FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Pico Untamed]

Hrmm, got a bit of a mixed impression on this one. In general I like what this game was going for and thought it had a lot of cool ideas and some nice touches, but many parts of it just felt unfinished or confused, giving a bad impression.

As said, I think it does a decent job at attempting to be a Pico's School style game. The story is an interesting exploration of the themes of Pico with all the various choices to make, the presentation and animations are very nice, the point n click adventure is decent with all the necessary elements of exploration and inventory management in place, the boss battles have a great variety of interesting patterns, and I love some of the little flavorful touches like boyfriend getting scared if you fire off some shots around him: you didn't have to add that but you did and it adds so much life and humor to the world!

But while all the ingredients are there in theory, so much of it felt really badly executed:

*The adventure felt a bit too linear, scripted, and easy for my tastes: would've loved a greater sense of exploration and problem solving, but the game world is just too tiny that it ends up leading you straight to solutions without even having to engage your brain. All of the little minigames like hiding and sneak attacking the guard felt so token and handholdy instead of being an interesting system to engage with: would've loved if the guards were more like Nemesis stalking you and you need to randomly react to their appearances in time.

*While some people might defend it, I didn't like how the game didn't highlight interactables when you hover over them (besides the obvious arrows) which made it confusing to determine what you can click on.

*The boss battles felt so terrible: without any sort of blood splatters or reactions from Pico and the boss when taking damage, without any sort of telegraph from the bosses for when they make an attack, without clear hitboxes for explosions and attacks, without any sort of strategic limitation to fire rate or ammo and being able to just spam-click until your ears blow out from the repetitive noise, it all just comes together feeling like a confusing, lifeless, dull mess.

And so on and so forth. Definitely feels like this had a great design and passion that could've came out great, but might not have had enough time to fully solidify the execution, leaving it ultimately feeling unfinished and lackluster. While that is a bummer, I think the hearts in the right place, I didn't completely hate my time with it, and it shows a great deal of potential: would love a more polished version of this or at the very least, would love to see future games from you!

TrickWithATwist responds:

First off I just want to say thank you so much for playing the game and leaving a detailed and thoughtful review. I'm sorry that your experience was mixed and you have brought up a lot of valid points. I really wish I could have properly fleshed the game out and make it more dynamic but due to tight time constraints and attending university a lot had to be scrapped. I really appreciate your feedback and I'll definitely keep this in mind once I work on future projects. :)

[Package Man]

Hrmm, not much to say unfortunately. Once you've played the game for a few seconds, you've seen pretty much all it has to offer, and while you can derive some minor pleasure from running around and throwing boxes and watching them bounce around, I didn't feel like the delivery mechanics were exciting enough to make me compelled to go for a high score, especially since the whole scoring system is comprised by random box variations that can give you an unfair lucky advantage (two people could play just as skillfully as one another, but one could have a lucky run where they get some +1 boxes).

I think the concept does have some merit: trying to deliver packages rapidly by having to both plot a course through a complex environment and manage precise/risky manuevers like throws could certainly be fun. The execution to me at the moment feels rather halfbaked and insubstantial: maybe if it had more interesting levels/geometry to get through (maybe even changing the terrain every delivery so you need to constantly react and replot your path), some fun risk/reward mechanics (like maybe being able to damage the box with bad throws), and altogether just had a bit more pizazz, it could be nice! As it is, though, I'm not seeing a great hook to make it a memorable experience.

CaperCube responds:

I think most of your points are right on and are things I'd much like to address if / when I come back to this project.

Watching your video review, I noticed that you picked up on this being an Ludum Dare game. tbh, we 100% could have done a better job with this project, but we missed most of the jam an only had 8 hours to put this thing together. I was surprised when we got FP'ed here, but I'm glad a bunch of people were able to have fun with it!

Thanks again for playing and reviewing!

[Witch's Familiar]

It's a decent concept that shows some good promise, but at the moment it feels a bit underwhelming due to a lack of content/progression and the presence of bugs.

I enjoyed the basic premise of picking up and dropping objects, but it really didn't evolve in any significant way to keep my interest: many of the levels do the same pattern of 'drop package on switch to get rock to put on switch instead of package' and it was only the very last level that finally changed things up with a few interesting tricks before it was over and left me feeling unsatisfied. Would've loved if there were more mechanics to deal with or really brainy puzzles that took advantage of the premise more: as it is, it's ok, but quite boring and doesn't feel unique or memorable.

