rather bad and actually contribute to giving a bad first impression, so I would nix them altogether, ideally, and just keep what works.

Classic mode is pretty much the worst of the bunch and contributes to the terrible first impression that I was talking about. Once you've seen one classic mode level, you've pretty much seen them all as there's really no way to significantly scale them up or diversify them in any meaningful way, and the levels reflect that by just changing up the green area size or adding pre-built boxes which is incredibly shallow (how the hell is a level with pre-placed boxes considered a new level? I could make that level by just playing the first level and putting the blocks in myself, and it's pointless anyway because I can just click the boxes away as if I placed them! Was that intentional, or a bug?) The levels in Classic mode aren't tests of skill or wits, they are just tests of patience as it is a foregone conclusion to eventually win by just filling everything in bit-by-bit.

Breakable mode is just Classic mode with a bit of time-pressure: it still suffers the same dilemma as Classic mode where every level is functionally the same and is therefore quite boring, but at least it has something to encourage the player to play quickly and therefore be a bit more engaged. It's a step up, but I would still consider this a mode that should probably be removed.

The Precise and Bad Pixels modes is where the game starts to have some decent ideas. I still don't think it's that fun necessarily, but at the very least there is actually some manner of skill and decision-making required from the player to reach a solution, and the levels actually start to diversify themselves in interesting ways, such as having multiple green zones with their own count requirements. It's here that the game actually has something slightly interesting to it, and I feel that these should be the only two modes the game has: better to showcase the best part of the game than risk the player getting bored from the other modes which are given top billing and could lead to them quitting before the good stuff. At the very most, you could maybe combine these two modes with the breakable rules as well to create the best of all worlds (though the breakable rules might be a bit annoying when having to manage everything else).

Oh, and I do like how you can click and drag to put down multiple blocks in a row: helps avoid flaring up my carpal tunnel from having to click every individual square, so thanks for that!

blit-blat responds:

The pre-placed boxes are intentional. If you're playing on a mobile device (which the game was designed primarily for) the best tactic is to immediately draw a square around the win zone. By having pre-placed blocks you'll actually be removing them if your drag your fingers in too wide an area, thus harming your progress, forcing you to be less erratic and more precise in your swipes. Playing with a mouse offers more precision by default, so this aspect is probably lost on desktop.

Breakable originally wasn't a standalone mode, but a feature of certain levels as per your suggestion. But as you also rightly suggested, this just became frustrating (and not in a fun way!) when combined with other mechanics - especially the multiple win zones - so was moved into it's own category.

Other ideas that were tested an scrapped were being able to place a limited number of bricks, bricks not being removable once placed and "paintable" pixels (you'd have to get bad pixels into a paint zone to turn them good and then into the win zone). These were ultimately rejected for being too annoying or too puzzley.

This isn't meant to be a puzzle game, it's meant to be frantic and fast paced (hence the dash). It's meant to be a test of speed and reactions, rather than necessarily skill, although I guess this doesn't really come through clearly enough. Perhaps each level should have a star rating, based on time. Although this would require a lot more play testing to find the right balance, and ain't nobody got time for that! :D

[Super Plantoid]

Hmm, quite the short and sweet Metroid-ish adventure with an interesting planting hook! While the game does start out pretty good with a nice little cinematic and overall decent graphics/animation and platforming, it didn't exactly grab me at the start: while the planting was rather unique, it was a bit tedious to have to grow every one of my shots and I was a bit worried at how the game would proceed. However, bit by bit the game introduced new interesting powerups like the bubble plant (with its cool double use through holding it for jump powers or throwing it to create a jump pad) and I loved how it kept looping back to the start and making you realize what new path just opened up with your abilities. In that way the game was very addictive: I always wanted to see what new plant would be nice and what new obstacles and paths would open up with it, and before you know it I made it through to the end!

However, it can be an incredibly frustrating game at times due to its overly punishing nature. Every missed throw with a plant was made all the more worse by the fact that I would need to replant it and wait for the entire animation and growing to take place (you'd think that the plant would remain and regrow the fruit over and over instead of needing to replant the entire thing), and every time I took damage when holding a plant was made doubly worse since it makes me immediately drop the plant (which again necessitates backtracking and waiting for the regrow animation to play out, or if you're in the dark area and you lose your light plant, you may as well just kill yourself, argh!) The game also loved to have a lot of overly difficult jumps that either require pixel-perfect edge jumps or the unintuitive use of a short jump to avoid hitting the ceiling which actually can make your jump travel less. The checkpoints were never too punishing, but when combined with all this other stuff, it sure didn't help that much.

