FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Get in Santa's Pants 3: Knickerless for St. Nicholas]

Hey, it's wonderful to see a new episode of this! As always, this game delivers a wonderful adventure filled with wonderful art, tricky puzzles, and most of all, very humorous dialogue that is just overstuffed with double entendres. I swear, my humor immediately reverts to that of a horny teenager after playing this game, giggling at every potentially naughty word, haha!

Very interesting to see such an evolution of the game system, moving out of the old Pico-8 setup! While I don't think every change has worked out for me (which I'll go into below) I still find it fascinating to witness and applaud the sense of experimentation. I may have liked the pixel graphics before, but it's nice to see your art style more directly implemented!

I gotta admit though, that if I'm being honest, this is my least favorite entry in the series so far. I still think it's a nice game overall, don't get me wrong, but I had a rough time enjoying it:

*I liked the old games for how much they cut to the chase, being so gameplay focused and with tight, sharp scripts. In contrast, this game is so wordy and indulgent, taking so much time to setup and delivering scene after scene interrupting gameplay, yet still leaving critical elements like your primary objectives vague (well, beyond the obvious objective). Perhaps this is a case where you over-indulged yourself with all the open space you've gotten after leaving Pico-8's strict memory limitations?

*While the new graphics are very nice, the world design was rough to get used to. Everything just felt so claustrophobic and cramped, and that weird visual effect when you're rotating within a room was just nauseating. It also feels like you're moving too fast and the animations for moving are oddly stiff.

*It really feels like the vibes and humor have shifted from goofy, light-hearted horniness to being much more crass, dark, and just plain gross, and I'm not that much of a fan of it.

*Perhaps I'm misremembering or misinterpreting stuff, but I feel like the triggers for events to move forward is bugged, or at least very illogical at times. I swear there were times where, for example, I gathered up all the underwear, but I wasn't able to turn it in until I quit the game from frustration and came back later, only for it to suddenly work. Similarly, I wasn't able to inform the guy about the goose until other stuff happened first, I guess? I really don't know.

*Similar to the above, the logic and direction of the game just felt bizarre, and most of the time I'd be hopelessly lost where it felt like all I could do was just keep clicking on stuff randomly and hope for the best, looping through all objects and people over and over and over until something completely out of nowhere happens that makes no sense and somehow moves things forward.

*There's a weird text glitch going on where every sentence break, or perhaps every ellipse, is rendered with some invalid characters and the paragraph break symbol, something like this: A◆¶

*While it's very cute that music plays whenever you move, it's driving me nuts how the music keeps resetting to the very start whenever you stop and start, instead of continuing from where it left off. Makes me feel like I need to keep moving so I don't drive myself insane from hearing the same second of music loop over and over and over and over!

Again, despite all the negative feedback, it's still a nice game overall, and I applaud trying out a new thing. I wouldn't put it on the naughty list, but maybe just a slap on the wrist!

Louistrations responds:

Aw, thank you for taking the time for the write-up!

Thankfully, nearly all of this is already addressed in my big QoL update. I probably should have delayed another year, but in all honesty, I'm so burnt out from working on Christmas stuff all year, every year. So please forgive me for that! XD

The whole concept was to create a darker Victorian-based visual novel, so I don't know what to do about the many many "too much reading" complaints. In hindsight, I should have disassociated it entirely from the Pico-8 games. Newgrounds seems to barely differentiate the different game categories.

[SYNTAXIA]

Whoa, this is looking to be pretty cool! Reminds me a lot of games like Lone Survivor or Eternal Darkness, at least a bit. There wasn't quite enough gameplay to really hook me on the depths of the systems and how they will evolve, but the game feels quite polished and high-quality overall, has a very intriguing and creepy world, and it plays with some neat mind-bending concepts, what with warping the world with the power of words to solve puzzles. I think it's shaping up to be something very interesting, so well done!

