FutureCopLGF's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[MÆRE II: Hypnagogia]

Very cool horror game! I was a fan of the first Maere, and I'm a fan of this one as well: the concept of trying to sleep while strategically scanning the area for safety while risking your sanity by doing so is very clever and nostalgic. My favorite part was definitely the sound design, not just in how it creates a creepy atmosphere, but in how it intuitively gives feedback and teaches how to play the game: hearing your heartbeat pound from seeing a ghost, turning away, eventually looking back, and having your heartbeat return to normal upon seeing it's gone is so cool and communicates how the game works incredibly well. I also liked the inclusion of a scoring system as it naturally incentivizes replays and makes the short length less of a problem. Cool stuff all-around!

While I do like it, I did still find myself a bit letdown by how easy and short it is. I was able to get an S rank without any sort of problem on my second try, and I couldn't help but wish the game had more meat to it. Would love if it was more like Five Nights at Freddys, where it slowly builds up the difficulty over the days, both in how punishing it can be and in new mechanics and obstacles to contend with. Right now I can't even see how a player could ever fail, but maybe if you introduced more ghost types that need to be handled in different ways, like having to look at them instead of away, that'd be neat. Couldn't help but want more, and I hope you can take that as a compliment, because it means you've got me hooked!

Chris responds:

Thanks! I think there will be a third game next year so there will be more. I like that idea about having certain ghosts that you have to look at, it would be an interesting twist to keep it interesting. It might make it into the third and final entry next year if I can figure out a way to make it immediately obvious which ghosts you need to look at and which you need to avoid.

[Clickery Hexagon]

Clicker games aren't really my thing, especially since my old hands just aren't up to the task nowadays, but I'll give this game credit that it did a lot to try to win me over with its stylish cold-open, tons of unlocks with satisfying blips and bloops, slick presentation, combo meter, addictive sense of progression as you keep quickly catching up to wherever you left off after buying an upgrade, and so on. Clickers live and die on how stylish and juicy they are since that's where the sense of addiction can be grown, and this is one of the first ones I've played in a long time that does good work in that regard, so kudos!

In terms of feedback: as a person with old hands, it was a bit rough that the game locks the auto-clicks behind a long initial commitment. Also, the music player didn't seem to work for me and it was a gamble whether a song that I switched over to would play or not: sometimes a song that was playing before wouldn't work when I went back to it, even!

amyspark-ng responds:

im glad you liked the game! i tried to make it as juicy as possible since it's one of my favorite aspects in games :3

it's kinda weird the music player doesn't work for you, if you can please PM me with more details about your browser maybe?

[Necrowave 5.0 (Old version)]

Oof, this was a rough one for me!

Credit where its due, this game does have a lot going for it: the graphics, particularly the animations, are absolutely gorgeous, and the game experiments with a lot of different mechanics, be it old-school Prince of Persia ledge-grab platforming, pogo jumping off enemies, and some puzzle elements like the invisible mime block and the fire extinguishing. A lot of potential on display here!

Unfortunately, it felt like a very style-over-substance experience to me. The world is so repetitive and bland, almost like a grey-box prototype, in the way it is constructed out of these blocks, and it takes so long for the game to introduce any sort of interesting mechanic or challenge, and when it finally does, it almost immediately discards it to introduce something else, meaning that nothing gets time to breathe and evolve into something complex and interesting. I really wanted to see some sort of final exam platforming challenge that combines the mime blocks, ledge climbing, pogoing and all of that, but it never came and I was left with a bunch of discordant one-offs!

Bit nitpicky here, but the world's also filled with a bunch of these goofy out-of-character backer statues that remind me of those weirdo self-inserts in Pillars of Eternity: I understand it's part of the Patreon grind, but it's just not my thing as it detracts from the world and immersion for me.

Clearly there are some great artistic chops on display here, but not so for everything else quite yet. For me, I would say find a designer and programmer to team up with here on Newgrounds to delegate those tasks to while you stick with just handling the art: I'm sure you could make something great that way! If you wanna stick with it solo that's fine too, because as harsh as I am on this, I would like to see it evolve into something great!

Arfhis responds:

You some really fine and valid points honestly. I'm gonna listen to this closely and apply it as best as I can. Thank you <3

[Party Pooper]

This was a great little adventure game, like a spiritual sequel to that 'Don't Shit Your Pants' game!

Always down for a bit of a 'straw millionaire'-esque puzzle adventure where you collect a series of objects through quests to make trades for more objects and get to the end goal, and this delivered that very well with some very charming presentation, lots of funny characters and dialogue, some great setpieces, and so on. I was worried a bit at first that it was gonna be too overloaded with goofy non-sequitur nonsense, but if anything, I felt like the game was well-paced and balanced for a short and sweet adventure, and in fact, I wouldn't have minded a bit more!