There were also some other frustrations with the game like how unclear the controls are. For example, I had no idea I could jump down thin floors since the game allowed me to use the up arrow to jump, which made me reluctant to jump down since you can't press up+down at the same time: only once I realized that you could jump down by using x+down or space+down did it work. Furthermore I had no idea what those glowy spots were and how to interact with them: would've been nice if the key to press would appear above your head when you're over a glowy spot to let you know what to do, perhaps. There are also weird design choices like how you can get a green seed, die without saving, and when you respawn you'll still have it: forgiving, but kind of kills the point of collecting them, I feel. Oh, and it stinks that the game doesn't have a save/load feature (despite it saving in-game), requiring that you beat it all in one sitting.

There definitely were a lot of little annoyances with the game that made a pretty bad first impression and almost made me quit, but I feel the game did enough right to deliver a short and sweet experience, so well done in that regard! My only big disappointment was that I would've loved if there was one more final area which was a bit more puzzle-y and requiring using all of the plant types: it felt like the levels only used whatever plant was just introduced and completely disregarded all of the other types, and in that way it felt like all of the levels were just tutorials on each plant and it never did a final exam, so to speak!

[Lunar Worm]

Fun goofy little arcade game! For the most part, I really like the goofy energy that this game gives off through a combination of its wacky music, funny little worm character expressions/animations, and juicy special effects. Gameplay is decent in that it's fast-paced fun to zip around and stay alive as long as possible while munching gems, but minding the different terrain that can slow you down, make you fall, or even blow you up. Also thought the design touches like being able to move your worm around slowly as they die were novel (but gruesome when juxtaposed against the generally happy aesthetic).

It makes a pretty solid impression and ain't bad, but I will admit that it got pretty boring quite fast: I didn't feel like the terrain added enough to the strategy of the game, nor did I think the game escalated enough with new obstacles as after bombs are added it seems to peter out with nothing else to add, and the game wasn't really that difficult, meaning I just play until I get bored and kill myself, meaning that a bad impression is inevitably left. Would've loved more obstacles like maybe blocks you can't burrow through, or maybe lava blocks that can flow, and so on. I'd also love some sort of combo meter/score counter so the game is less about just plain ol' survival but trying to pull off cool chains and get big points beyond just depth. Also thought the whole way you can move after death was odd in that you'd think you could recover in some way, similar to a Borderlands Second Chance, but there was nothing to do but die: again, gruesome.

Basically, I like the energy and thought it had potential, but at the moment it's a bit too simple for my time and is thus short-lived. Still, I hope that throwing this game together was a fun experiment and got some ideas flowing in the brain for future!

[RedNapkin]

Interesting little game! Pretty much feels like a very stylish and professional recreation of those samurai/cowboy-themed dueling minigames in Kirby, but where those were just minigames, this is the entire game, so while it was a feast for the eyes for a bit, I can't help but feel that there isn't much meat to it.

Now, that's not to say that this game is bad or lazy or anything like that: the game has a very stylish presentation to it all that not only was very impressive to look at and witness what with its great animation and camera framing and great little touches like how the faces get angrier for higher difficulties, but was something which I found very intriguing and mysterious. It's silly, but while I did find the gameplay rather short-lived in its appeal, I actually found the process of learning how the game operated to be very fun: deciphering the weird names given to the modes and difficulties, figuring out what buttons do what, and so on was a puzzle in itself.

Having said that, I'm unsure whether the mysterious and indecipherable nature of the game was intentional, and even if it was, I'm not sure if it was the best idea, as I did spend a considerable amount of time confused on certain facets which should be much more intuitive. For example, I had no idea that you had to press the button for the character to slash for them: for me it felt more intuitive to use a button like the space bar, and for the longest time it was difficult to tell whether I was pressing the wrong button or just losing by pressing too late since the game is very vague and mysterious with its feedback. There were other confusing design decisions like how you can skip the intro cutscene with the space bar, but only if you press it right at the very start for some weird reason, otherwise it forces you to run the whole way through. While I understand it might hurt the whole minimalist presentation which I think is cool, the game could maybe stand to have some pop-ups or tutorials or something to explain certain elements, and it'd also be great to get some other feedback like the amount of milliseconds it took your input to register and so on.