The game was also quite buggy, with the major bug being that the objects like packages and rocks don't have their rotations locked, meaning that they can actually tip over if you place on the edges of platforms. This can create very glitchy behavior where, if you pick up a rotated rock and then drop it, you can end up blasting away from each other, most likely because your hitboxes are intersecting upon drop off since it isn't giving enough clearance between the two (since it expects the objects to be flat rectangles in their original positions) and the physics engine tries to rectify it by moving them away from each other. There are other minor bugs like how the 'z to drop' message doesn't disappear if you place a cog in a switch, and the animation of the bird freezes if you walk on the ground.

It's understandable since it was made in such a short time frame, I suppose, and like I said I did have a decent time and it does show promise if it was further developed, but I wanted to give my opinion on it lacking as a full game since, after all, this has been submitted on newgrounds, not the game jam site, so I think the context is fair. Would love to see an enhanced version with more meat on its bones!

nion-ne responds:

Thanks for the coverage and the lengthy feedback, especially impressive after playing so many games. I mainly kept the rotating and janky physics because it was funny in a kind of half life 2 sort of way, but definitely agree that a polished version would need to be predictable.

More mechanics would be nice. A struggle during the jam was thinking of mechanics that wouldn't be too contrived or difficult to implement reliably in the short time available. For instance a "draw string" that powers machines for a short time while pulled. But ultimately I decided on being short, simple, and easy so that most ludum dare players would be able to complete it.

A more complete version is something I'd love to do after my current project. There's a number of ideas I'd love to implement, both narrative and mechanical.

As for submitting to Newgrounds, it's mainly because they were advertising for the game jam, that being said these are all points I will take into account if I take this project further.
Thanks again :)

[Genokids DEMO]

Wow, wonderful to see this game on Newgrounds! Been following it for a long time and I'm glad to see that the game played as well as it looked on twitter and other such places. In general the game feels great in practically all aspects: not only is it very charming and stylish from a presentation and construction side of things, but it gets a lot of the sweet science of character-action/beat-em-ups/hack-and-slashes/whatever you wanna call it, like that wonderfully subtle but generous usage of auto-correction magnetism that ensures that your combos fluidily connect from many different avenues of attack (even when not using lock-on), input buffering and such that ensured no awkward input drops, and the wonderful use of hit-freeze and sparks for great impact to attacks.

Now, I'm going to deliver a whole bunch of feedback that is going to severely dwarf the amount of praise I just gave, but please realize that I am still incredibly positive on the game: I'm just a bit crazy for these types of games and just want to give as much thoughts that I can offer to help you think about your game and hopefully make it even better in future! Ok, here goes:

*I found the default controls a bit odd: most important, I'd expect the light attack button and the dodge button to be swapped as that would more closely match common setups, and it created a very awkward first impression where I struggled to get used to it. I know, I know, it's probably rebindable and there are some games out there that do match this setup so it's just a preference thing, but I still think it's worth pointing out since it can make a really weird first impression and some people just don't have much patience and might leave without giving it a shot. Even with rebinds being available, I'm typically wanting to follow the default controls since I trust that the developer did it for a good reason and don't want to screw myself from changing it (for example, I like how you setup the flow moves to consistently match the regular moves, like how the flow move you do with the launcher button is set to a launcher-esque move), but I just wasn't sure if there was a good reason in this case.

*I had a lot of trouble with the 'chase' mechanic, most especially with world traversal as the lock-on logic felt very inconsistent. For example, on the very first pole in the game: I chased to it, jumped off of it to gain some air and hit the button to chase to the next pole, only for my character to chase right back to the pole I just jumped off of a few inches behind them! I didn't even have the camera pointed that direction, so how the hell did that happen? There were some weird chase behavior going on with the wall-run to where suddenly I've be running the opposite direction or something weird. Definitely feel that it needs a review: methinks it's currently only working for 'best-case' scenarios and doesn't account for all the little deviations that players can have (for example, me jumping off before chasing to the next thing instead of just chaining-chases).

*I had a lot of difficulty keeping track of resources like flow and health and hype and all that since the bars for them are all crammed in the corner of the screen in a very perhaps too-stylish-and-small-and-therefore-difficult-to-parse ensemble and I'm busy focusing on my character in the center. A lot of times I'd hit the buttons for a flow move I want and nothing would come out, making me feel very silly. Would love if I could get more feedback when I do a move that I don't have resources for, like an error sound and maybe something pop-ups above my character with my current flow and how much is needed, like 2/3 or whatever. In fact, I'd love if maybe we have a little mini-HUD right by our character that displays health and flow and such, or at least maybe we can get signals for important events, like have our character glow or play a sound when flow or hype is full, and maybe have a red health bar appear above their head when low on health, perhaps!