A bit of feedback:

*I feel silly because I now realize you could ask that girl for a Russian dictonary, but I thought the only way to solve the cheesesteak puzzle was to pull out Google Translate camera, hah! Having said that, I wish the solution was a bit more puzzle-y than the text just automatically transforming to english once you get the dictionary: would've loved if, for example, it's just a scrap of a dictionary that shows you simple info like Russian numbers and the name of common food items, and you have to use that to find the keywords within the text while ignoring the rest.

*I wasn't sure how exactly one is supposed to win the video game fight: is it just that once you play long enough they will fumble eventually? If so, then similar to the above, I wish the puzzle was a bit more elegant and complex than that, like maybe you need to time your shots appropriately that you trap him, like firing a crouch shot quickly followed by a standing shot so he jumps into the second bullet or something, otherwise he'll keep perfectly dodging.

*I would say that the voice actors need to get better recording setups, specifically with pop filters and the like, but I suppose the goofy audio quality matches the goofy atmosphere and is thus actually a benefit to the intended experience, so, uh, stay the course!

popperr responds:

Thank you for the kind and thorough feedback, sir! Much love!

[Lily's Cafe in Nevada]

Man, I really liked the idea behind this. Having to manage a cafe that caters to deadly killers? What on earth could happen? Maybe you need to deliver food in the middle of a gunfight with bullets flying everywhere? Maybe you need to mop up blood from the constant fights in addition to food service? Maybe you need to keep everyone fed or else they start fighting? Maybe you join in on the fighting to calm them down? The possibilities had me excited for what was in store!

Unfortunately, what I found was rather underwhelming. I don't want to be mean, but how on earth can you have a food service game where customers have infinite patience, only come one at a time, and don't make orders and are satisfied with anything you give them? It goes against all logical expectations! The game is just so easily exploitable by filling up the plate with every single type of food and giving that to everyone for maximum points, because apparently you get 10 points per food. I quickly found myself losing interest as it all just felt so pointless.

I guess I got surprised by how the game turned out, but it wasn't a good surprise. It felt like a real nothingburger, if you pardon the pun. Please revisit this concept in the future and do it justice: I'm a big fan of cafe management games and I think one set in Madness is a novel idea!

TomaFokio responds:

We are currently working on a similar update. And I think your reasoning is pretty fair

[Deckerware - Eggbug Party Games]

Hmm, seems like a rather cute little Warioware-esque microgame collection you got here! Not too shabby, especially considering it was for a gamejam, but ultimately when taken out of that context, there not only isn't enough microgames on offer which makes it take no time at all for them to start feeling repetitive, but the microgames also don't speed up or have enough variety to them within themselves to keep things interesting for long. Basically it feels like a good rough draft or prototype in its current state, but not enough as a full-fledged game, which I would love to see if you continue work on it!

As a side note, I'm not familiar with this whole Decker interface: maybe it would be best if it was hidden to avoid confusion, thinking it's necessary to mess around with its controls? I also found it weird that the game starts with the music disabled: not sure why!

sysl responds:

Hey, I've left the controls visible so people can see how it works and play with it.

I would love it if more people played with decker.

[Landmine Cube]

Huh, this was a surprisingly cute and fun little Minesweeper-esque arcade game! I was worried it would be too trial-and-error, but it was rather fun to slowly and carefully go across the map and figure out where all the mines were while collecting all the trinkets: maybe I'm part robot, but something about combing levels over and over was somewhat meditative. Sometimes it can be a little frustrating when mines are too close together and you just have to take a gamble, but as long as you view the life counter as an allowance for error instead of something you don't want to lose, then it's ok. Yeah, just some simple but addictive fun to be had here!

If I were to have any feedback:

*It'd be nice if you could keep moving if you held down the key so you wouldn't need to constantly be pressing buttons to cover large areas. I understand that maybe it's intentional so players don't accidently wander too far into a mine, but perhaps you could make it so that holding down the key only works on ground you've already marked/covered to prevent that.

*It'd be nice if, similar to Minesweeper, you could mark tiles that you suspect have a mine in them with a flag, just to help you keep track of everything.

*I'd like it if there was a better scoring/grading system, like if you get a gold medal if you clear the level quickly and with a minimum amount of lives lost: would add a lot of replayability, I think.

Pitigamedev responds:

I'm glad you enjoyed my game, and thank you for your precious feedback as always. If I will decide to expand this game a little bit I will implement a "flag mechanics" similar to the one in Minesweeper!

[Face Down]

Interesting game you got here! Reminds me a lot of games like Buckshot Roulette and Inscryption, and I assume those were the direct inspirations. The presentation and atmosphere were pretty slick, and while it was a bit slow to start, I enjoyed the way it kept adding on new rules as the game went on to keep it exciting: in particular I thought that the rules were you can call out rule-breaking were neat and reminded me a lot of Liar's Dice and other deception-based games. The way the villain has dialogue and expressions that dynamically respond to your actions and how the game is going is neat too and keeps the tension up.