Again, I think it's very cool and bold to go for this mysterious and minimalist presentation, but I did feel like the actual game itself did not have much to offer and almost felt bad or guilty in how short-lived it is compared to the amount of effort that was put in for all these great animations. It's quite the mixed impression: on one hand I feel like it's style over substance, and on the other hand I want to applaud the bravery and commitment in putting so much effort into such a compact experience. Quite the memorable experience nonetheless!

NeoD-ray responds:

Boy am I glad to know that someone with actual sense of criticism exists in Newgrounds' review section. Thank you comrade.

Anyway, I can confirm you that the "mysterious and indecipherable" nature of the ""game"" was indeed intentional, and pretty much the main target of it. Mainly to make it stylish, but also because I wanted to see how intuitive it could have been without the cliché popups and tutorials.
Sure it couldn't have been perfectly intuitive (that's why I still added the info the description) but it was worth a try. For curiosity sake.

RedNapkin, as a concept, has always been a simple re-imagination of a minigame (Kirby's Duel Minigame). And since such minigame was very simple and limited, I couldn't really find a way to expand it, thus blocking me from making the project too ambitious.
Plus, I've never considered it to be an actual game myself, but rather a quick and stupid way of dueling in the simplest way possible.

Since I couldn't expand the gameplay and content, I decided to just go ALL IN with the style, appeal and art, until I decided that the point of it was just to "stand out", rather than being an actual game. An interactive artwork if you will.

With all this being said, I agree on everything you said, and I deeply appreciate your review. Seriously, these things are pretty much what I crave for.
Thank you again comrade.

[64 Bits - Kirby and the Forgotten Land Demake for NES]

Wow, amazed to see your demakes go from videos to games, and for a first outing, I found this to be very nice and enjoyable! I'm a sucker for demakes since they can be a great showcase of creativity in how the game is compressed into a new form, and this was a great example of that.

Not only does this demake capture the graphical touches of Kirby very well in practically every aspect (most especially for me in the cute level intro cinematic), I found the most important aspect of gameplay and gamefeel to be captured as well and deliver a very authentic experience (I'd argue that the controls could be a bit stiff at times, but perhaps as a convenient excuse, I'd say this helps the authenticity)!

The combination of Kirby with City Connection driving controls was a novel idea and allowed for some challenging gameplay in having to manage Kirby's now ever-forward momentum, though the world was designed to work with this for the most part so it didn't feel unfair (though perhaps the world could've been a bit better to allow room to stretch). Overall a fun short and sweet experience that even had some nice little bonus challenges and secrets to go for!

Not many complaints I can think of that I haven't already touched slightly, other than the easy complaint of it being too short and leaving me hungry for more levels (and future demakes)!

64bitsanimation responds:

Appreceate the long review! Thank you for the feedback!

[Must Escape Dinosaur Land]

Not a bad little point n click adventure escape game, but in comparison to some of the other selfdefiant entries I've played recently, this definitely felt like a bit of a step down. The graphics were a bit overly goofy for my tastes, the amount of puzzles and interactables felt very small which made the game incredibly short, there were no fun head-scratcher puzzles as everything was too overly simple, and there was a weird bug involving the cattail where it doesn't show up in your inventory but if you click the space where it should be and then click another slot, you get a rock that you can use to make the hammer??? Again, not a bad game, but just lower in the ranking as it left me unsatisfied considering the big meals that the other games on offer have delivered.

[You Will Fall]

Quite the challenging and funny little game! Apart from the annoying narrator who is annoying on purpose, of course, I really loved my experience with this game: loved the really intuitive and fluid feel of controlling balance, loved the huge variety of crazy events that can happen that not only change your balance but also change your mental faculties (such as the error screen, door knocks, discord sounds and the best of all, the mouse control trick), and loved just how crazy difficult it was and kept amping up! And yes, I was just joking, I loved the whole narrator adversary relationship as well, haha.