*The world felt a bit barren. I'm not talking about the literal fact that the world is all crumbling and barren and bombed-out and such, it's more the general feel of the world being a bit lifeless. This is going to be a bit tricky since I'm not sure of the exact cause as it's just a subtle feel to it all, but it just felt like the world had a lot of too big and boring open and empty spaces that added a lot of boring travel time between fights and a weird sense of mismatched scale that makes us and the enemies look so tiny and insignificant. As stylish as the world looks, it just felt off and a bit too gamey, like it's one step away from being a gray box dev level what with all the silly placed traps that stood out like a sore thumb. Didn't have much of a sense of progress being made either as I just kept seeing the same type of stuff and not many landmarks or changes. I dunno, I might be being silly as perhaps this level is just a showcase demo level built to show all this stuff and so perhaps it is off since it's cobbled together. At the very least, could stand to have more interesting fighting places, perhaps with a lot of clutter to chop up or throw at enemies (there was an attempt with the bumper car, but that did not offer enough damage or abilities that I ended up ditching it fast since it just slowed down the fun).

*There were a few things I had difficulty accepting, like the inability to be able to recovery from knockback with the jump or dodge button, instead being forced to use the character swap button. There were some other things like how some flow moves would pierce past/through enemies instead of stopping in front of them (though maybe that's on purpose since chase already serves that purpose). It's all something I can get used to but it definitely felt a bit unintuitive at times, but nothing major.

*Little nitpick, but there were some occasions where the camera is showcasing something cinematic but I can still move around instead of being temporarily locked: could lead to bad things like someone running into a pit during the cutscene or just messing around and making goofy noises, haha.

*While it's nice and all and that could certainly be enough, I wasn't fully sold on a unique hook and feel for the combat. For example, I think there could be a strong hook with the character swapping mechanics, but at the moment they didn't have enough defining and differing strengths/weaknesses to make me want to utilize them in a strategic/synergistic way. For example, perhaps one of them could be good at guard-breaking blocking enemies so you'd feel compelled to swap to them for those, but in general the characters all feel generally competent at everything. At the very least, if each character had their own health bar you might want to switch if one gets low, but since it's a shared health bar, there's little incentive to stray away from your favorite. In a similar vein, enemies didn't offer enough resistance or abilities to promote interesting play either and they all just felt like pathetic punching bags at times: fun at first to style on but loses its appeal. This might just be a case of not being deep enough in the game yet as perhaps later enemies and synergies and such will become more apparent, but I wanted to point it out nonetheless. It could also just be a developer preference: some games want to force you into stylish play with big design incentives, and some games are content with stylish play being an optional challenge or a flex that isn't required.

Very happy to see that the Kickstarter worked out: it is very well deserved based off of this demo and I look forward to the future release (and hopefully I'll have helped in some small way!) Stay motivated!

NukefistStudio responds:

That's lengthy!

Some of that feedback can't be done now, other has already been noticed and will be taken into account in the future.

The defaults may be changed in the future, but for now only the CTRL modifier on this web version has been changed, to avoid more people closing the tab by accident. It's been many people already who found Square and Circle swapped, though there was other people that wanted even more exotic mappings, which means we will have to wait and test more to see what the best default mapping is, understanding that not everyone will like it.

The chase has been improved already (when there's a "next" chase target, the previous one won't be that prioritized, plus it now takes into account where you are looking, like with the enemies. Parkour is less fleshed out than combat right now, it's a difficult thing (well, the whole game is difficult, it's a lot of knobs to tune and a lot of stuff to try and maybe add, or remove).

We are considering having non-intrusive UI close to the center of the screen to show the flow meter, we already have some ideas but they won't land on this demo. It's been a problem with many as it requires a lot of playtime to get used to knowing how much flow specials cost and how much flow you have. At some point you end up getting a ton of flow, but until that point is reached (and even at that point) it could be helpful to have the flow on the UI closed to the center of the screen. We don't think health and hype need to be on the center of the screen, though, as it's not that time sensitive.

World needs more love, yes. It's a difficult feedback, as you say one possible reason is the apparent scale of the world vs the scale of the characters. Ultimately, we will need to spend more time on it figuring out what makes it work the best. The thing we have worked the most on, with difference, is on the combat, so that left the map behind.

We like being able to move while the camera is in cinematic mode. The solution for this will be being invincible instead of removing this "feature". Some people have already taken damage due to this, but again won't be solved in this demo.

About the combat feedback, sadly, I hate to write this but not only because of our gameplay, but also from seeing many others play (after trying the demo many times, none on the first try) it already has a lot to combine, be stylish, and there's reasons to be stylish not explained in the turorial (for example, the highest your rank, the highest the amount of flow you get, plus switching after dealing damage will give flow. There's a lot of hidden mechanics, only hidden because we can't shove more tutorials into the demo, it already feels like there's a lot of them. The full game will have time to explain stuff and in a better way).