I think my gameplay was pretty smooth and intuitive without any major issues apart from not realizing I had to click on items to equip them before use, but that was naught but a few seconds of confusion. Otherwise you had my attention the whole way through, so yeah, no major feedback I can think of at the moment, apart from some little thoughts:

*I found it interesting that, considering it's such a creepy game, it also has some humorous dialogue and cute art. I wonder if it's truly going for a 'cozy horror' vibe like it says, or if it's just doing it to let your guard down before it scares the living daylights out of the player, haha.

*I was curious about that 'recent nightmares' warning at the start: is that supposed to be a subtle fourth-wall breaking trigger warning for the player, or is it just supposed to be a weird in-universe thing?

[timmy christmas]

Hah, quite the amusing adventure! I may try to be all intellectual when reviewing games, so you'd think I'd bounce off of something as goofy and low-effort looking as this, but I enjoyed all the twists and turns this wild ride took me on! For something that looks low-effort, I actually found a lot of the game smartly designed with some subtle details you might not even notice, like the great sound design that accounts for distance, leading to nice doppler effects. The platforming also got surprisingly challenging as well, which pleased me! Mery Chriskmas (or however you spelled it) to you as well!

StaggerNight responds:

Merry Christmas FutureCop!!!!

[G.A.T.O.R]

Hmm, pretty cute game!

On one hand, it's some good simple fun to just get in there, blast away, and save the day. I'm down for short and sweet adventures like this!

But on the other hand, the game is perhaps a bit too short which leads to it feeling rather unsatisfying, especially since you don't get a better ending by going for a perfect run or anything like that. The controls and physics can also be a bit finicky, and once you learn you can just hold down the trigger (instead of trying to be delicate with it like I did), its just too easy to get through.

It's ok, especially for a game jam game, but it just doesn't have much meat on its bones and suffers from a slightly unpolished feel. Still cute though!

[Pizza Kidd - NEW DEMO! 🍕🔥]

Hey, nice to see this pop up again! I'm a big fan of beat-em-ups and I'm glad to see this chugging along and with a lot improved from the previous version! In particular, the visuals are stylish, hitting enemies feels nice and chunky thanks to the sound effects and hitstop, there's a decently strategic moveset you can use to crowd-control or style on enemies with juggles, throws, parries and so on!

That being said, as a fan of a beat-em-ups, I can be tough to please, and there are still a lot of rough aspects to this game that got in the way of my enjoyment. Here's some feedback in regards to that:

*Controls felt really unresponsive and finicky at times. I'd dash when I was just trying to walk because the double-tap buffer is too generous, I'd grab someone when I didn't mean to or not grab someone when I felt I should've been able to, parries would come out when I didn't time it properly at all, my character would take forever transitioning between a grab-kick and a throw, and other oddities.

*While it's fun to punch the standard enemies and the bosses, I really hated the other enemies like the bats, slime, and mini-bots. You can't hit the bats without being hit back, and the slime and mini-bots explode on-hit or on-death. Why do they exist? They just seem built to annoy and I would prefer them removed from the game altogether.

*Enemy AI could be really glitched and act weird, getting stuck in the air or getting a punch off despite being interrupted and so on. In particular, the boss would be doing his spinning psycho crushed and suddenly freeze in one place but keep spinning, becoming almost untouchable until he eventually resets himself.

*Game didn't play the music properly when I first tried the level, only playing it on a retry?

*The controls menu text is impossible to read if you use a controller because the text starts overlapping: consider using symbols/images for the buttons instead of full words to help with spacing.

*There are some minor graphical issues like the enemy shadows floating in midair that doesn't make sense based on what the background looks like.

*I couldn't figure out some of the moves. For example, if you're holding block and then press a direction, I thought you would evade, but that requires pressing the jump button as well which seems needlessly complicated. Instead, if you do those buttons, you sometimes shift your stance or do a mini-dash or something: dunno what's going on there, some sorta parry dash or something?

I hope you keep on chugging along with this! It may be kinda unpolished and janky, but it's certainly got potential and I'm always down for a new beat-em-up!

