Emrox's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Last Piece of Cake DX]

You know what I kinda miss with this update is in the original version, when the dad says "looks like you'll have to kill me for it" and the background goes red it like, switches over to the pixelated rasterized art at that moment and there was something unintentionally creepy about that - almost like a very subtle version of what they call 'deep frying' an image now. It doesn't really affect my enjoyment of the thing (still great after all these years) but I am curious if anyone else remembers this or would agree that that moment has a little less "punch" in this enhanced version

[Roguebot Rumble]

I like the game! This morning I asked Bill if he could sing a few lines on a song I'm producing and he said he'd do it in exchange for a review of his new game, so for the sweet sound of Bill's voice I'm going to write up some stuff I thought about while playing the game.

When I started the game for the first time I wasn't sure if I was playing user-generated levels right away or something curated to introduce the rules of the game. Actually, I'm still not sure. The rating thing after each screen suggests it was all user-created but I thought maybe it would start out with some basic introductory levels and then graduate to random user levels at some point. That seems like a very minor thing, but I think knowing whether or not these are "intro levels," or even just "game-designer-created levels" makes a difference with how I approach them - I sort of expect the author-created levels to be very deliberate and have their design ideas unobfuscated by randomly placed platforms or whatever, so if I don't know if the level is created by the game designer, I don't know how much I should be reading into level design to see if it's trying to show me something. As a quick fix I would have some kind of indication if they're player made, like a little thing that says the author of the level when you start, or even just a tutorial that is very overtly tutorial-y with the text in the background that tells you what to do n shit so that when it gets to the random user levels they are very obviously the user-made levels. Taking "we barely got this done in time" into account, I'm guessing that's the sort of concern that would be addressed with a little more time in the oven, so whatever!

I also thought it was weird that restarting doesn't take you back to the same level you were on. It would be nice to be able to use what you learned from that particular failure, instead of re-rolling until you get an easy enough level.

The big explodey death balls were cool but I almost feel like they would be cooler if they didn't speed up & home in on you when you get in range - like they're fun because they're a big looming threat that you have to learn to work around, but they would always blow up on me pretty shortly after appearing so I would never get to do anything cool to avoid them. I feel like it would be cool if they just slowly followed you around and didn't ever rush into to you, and they did a ton of damage or insta-killed so that they don't always get to you but just have a very threatening presence. I get why this sort of thing could be weird - if too many death balls spawn they would probably bunch up and just be a weird cluster of death balls following you around, but you could probably fix that by giving them an acceleration thing, kinda like the flying mask in mario 2, but slower.

Hm this "review" is getting into backseat-game designer territory, so I will cut it off there! I'm looking forward to seeing what this turns into with the future updates. Good work guys!

PsychoGoldfish responds:

Yeah but did you use Firefox?

[Blooming]

I'm posting this to say I beat it and I want to brag about it!

I sympathize with the people who say it's too punishing - there were a few times where I had an idea of how to solve a puzzle but to get to the puzzle I had to run past some jugs or cats or whatever and I would die like 50 times on the thing that I didn't care about just to get another try at the part I was trying to solve. I also didn't like having to wait around for the picking of the flowers, and even though there were a few puzzles that were dependent on that, it added an extra bit of annoyance to the retrying over and over thing.

I really liked the puzzles though! And I like the level of challenge, I think just minimizing those sorts of annoyances would make it more appreciable. Some other gripes - I didn't like that there were petals just for aesthetic particle stuff, like if it's a main game mechanic there shouldn't be other stuff that looks exactly the same with no real function. I don't know what the non-coin jugs were for. It was also weird not knowing where it was saving checkpoints (actually I thought the jugs were doing that for a little bit?) These are minor things but when the game is really hard and potentially frustrating, the little things can add up!

HealliesGames responds:

You have every right to brag about it. x)

The fact that puzzles actually leave you thinking is a great achievement for me, as I feared they might be too intuitive.

Currently static jugs were used only for aesthetics, only to make exclaim at the first enemy jug encountered: "What the..." ahah!
The fact that they were outlined by the black border, pretended to be some kind of interactable object.

I fully agree on the particles.
I chose to recycle the petal sprite to dampen the time and dedicate myself to other things to arrive in time for the jam.

In addition, a little extra speed on picking the flower may decrease the rigidity.

Thanks for the detailed review, in these days I will try to fix by following your valuable suggestions.

[Rigby Saw Game]

gotta love that shove'

[Super OpenWorld Retro RPG]

I beat it

[Alex]

Hey so the game's pretty solid and the message is cool.

The one thing that bothered me though, and the only reason I'm writing this review, is that the whole story is directly told to the player, when I could have just as easily "felt" it through the increasing restrictions on the controls. I feel like the gameplay was too restricted to the story (understandably so, as it was designed to create a sense of empathy for ALS patients), but there are probably more game-design-specific ways you could have done the same thing.

If I had designed this game, I would have probably made the gameplay a little less linear. Instead of having one track the player follows, which magically adapts to the player's inabilities, I would have made one short level that the player has to traverse over and over, maybe getting another carton of milk every week. Each time, it would be a little bit harder to jump around, forcing the player to find new ways to cross the terrain each time. By the end, crossing the one level would be really difficult and time-consuming. I don't know much about ALS, but I feel like that would be a better comparison.

In the end, empathy is an emotion games can create better than any other medium, and I guess that's why I felt it so unnecessary to see text on the screen telling me what was going on. It really shouldn't bother me, and I guess it doesn't really detract from the gameplay, but it does kinda seem like you're using the text as a crutch to tell the story, when the game is perfectly capable of doing that on its own.

[Invert Selection]

Really cool concept, but for the first five or six puzzles you tell the player exactly what to do. I get that you're showing them how to play the game, but sometimes I like to figure out these things on my own. It'd be ok if you waited 20 seconds before the little demonstration comes up, but when you tell the player what to do right away it takes away the joy of discovery.

It also seems like it teaches you everything right away, but doesn't utilize some of the tools until later on. I'd prefer to see the different mechanics introduced as they appear in the game. In fact, I think I would have liked the game better if you'd just taken out levels 2-5 completely and left it up to me to figure out what to do. At the very least, the first few levels would still be puzzles, because I'd have to figure out how to use the game's mechanics together as they arise.

[RE-tards]

This is probably the best thing

[.Loneliness.]

Lol that blew.

[powerMOUSE]

Eek. There's a clear issue with control here, too.

I think the reason so many people are saying the control was bad is simply because of the use of X and Y relative positioning, as opposed to calculating the angles and making the x and y speed relative to the distance from the mouse to the cursor.