You have helped, thank you. The most helpful thing, I think, was pointing out the possible discrepancy in scales. It's not the only problem with the maps (we are limited with how much we can improve them as we are only 2 and time is limited, but we will improve them).

[Cargo Truck Racer]

I love the concept behind this game, and while I did have a decent amount of fun, the execution of it felt a bit strange and a bit of a missed opportunity.

As said, the concept is so simple yet so brilliant, being an amusing twist to the standard racing game where you drive a very uncommon race car, being a cargo truck, and not only have to make it to the end of the course at a fast pace, but you have to do so without spilling your cargo out! The concept is very comical and a great hook, and in general the feel of driving is fun. Tons of potential here! It's like Initial D meets Death Stranding!

However, there were a bunch of issues that got in the way of the fun:

Crash detection was very weird and way too sensitive: I'd barrel straight into a cone and not have an issue, but if the side of my truck lightly grazes a tree or barrier as I pass by I'd suddenly explode! In reality, I don't think the explosions from object collisions are even necessary, as crashing into something would already punish you by having your cargo pop out naturally, so there's no need to add salt to the wound (though I'll grant you the explosions are amusing in theory).

Movement of the truck felt a bit wonky, and the physics for the cargo in the back felt random and inconsistent: sometimes I'd be driving so carefully and it'd suddenly just spill out for no reason I could tell. Would help if maybe there was more fine control you could impose, or a rework of the physics system, as without it, it could feel very unfair.

I was also getting some performance/stuttering issues and other weird bugs in the later levels.

Finally, the design of the game might like a real missed opportunity:

For a game about deliveries, I found it very odd that there is not a time limit to the courses, or at least a par time to beat. You've got this whole boost mechanic that could be used in conjunction with the time limit to pressure the player to have to take risks and get good at driving quick and dangerously while preserving the cargo. But since there is no time limit, you may as well ignore the boost mechanic since it can only get you into trouble, and instead just drive safely and have a boring risk-free time.

I am befuddled as to why the stars on the course are randomized when the rest of the course remains the same. You'd think that the stars would be placed in a specific way to make the player have to pull off difficult moves that they wouldn't normally do when getting through the course as an extra challenge. Since they're randomly placed, though, it's completely random as to whether you'll have stars placed in a very easy spot or put in a practically impossible spot like right in front of a barrier (which happened to me!) This totally ruins the challenge as its up to luck and not player skill.

Similar to the stars mentioned above, I felt like the game should have some sort of three-tiered reward system based on the objectives of 1) beating the par time 2) preserving all cargo and 3) collecting all stars. It'd be fun if you go from bronze to silver to gold depending on whether you're able to beat the course with all three: newbies could have fun just beating the level, while experts would go back to beat it while accomplishing all three. However, currently it only rewards you for stars collected, which as mentioned above are completely random. Without some sort of reward system like this, I just didn't feel compelled to retry levels or even continue as I could easily exploit the system for easy wins.

I find that if I turn off my brain and just drive while imposing fun challenges upon myself, there's a good time that can be had, but I feel it's a missed opportunity that the game itself doesn't provide these potential fun challenges, as by not doing so, the player can play the game in a very safe and unfun way. This should be the next Crazy Taxi, but without an incentive system, it's unfortunately not.

MrNannings responds:

Thanks for your long review. It's always interesting to read what your thoughts of a game is.

Looing forward to you monthly video reviews!

[Slasher Click]

Hmm, this was a bit of mixed bag! On first glance, it's easy to get an impression of this game feeling unfinished due to the lackluster presentation and simplistic, repetitive gameplay that just plops you into the world with no story or goal or anything, and indeed, I do think it would be understandable for a lot of people to not even give this game a chance.

The game's design can be a bit odd at times: instead of the world feeling curated to provide progressively stronger challenges that are custom-built like a story, the fact that enemies can randomly change makes it feel like it's just up to dumb luck. For example, there was one narrow path early on with tough monsters guarding it that overlapped each other that I felt was too hard and intended to be done by going back and getting the sandstorm ability to blind one of them to force a one-on-one. Imagine my surprise when I came back and suddenly the monsters were weaker and no longer overlapping: I felt really let-down that all my smart planning was pointless and that the game was just going to be arbitrary! There were plenty of other slight annoyances too like how the stats aren't quite well explained: yes, it does say that strength increases critical chance, for example, but by how much? Without numbers, I don't know whether I'm getting big returns for my investment or if it's just barely anything (and speaking of numbers, what's up with stat points adding +2 for most stats except endurance is your health instead of the stat and so on, weird inconsistency).