In terms of feedback and potential improvements:

1) I don't think the whole strategy of holding W to move faster works considering the rules in this setup, and is currently just pointless. Ideally, I believe W should be a way for the player to add some extra risk to their run but in doing so, be able to strategically reduce the amount of events that happen. This only works, however, if the events come out based on time, which it looks like they don't, as they look to come out based on distance. This means that holding W doesn't net you anything as you still need to go through just as many events, except you'll be doing them with smaller rest periods in-between and also you're more likely get screwed over because by rushing, you're actually going faster than the narrator can keep up and thus you won't be signaled by the narrator when an event is happening since he could still be yapping about the last event (ideally the narrator should probably interrupt himself to start talking about new things immediately, instead of queueing them up and getting to them eventually).

2) I think the game should force full-screen and force a cursor-lock to prevent the mouse from drifting off-screen and losing control, which can happen not just from the player doing so manually, but also unfairly from the game when it steals your mouse control.

3) Narrator can get a bit annoying with the sheer amount of repeated lines (perhaps intentional and unavoidable, but it'd be great if there were more line variations to reduce repeats) and the randomization is a bit weird: I feel like I've got the error popup event waaaaay more often than the teleport popup event and I'm not sure whether this is just luck or perhaps intentionally it is a rarer event.

4) I was actually a bit surprised at the inclusion of easy mode: at first I assumed it was a trick where the narrator will berate you or make your game insta-fail if you use it, but it seems to be an actual option for realsies, which is weird since it seems to go against the nature of the challenge. Ideally I think the game shouldn't have difficulty modes: just draw a line in the sand and have their only be one difficulty mode that people have to get through. I do think, though, as bad as this makes me look considering what I just said, that the default and only difficulty probably should be what you have currently as the easy mode, though, because it's already hard enough haha (though if you were to make the default the current normal mode, I'd be on board)!

Anyway, back to trying to see if I can make it all the way! So far I'm only at the 2nd trip phase on easy mode, but I'll get there eventually!

YaenGames responds:

Heyhey thank you very much for the in-depth feedback and for sticking with the game, even with its difficulty. I'm gonna respond to some of your points, here we go!

1) The intention of W is not that it gives new players any benefit or to make getting through it faster. The point of this feature is to make the experience less repetitive in the first half for advanced players who want to get to the point they failed last time again, but more quickly while still keeping up a real challenge for them. And then there's of course the added risk-reward for those few REALLY advanced players who might wanna speedrun the game and beat the fastest times on the leaderboards.

2) I don't think we can force fullscreen on webgl due to browser safety restrictions. On the downloadable version, the game runs in fullscreen. I always recommend fullscreen to those who have a good enough PC to render the game in fullscreen as it gives you more space to move your mouse and thus finer control over the balance. The cursor lock idea is interesting, however, I'm not sure how complex it is to implement regarding some of our unusual mouse-features. Would be something to investigate!

3) We already added quite a few more lines for the earlier parts of the game in this version but yeah more is always better here. In the original version it repeated the same exact line every time you restarted and that got really infuriating very fast lol. The teleport popup is rarer than the other one and also requires you to have beaten the first half of the game at least once to show up. This has two reasons: 1 - it's technically the "easier" one because it's easier to close and half-transparent, so we're throwing it in as a random lucky choice. 2 - we wanted to add some new things in that only appear even after you have already been playing for a while.

4) I know an easy mode is sometimes a contentious topic in games that are meant to be difficult like this one. I do still believe that its inclusion was a good choice since a lot more people managed to see the grand finale at the end which we put weeks of effort into. The normal mode is the way it played in the original version and we still wanted to keep that as the ultimate challenge. So far, only 3 people are confirmed to have beaten it, including me. Some players won't even choose easy mode out of pride even though it's right there and they could do it. I wouldn't hold choosing easy mode against anyone though. I realize different people have different abilities and skill levels and that's fine. That being said, if you want to have two of the medals that give the highest amount of points, you'll have to actually get through it in normal mode. I hope my reasoning for the inclusion of both modes makes some sense to you ^^

I'd be so hyped to see you succeed and make it to the very end. It's a tough journey, but many who have made it said that the ending made it worth it :)

Regardless, thanks for playing and thanks for the kind rating!