For the most part, I didn't have any major issues, just little nitpicks. I was a bit confused as to why whenever I moused over to the right that the drawer was being so fiddly and unresponsive, but that's because I didn't realize that I needed to mouse over the card piles specifically instead of just the general right side of the screen: perhaps a highlight when you hover over the card piles would've made this more obvious. And I will admit that as neat as the game is, sometimes it feels like it is just dragging on and on and I want it to end already: sometimes that might be due to the game just feeling random and up to the luck of the draw, other times it's probably just me being impatient and not wanting to count cards and all that jazz, haha!

prsaseta responds:

Buckshot Roulette release date: 28 December 2023
Face Down release date: 26 September 2022

[Tezcatlipoca Early Acces]

Huh, quite the promising survival horror game you have here!

For the most part, it feels like the game has good fundamentals: all the stuff you would expect, such as tank controls and fixed camera angles are presented and handled alright (though I'll admit I find it weird that pressing backwards has the character insta-turn instead of backpedaling). The visual style is pretty distinct, reminding me of something like Killer7, and the way it brightly highlighting interactables is rather striking. Atmosphere is alright too with neat lighting and ambient sound. I also thought it had some pretty neat aspects to the gameplay: in particular I liked some of the first-person segments, like the part where you have a maze to get through and you need to use audio cues to find the way out based on the clue given: that was pretty clever and felt like a good puzzle!

In spite of this, though, I had to admit that I had a tough time getting immersed into the game and taking it seriously. My feedback would be thus:

First there were a lot of weird technical issues. For some reason the game defaults the SFX volume to zero which is bizarre as it can make you miss a lot of audio cues, even important ones such as your father screaming. Whenever a tutorial would pop-up to explain controls, the place where an icon is supposed to be wouldn't render properly. I crashed the game when I tried to crouch through the gap in the bus because it involves pressing ctrl+W and that is a shortcut that closes the browser window. The SFX of the game also felt like stock sounds that didn't fit the theme, especially the menu sounds. Finally in general there were just a lot of weird micro-stutters and times were the controls became unresponsive for no reason I could tell: I think it would happen when the game would load those wandering ghosts in?

When it wasn't technical issues, I just felt like the game wasn't appropriately building horror and dread. A lot of stuff just felt really goofy and unthreatening with the way they were presented, especially the dumb enemies which are so easily avoided due to their slow speed and attacks: seriously, I can't see how you would ever be hit by these guys unless you wanted to die. The way events were setup were silly too, like the way the game interrupts you with a blatant 'Flee!' prompt instead of something more subtle, like a musical sting or just letting the enemy appear and scare the player naturally. There's plenty other stuff but it's rather subtle and hard to describe exactly what it was doing wrong: it's just the vibes weren't fitting, I suppose.

As said, I definitely think there is something here, so I hope you keep working on it and I get to see the final version sometime soon!

BecSantus responds:

Thank you very much for the review! I’m still working hard to make this game the best it can be. I'll address as many of the issues as possible, though some are unfortunately tied to the limitations of the HTML version. I recommend playing the executable file available on itch.io for a better experience.

As for the crouch feature, it’s a toggle that automatically deactivates when you start running, so there's no need to keep holding Ctrl. I'll try to upload a fix for the SFX issue soon, as I'm currently working on finishing the rest of the town.

[A Quiet Winter Walk Home]

Pretty cute and chill game you got here! I'll admit I'm not always much for chill, low-stakes games like this, being an action junkie, but I do enjoy examining and interacting with everything I can in my point-n-click adventures or survival horrors, so likewise I very much enjoyed finding all of the amusing gags, dialogue and references that were strewn about this little town! It was a nice little adventure and I was impressed at the cute and stylish presentation!

In terms of feedback:

*Maybe it's against the spirit of the game, but I do wish the game had some sort of tasks or quests you could get involved in. For example, maybe you help a family out with, say, clearing the snow out of their shop, upon which they reward you with a leftover carrot as a snack, which you instead take to a snowman you met earlier who has lost their nose, and so on and so forth. I know the game is giving you points for interacting with stuff, but I just wish there was something more that required a little bit of brainwork or involvement.

*Found it a bit odd that when you are given a few options to select in a dialogue, you aren't able to use WASD to select options but instead need to utilize the arrow keys. I constantly kept getting confused when the options weren't responding, only to remember to switch to the arrows, over and over.

*Would be nice if you could press a button when text is filling out to have it fast-forward to immediately fill out completely.

*For some reason when you move diagonally into a wall, you move much quicker than if you were to just move straight forward. Perhaps it's some sort of hidden tech for speedrunners to take advantage of?

sysl responds:

Hey, this was my first port to godot so the movement was a result of not adjusting for that.

Thank you for playing!