In spite of all of that, however, the game does have a rather addictive old-school RPG appeal to it, where you go out, grind some monsters for exp and gold, go back to buy some new equipment and new moves, and so on, getting deeper and deeper as you go. There's also a surprisingly deep level of strategy to the game: time only moves when you move, moves have a lot of properties to consider like uses and ranges and time commitment, enemy attacks are modeled as bullets which can be skillfully baited and dodged, status ailments like blind can be used to shrink enemy ranges to let you sneak by or prevent getting double-teamed by overlap, and so on! It rides that fine line of being simple enough that you can kinda zone out, but being active enough to keep you not feeling bored and quitting.

While the game didn't appeal to me enough for a full playthrough, I did think some of the combat design and retro grindy nature of it were quite memorable, so not too shabby! I know it might seem superficial and I do think that the game engine is more important to get solid first and foremost in development (so kudos on doing so), but some graphical improvements and special effects would've been much appreciated to sell it better!

Kwing responds:

Thanks for the really thorough review!

I was really on the fence about how much of a story I wanted to give this game. I didn't want to over-scope, but I didn't want to flesh out a premise that was shallow and cliche, either, so I basically didn't explain anything beyond the villagers complaining about whatever boss monster was the next objective. Still, it's no excuse to not have some kind of intro.

The enemies spawning was intentional. I liked the idea that the player might make different decisions based on the luck of the draw. For instance, if an area makes the player choose between two easy enemies and one hard enemy, that choice might be a bit different if by luck an easier or harder monster spawns in, or if you encounter a rare enemy color that you haven't collected yet. On the other hand, scenarios like what you describe with Sandstorm are also possible, and I see how that could be frustrating.

The stats couldn't be simpler. Your strength is the percent chance of a critical hit. 50 strength equals a 50% chance to crit. Endurance is your maximum health. This was an intentional decision as I find complicated damage formulas can often alienate the player and dissuade them from understanding the mechanics, and I wanted something that made immediate and intuitive sense.

I find it interesting that you called the game grindy, as I actually made a conscious choice for the game not to feel that way. Sure, you can always level up and increase your stats, but given that the stats are mostly only percent chances for certain events to occur, you can never just increase your damage output to the point where you can power through enemies, and this was an intentional way to make the underlying strategy remain relevant no matter how much level grinding the player did.

I do think for a sequel I would want the game to feature at least a bit more of a story (bare minimum have the different bosses be related to a common cause,) and perhaps an entire area dedicated to tutorializing the basic gameplay. Thanks again for the review!

[Portal Defenders: Fast Break!]

NOTE: this review comes from someone who only played singleplayer, and doesn't fancy sports games that much beyond NBA Jam or NFL Blitz.

Hrmm, this was surprisingly a really, really rough one for me! I want to give this game a lot of props as it does a lot of things right, but there were some pretty severe annoyances with my experience that really soured me on it, making it feel like an unfortunately style-over-substance situation!

As said, I think there's a lot of good things to say about this game. In fact, there's so much right it's almost difficult to even describe as the list would just go on and on and I don't wanna bore you to tears. The entire game itself just feels immaculate and professionally put together in practically every aspect. It just exudes charm, and I'm not even talking about just the superficial things like graphics and music (which are great), as the professional touch even extends to the game feel of playing basketball and navigating the menus and reading inputs and so on and so forth. I also appreciate that the game mixes things up in the levels as you go on, as if it were just the same game of basketball but with new characters, I could imagine it getting boring very quickly.

But I unexpectedly spent a lot of my time playing the game feeling very lost and confused. As much as the game teaches you how to shoot with a nice little tutorial, and it does tell you the buttons you have to work with, it leaves a lot up in the air. For example, I didn't know why I wasn't able to attack people anymore until I eventually noticed it was controlled by a bar: why is this the case and how do I get bar back? Plus, even despite teaching me to shoot, I could never tell if I was doing the timing right or wrong as it just felt random when it decided to go in and I didn't know whether that was on me or RNG or other factors I'm not considering. Same for blocking: I kept trying over and over to block people but nothing would work despite my best efforts (maybe it's because with such small collision between players it's difficult to judge where to stand to be in front of them and, well, block them?) I kinda wish Referee Tom would actually give some actual gameplay hints instead of just talking about their cat: I like a good joke, but I'm lost here and could use some actual help! I know I'm probably just supposed to follow instincts and treat it as a party game and accept that RNG is involved to make the game work, but I had a tough time doing that: I'll accept that part of that might be on me.