PizzaKiddo responds:

Hey… Thanks again for jumping back in and giving us such thorough feedback—it really means a lot! We’re stoked to hear that you were at least digging the visuals, the impact sfx, and the expanded moveset. That chunky, strategic combat vibe is exactly what we’re going for, so it’s awesome to hear it’s resonating a bit!

We hear you loud and clear on the areas that need improvement. The controls will receive further polish—we’ll be tweaking things like the dash sensitivity, grab mechanics, and parry timing to make everything feel smoother. As for the bats, slimes, and mini-bots, we’ll revisit those to make sure they feel challenging in a fun way rather than just frustrating.

The AI glitches, music issues, and overlapping text (UI/UX) are definitely on our radar, and we’re working on revisions for those too. And your point about some moves being tricky to figure out is fair—we’ll look at simplifying with single button input assignments (rebinds and customization) and adding better explanations to make everything more intuitive.

One thing we’re curious about—what kind of setup were you playing on? We’ve seen some controller input lag or browser issues depending on the system, which might explain some of the unresponsiveness you noticed. Not sure… If you’re up for it, we’d love for you to try the Steam version at some point to see if the controller experience feels better for you.

Again, your feedback is appreciated… seriously. Thanks for sticking with us through the rougher edges—it’s players like you who help us to make the game the best it can be. If you ever want to jump back into a future build, we’d love to hear your thoughts!

—
PK Team 👊🍕

[Battle Plan: Jester's Knife Demo]

Hey, this is a pretty impressive demo you got here! Overall it feels like high-quality stuff all-around, what with its charming cartoony visuals, polished gameplay, juicy and flavorful interactions and cool puzzles with loads of mechanics that are intuitively taught to the player! I had a grand ol' time and got quite addicted to making my way through this adventure!

One particular puzzle really blew me away where you have to construct an infinite loop for a bullet to keep hitting a switch so you can make it through multiple doors in sequence. It was quite the difficulty spike and required some dexterity since you need to slip the mirrors in place while the bullet is traveling, but boy did I feel smart doing it!

In the interest of providing feedback to help this game grow:

*I'm not quite sure what that train station room was all about? There's a cow floating in space and you can find something in the crates, but I dunno if that was important or some sort of bonus collectable? Don't get me wrong, I love me some bonus levels like Celeste's strawberries, but I just didn't know what was happening here.

*The ice floor really looks more like a spike floor: maybe the design can be changed to be more recognizable at a glance?

*There are these soda machines where you can get hydrated: unsure if that is actually powering up your character or is just added flavor to the environmental interactions that doesn't have an actual effect on the player.

*Maybe it's my fault for not playing on full-screen, but the game seems super tiny overall with the characters being the size of ants. It's not bad, but sometimes I feel guilty seeing all these great animations but not being able to see them up close in detail!

*As mentioned above, that puzzle where you need to set up an infinite loop was a crazy difficulty spike! I liked it, but man, it really came outta left field and could scare some people off! Then again, maybe there was an easier way to do it and I just wasn't seeing it...

*Unfortunately, I took a break and came back disappointed since the game didn't save my progress! I was looking forward to seeing what else was on offer, if anything, but I don't want to have to re-do everything to see.

Best of luck on further development: I think you've got something great here!

GoudaGames responds:

Hey!

Thank you so much for all the great feedback! We loved watching you play the demo and it was super insightful. We're already working on some fixes.

Regarding saving, the game has auto-save, but in the web version it won't work if you close the tab or refresh. You have to exit adventure mode first.

Big thanks once again! We hope you give the demo another chance and get to see the battle mechanic and final boss.

[Paper U.F.O.]

Cute little game! Reminds me a bit of Gyromite, a game from my youth where you lead a hapless professor around dangerous territory. The game's got an amusing style to its presentation and concept, and there's a lot of variety in the levels and their mechanics: some are more dexterity-based while others are more puzzles, for example. It's a fun time!