Moving on from that, there were a lot of confusing and annoying design decisions. Whenever I passed to my partner, I would've much preferred if I was able to automatically swap to control my partner: the fact that they remain as a CPU even then felt very awkward and they'd generally do some dumb stuff like just pass it right back to me: made it feel pointless and unable to pull off any strategy through passing. Likewise, it was super frustrating that I couldn't swap to my partner at any time either in general: so many times they'd be closer to where the ball is and I'd be far away and unable to do anything and just feel so helpless. I spoke previously about having difficulty blocking, well, that was only because I was trying to properly block, as once I started goaltending, blocking was a breeze! There's a reason goaltending is illegal and I can't believe this game doesn't prevent that, as it completely breaks the difficulty of the game in half! Speaking of breaking the difficulty, I feel like the 'on fire' buff (which I don't even know how it happens) is way too overpowered as it just seems to last indefinitely and makes every shot 100% guaranteed: there's just no way for the enemy to come back from that! There were also just some weird glitches like the ball teleporting for some reason.

I could go on with other issues, but I'll admit that in spite of it all, the game is still pretty fun, albeit maybe not quite fun enough to make me go through the entire story campaign as while it does make an effort to mix things up every level, it's not quite enough especially considering how simple the gameplay is. I still think the game is something to be proud of and a very impressive endeavor overall: just had a bit of a rocky first impression that left both a powerful positive and negative impression!

As a side note! I loved the feel of attacking players and it gave nice flashbacks to games of the past: maybe make a beat-em-up in future? Haha!

BoMToons responds:

Good review! We've actually made a few beatemups in the past, you should check our profiles! In fact, this is a sequel to a beatemup called "Portal Defenders" from the early 2000s!

Tom's quotes cycle and he does have good hints in there about how "on fire" works and "turbo" usage. But we've heard the feedback from you and many others about the need for a better tutorial, so we're working on that. Stay tuned!

In single player mode, I'll also see how easy it would be to swap control when you pass... should be possible!

Shooting accuracy is actually affected by a few things:
1. The "base" accuracy of your player
2. How close you get to "releasing" your shot at the exact apex of your shot
3. If turbo is being held down while shooting (and you have turbo to use)
4. If you're "on fire" your accuracy goes way up, but it's not "perfect"
5. Your distance from the basket

If you can capture the ball disappearing in a video, please send it over. I thought I had squashed the bugs around that in the latest versions, but there might be more bugs lingering.

[Alister - Monster tamer]

Hoo boy, I'm not even sure where to start with this one as overall it just feels incredibly buggy and unfinished. If I'm not mistaken, I'm assuming we've got a classic newbie indie dev mistake here: getting way too overambitious and trying to make a huge RPG of their dreams but failing to realize just how much work is involved and burning out (and it's made even crazier since the game was for a game jam too!)

Bugs and missing features were everywhere: you've got improperly layered graphics (the player character appears in front of the partner even if behind them), bad/sticky boundary collisions, the game skips the first turtle fight if you lose at it instead of resetting, missing game over screens, the list goes on and on.

Moving on from bugs, we've just got bizarre design decisions and construction: the game just dumps you in the world with no tutorial or sense of direction, random encounters are programmed so badly you can get into another fight after taking one step after a previous fight, the text and menus are rife with typos and missing punctuation and bad layouts, the utility of the moves is questionable and I'm not sure if they work, augh!

I'll give the game credit that some of the stuff does look impressive: for example the battle animations and special effects felt quite impactful, the combat was quite fast-paced, and so on, but they were all very superficial qualities and actually made the game seem even worse with how much they stand out against the terrible construction: the phrase 'lipstick on a pig' comes to mind, though that would imply a malicious intent to dupe the viewer into thinking the game is good when it isn't, but in this case I think it was just terrible management and bad priorities (as in wanting the program the 'cool' stuff before doing all the boring but critical features which were left to rot).

I'm barely even touching all of the problems the game has as they were practically uncountable. I couldn't make it that far into the game before giving up hope: felt like the game was barely holding itself together and I was so confused that I didn't have faith that it even had an ending to get to in the first place. Hopefully this can just be a learning moment and you'll have better luck on their next project, or perhaps you can continue work on this but free of the short game jam time constraints!

Alex303 responds:

thank you for your response!

yeaaa I really was too ambitious with this one, espically with my lack of coding skills. I'll make sure to make something smaller next time around. Im gonna go through and try to fix alot of the bugs you mentioned. Yea I didn't have time to program in a tutorial, but thats no exuse I should have had one. Ill definitly take this as a learning experience thank you again.