While I did have a good time at first, I will admit that the excitement wore down around world 2 or 3. All of the levels just started to blend together in a mush since none of the worlds had a particular theme to them, nor did they change the music or design to make you feel like you're making any progress. The worst aspect was how repetitive the game started to feel as I began seeing levels I've seen before but with very minor tweaks to them: I think you kinda screwed yourself over by having the playspace be too consistently tiny as it doesn't allow you the ability to experiment much! I kept waiting for the levels to get bigger and better but it never came, so I quit: still, it was good while it lasted!

[BEAT 'EM]

Not too shabby! For a rhythm game, this feels pretty decent in its current state: the presentation is cartoony and charming, the gameplay is decent and on-beat, and the note charts show a good level of challenge and hint at some more complex mechanics like the 2-hit boards. It's quite promising!

That said, it definitely feels like it's in a very early and rough state at the moment, missing a lot of features and other niceties that would make it truly feel great. In terms of feedback:

*I was a bit bummed out that all of the levels are pretty much the same with no difference in setting, theming, and lacking any sort of story or narrative to bridge the gap or add a bit of spice. Perhaps it's just not there because this is a demo or something, but I wanted to let you know nonetheless.

*The game gets pretty dang hard pretty dang fast! Don't get me wrong, as a rhythm game enthusiast I appreciate the challenge, and perhaps you were just showing that the game can get hard in the future, but it's quite overwhelming for someone starting out!

*I feel like the note timing is way too forgiving, with great/daora being too easy to achieve even with bad timing: it just makes everything unsatisfying. I would like the window tightened and to even add another score tier for hitting perfectly (or incredibly close to perfect) on-beat.

*It might be just because of the aforementioned too forgiving note timing, but hitting notes just didn't feel quite as satisfying as I'd like in this: maybe there needs to be better juicy effects in both the visual and audio department to highlight the impacts.

*Could be nice if the notes had different styles/colors to them to highlight their different timings like you see in other games such as DDR: could really help people to read the notes at a glance.

*Was a bit disappointed there was no special stance animation for when hitting two notes at once, like a split kick: would be nice to have.

*Would love a more in-depth scoring system and records so I could keep track of my previous hi-scores and challenge myself to do better.

*Would love an options menu to adjust things like volume, as well as the ability to pause a song so I can back out or restart it quickly.

*Would love an English translation option (though the game is intuitive enough that you can get through it even if you don't know the language).

Looking forward to seeing how this progresses!

[DOOM: The Gallery Experience]

Hah, quite the amusing and charming game! The juxtaposition of "rip-and-tear" Doomguy doing something so posh and chill as admiring art, as well as the recontextualization of the E1M1 map and HUD, is very humorous to witness. It's very nice how the game actually has links to the art so you can educate yourself further, and I loved that you can still find the classic secrets in this as well, but with their own new twist. I'd love it if all the art collabs on Newgrounds could showcase their art creatively like this!

Side note: I could've sworn I saw a tweet about updating this game to have the Doom guy say a slow-pitched 'oof' when they look at art. That doesn't seem to be in this version, though? Or maybe that wasn't official.

[204Snake!]

Wow, this puzzle game really surprised me and took me for quite the ride!

I'll admit that it didn't have the greatest first impression. For example, the title screen feels very lackluster, and I was stuck on level 2 for an embarrassing amount of time since I didn't notice the new tutorial prompt about moving the critters: my brain just saw the arrow key instructions and assumed it was just refreshing me about moving my character around.

But once I got into the game proper, I was blown away! The puzzle mechanics were very unique and mind-bending to me where you need to manage both your snake and the critters sliding around, and the game gets into some challenging puzzles almost immediately instead of being content to baby you. There's loads of content which slowly increases the difficulty with new mechanics, and the game actually has decent presentation quality with nice subtle effects like the critters shaking right before you eat them.

There are still some other slight issues like how there isn't an obvious way to go back to the main menu to select another level, like if you want to skip the world 1 bonus levels to go straight to world 2. But overall, this was a cool experience and very impressive for a game jam game!

Sodoj responds:

heyo,

you can press the 'P' key to bring up the options menu that also lets you get back to the title screen.

good luck with the rest of the game, if you ever decide to return to it!