[Go, Go, Cupid!]

It's certainly quite a stylish, goofy and funny game in many senses, so I really want to like it and do think it is pretty good, but I found my impression of it very soured due to the confusing, shoddy construction and odd design decisions. Basically the core characters and dialogue are very nice, but the dialogue system, minigames and other aspects are pretty bad/nonsensical and drag the experience down.

First and foremost, the dialogue was very infuriating to deal with as it was generally lacking typical quality of life designs. I understand that the dialogue is paced in a certain way with pauses to reflect speech pattern and such, but every dialogue-heavy game should offer a way to click and have the line immediately fill out to finish, as without it the game can be incredibly tedious to get through. Even with the option to speed up the dialogue I still found it very frustrating, and furthermore replays were super annoying as there was no skip option or save/load feature.

Second, I found the game took way too long to get to some actual gameplay. In retrospect, the game is a visual novel, so there isn't much gameplay to speak of beyond reading text, but the introduction sequence just takes so damn long to set everything up (especially due to the aforementioned unskippable dialogue) that it doesn't allow even a crumb of interactivity to get a feel of what the game has to offer. Furthermore, when the game does actually introduce some minigames, they feel really shoddy and confusing, both in where they are placed and how they operate. I have no idea why a shooting minigame pops up in random parts with the film geek as they don't seem to correspond to anything happening in their current activities, and the rules for the game don't make sense: I think you need to only shoot bad people, but the logical for it isn't clear as to who is bad (for instance, I felt like it was just saying to avoid shooting women and children, but you can't shoot this one guy, and you can't shoot this woman who is part of the group in that music game so you'd think they'd all be fair game, but you can shoot Stepford and the cops for some reason?) In the end it didn't even matter as no matter whether I won or lost, it didn't even seem to make a difference (or if it did, the game didn't offer clear feedback of it).

Finally, the game also just seemed weirdly designed: you've got these choices to make that affect your romance bar, and I made a few goofs so I didn't have full bar at the end. Despite this, the story seemed to have the two of them absolutely falling over each other, so you'd think I'd get the good end, only for them to suddenly get cold feet outta nowhere and give me a bad ending most likely due to my unfilled bar. Just felt dumb for the story to only have the bar influence it at the very end, and to have it completely derail where the story is going: may as well just get rid of the bar altogether and just give a good ending at this rate since it just felt so dumb!

Also some buttons like the Go Home button just straight up do not work??? And there's just a lot of odd buggy things like the dialogue boxes and time gauges in the minigames go all wonky at times.

Having said all that, I do think the game is pretty cool once you come to grips with it. The graphics are very stylish, you weren't lazy as there are tons of unique expressions and character animations and CGs for all sorts of events, the dialogue is very funny and charming not only due to the words they say, but the more subtle things like how it is paced to reflect speech patterns and has intentional lack of punctuation and such. Despite me having a frustrating time that I don't know if I'm adequately explaining (the gall of me to give you guys complaints when I can't verbalize either, haha) I still found myself going back to retry with the film geek girl and check out the other characters, so it hooked me in the end. Certainly a pretty cool visual novel!

EDIT: oh what the hell i replayed film girl and got full bar this time instead but the ending was still just a weird copout where he left for some reason despite them being madly in love? how does this game work? is there even a good ending? i'm so confused.

DOJIMADOG responds:

woah! first off, thank you for the in depth review! you acknowledge a whole lotta stuff we both kinda knew about when going in and dropping and it some other stuff we might've not've haha

a lot of what you mentioned mostly came down to time limitations for the jam and everyone's schedules on the team being hard to match up with one another; a big thing is the romance bar. The romance bar was one of the bigger ideas we had towards the start that we kinda ended up ignoring towards the end to focus on other aspects (and also time). It's definitely something we wanted to expand upon and lead to more endings and such but ultimately ended up deciding to leave alone in favor of spending more time with art, music, etc. for what we already had. A shame, but it is what it is lol

home button not working is completely on us, we (or i) was totally aware but we were running outta time so we were like, whatever LOL. regarding the shooty minigame the indicative of who to shoot is the red and green outlines on every character, but overall i tried to also make most characters suiting to who'd make sense to shoot and not shoot (bad guys having meaner expressions or weapons, etc.)

SPOILER ALERT: there's only one ending for each route, we definitely did wanna do more with the romance bar, but to save adding loads upon what we already had regarding different aspects of the game we simplified things and hoped having 3 routes was enough to make up for that lack. To keep things fresh, dialogue is also directly affected by your choices most of the time (you might even miss a whole scene or get a whole new scene cuz you chose a certain thing!)

we might update it in the future to fix or expand upon some things, who knows? but thanks for playing, yo!

[Tidying Up + Secrets of the Sewers]

Quite the cute little game! Not only does the game have a wonderfully cute aesthetic to it all and tons of wonderful juicy touches like cool transitions, but the gameplay itself did a great job at escalating the difficulty bit-by-bit while also introducing new mechanics to keep me hooked, all while also having a nice story to further keep me intrigued at where it is going. Loved that it also had a save/load system which meant I could continue my game after taking a break, and that it had movement where you could hold down the key, meaning I didn't need to tap for every step! Very impressive to that it even had a level editor and such: I can't see myself using it but kudos for going the extra mile!

While I'm overall very positive on the game, there were a lot of odd design decisions and weird stuff that I encountered to give feedback on:

Despite the game having an option to have the text move forward on player input instead of automatically and having that option on by default, the cold open introduction doesn't respect this and not only moves forward with the text automatically, but at a ridiculous speed! Even if you have to have the text move automatically, you should try and pace it as if the dialogue was being spoken (and then add a few seconds of padding)! Bizarre since the outro does wait for player input, too!

I wish the game had some more sounds to it to make it feel a bit more exciting. Vacumming up all of the trash like Pac-man would've felt a bit better if we had some sounds like that as well.

I wish that the game made it a bit clearer who you are controlling. Yes, it does take some steps to address this in that it makes the character you pick sparkle initially, but that only lasts a brief moment. I'd love if it'd do something like darkening/brightening the sprite for who is inactive/active respectively, or perhaps have different sprite states, like one with them standing up and another with them sleeping or sitting down.

It's silly, but I found the game actually a bit spooky in some aspects despite being overall very cute? For example, the whole glitchy transition was quite odd and feels like something you'd see in a horror game (I'd expect the game to do something like a heart wipe and a confetti shower when you beat a level, perhaps), and I don't know why some of the conversations were done in the darkness zone when it felt like all of them could've just been done within the game HUD, where most of them take place.

I found it a bit odd that not only does the game not automatically move onto the next level once you hover up all the trash and head to the door, you can actually end the level prematurely by just making it to the door and clicking next level even if you haven't picked up all the trash??? Shouldn't cleaning up everything be a requirement? Sometimes it seems like bonus dialogue happens on all the trash being cleaned up, so is it just meant as a bonus objective (despite the fact it should be a main objective?)

There were also a few other odd bugs I experienced, like how I couldn't get the music/sound to work anymore when I let the game go idle briefly. Only happened once though and I couldn't recreate it afterwards? Probably just a dumb browser thing and not your prob.

Most of the puzzles do seem to fall on the way-too-easy side: most of them start out interesting with the two separated and having to cooperate, but what could be some cool sliding puzzles where you really gotta plan your moves usually end up just being able to be 'cheated' by eventually breaking down the boundaries and just getting Capy to go into the puzzle and stand anywhere to let you reroute anyway you want.

The story doesn't quite evolve as much as I'd like: there is some intrigue and information you learn over time, but several levels just loop very similar themes of them cracking jokes and encouraging each other. Look, it's nice that it's happy and all, but it just feels like it isn't going anywhere. Stories usually involve some sort of growth and challenges, you know, and while it is technically doing that, it kinda feels superficial at times, just self-help platitude after platitude. I just felt like I wasn't really buying what it was selling. Furthermore it'd be nicer if the gameplay was more tied to the story: maybe it'd be nice if we had a better hook, like some sort of item we're looking for like buried treasure, or talk about some interesting things we find in the trash as we go that bring back memories of past relationships or whatever.

I'm not quite sure how the switches work? I just flip 'em until I get what I want, which works I guess.

Overall feels like the game is very well polished and delivers a short and sweet adventure that doesn't overstay its welcome: well done!

Bleak-Creep responds:

I wanna say this is the longest write up I've seen from you yet? Lots of good notes in here, and I know we've already got a few on our list as things we wanna fix in future updates like making it easier to tell which character you're using or adding a few more elements to make new puzzles a little more difficult.

I could probably modify the opening scene to be manually controlled too. That's not a bad idea. I just quickly animated that part in a day pretty late into development, so I wanted to make sure it was easy for Intrapath to incorporate.

As for the story itself, I thought about revealing a bit more about what happened with James, but sometimes it was tricky finding the right balance to the amount of dialogue per level. In the end, I decided to just leave it mostly ambiguous and keep dialogue short and concise for the sake of pacing. It became less about the details of Capy's past, and more about making Roombella and Capy's friendship feel authentic.

As always, thanks for the detailed review! :)