Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Riddle University]

The production value here is really fantastic. Everything looks clean, including the fully animated cutscenes for several of the sequences (some, like the way the can or fat guy roll, really show off incredibly smooth realism on a level that not too many animators here are capable of.)

Beyond that, I found this actively difficult to get through. The environment is too big (and the game is too long) for the kind of precise pixel hunting needed to gather everything, and only a handful of the puzzles are telegraphed in a way that makes sense. I ended up using your walkthrough perhaps 3 times before giving up at the final code at the end (which I had absolutely no idea how to find on my own and didn't feel like skimming the whole walkthrough for.)

I think one of the biggest things that makes this game less fun than the old escape room games (and this is generalizable to all of the point and click Riddle games, not just this one) is that unlocking more rooms as you progress makes the game drag on and on, instead of giving the player a small and mostly complete set of problems which the player is able to solve one at a time. You pixel hunt, use trial and error on an absolutely massive number of clickable items, finally find the combination that works, then unlock a new area which requires more pixel hunting, trial and error over a larger area, and backtracking over a larger area. The longer the game goes on the more tedious it becomes, leading to an experience where I found myself hoping for the game to be almost over for pretty much the entirety of the experience.

Having some more hints to guide the player, or perhaps just blatantly showing which items were clickable, would have made this experience feel a lot less frustrating. As it is, the time you spend stuck does make the game difficult in a sense, but it's the kind of difficulty that can only ever feel frustrating because there's no real way to "try harder."

As a closing note, I really didn't find the flavor text (or the general premise: "escape the school") to be terribly interesting, which meant I was only interested in completing the game for the sake of completing it. I wasn't invested in the characters, the plot, or anything that would make me anticipate what I would find deeper in the game.

I do think this game probably succeeds at doing what it intended to accomplish, but I personally would have had a much better experience with a shallower "choose your animation" game, or perhaps a shorter game.

[Madness: Project Nexus (Classic)]

I'm not sure how this one slipped by me. I see why this is sometimes called Madness Interactive 2, it really does feel like a faithful recreation of the animations in game form.

The art, animation, sound design, and variety of content (mostly in the weapons and skills) is really fantastic. I also like the concept of the tech bar and the fact that enemies will dive to avoid being hit, it makes the enemies feel more engaging rather than just being sitting ducks.

I really didn't like the level design. Having to run through room after room (that all looked the same) was annoying, especially if you went the wrong way and had to backtrack. I found myself preferring the Arena because it allowed the combat to take a front seat while level design was essentially moot.

My biggest issue here is how the difficulty is implemented. Most of episode 1 seems extremely easy, sans the bosses which seem inappropriately hard compared to the rest of the content. The amount of hits it takes to knock the helmet off of the boss in the penultimate level (of episode 1) was so ridiculous (even on easy!) that I thought the game was glitched and was about to close the game when it finally popped off and allowed me to finish the level. It's a good thing enemies are converted into BitmapData when they die, because you stack up so many bodies during that fight there's no way you could play it without those Movie Clips causing major slowdown. Similar to the point about clutter, the fact that empty weapons don't despawn is a ridiculous QoL oversight; yes, they flash red, but when there's a bunch of them in a pile and you have to grab one in a hurry, it's essentially the luck of the draw whether or not you get something with ammo.

Arena mode also felt a bit odd to me. I spent forever redoing round 1 before finally getting enough money to have a weak melee weapon at the start of every fight (which was also just enough for me to buy another weapon with a slight profit.) The mode didn't start for real until I was able to reach levels where I could bring back guns from enemies found in the arena and continually swap them out; the fact that melee weapons break while guns get more ammo between rounds makes the start of the game extremely slow in this regard. Once it does pick up, the enemy difficulty scales so slowly that the difficulty drops from tedious and protracted to tedious and unlosable. The gun with 200 ammo allows you to double down on this and protract how long it feels easy, while the generous experience payouts make it feel like most of the experience is just power creep rather than a change in difficulty. By the time the difficulty picked back up (for me, about round 30) it was mostly because of slowdown as well as ATPs having way too much tac (while I had neglected to spec into tac damage.) Starting over after getting this far is also really painful.

In so many ways this is a more sophisticated game than Madness Interactive, yet the difficulty of that game somehow feels a lot more transparent, whereas here you have ridiculously tanky enemies, the power creep of a stat system, and regeneration from the tac system making the difficulty feel somewhat arbitrary.

[the skullkid]

2002 is such an unfathomably long time that it's hard to imagine what other games were competing with this one at the time.

The movement speed is *brutally* slow to the point of painful, but the chainsaw and shooting mechanics are clean and overall feel good. The unique animations for different things being cut in half are really nice and make the game visually interesting, with the later violence also having some nice (and smooth!) frame by frame animation.

Gameplay-wise the meat and potatoes of the difficulty is really the 2nd shootout level, which is honestly not bad in how you have to learn the proper pattern to attack without being hit yourself. It's not exceptionally hard, but I did die once to the shotgun before realizing the reloading phase was the best time to attack.

It's short and it's simple but 23 years later it still plays quite well.

[God's Playing Field]

I randomly remembered this game existed and figured I'd replay it. The gameplay is immensely satisfying, whether it's the tapping type weapons, tap and drag weapons, or the insta kill weapons. The animation and sounds are good (with the music being exceptionally catchy) and this is a rare game for 2005 in having pretty good voice acting and a fully animated intro and ending.

All that said, lack of any kind of lose state and the extremely short length make this more of a sandbox that gets boring after 5 minutes than a proper game. You can easily go from fist to scythe to flood, and especially with the enemy limit maxed, you can probably finish this game in about 2 minutes plus another 1-2 minutes to get all of the cheats (which really aren't needed considering the game is already so easy.)

Satisfying game but ultimately pretty shallow.

[Parry the night]

If this game had been finished it would have absolutely annihilated every other submission this year.

The insane production quality reminds me a lot of Arcane Maiden, the winner of the first (2021) FFGJ. Aesthetics on their own go a long way but I got REALLY hyped to play a tactical RPG (I haven't finished Fire Emblem but FFT is my all-time favorite game.)

Regarding the singular, partly working battle, the number of enemies is too much. You did well to have only some enemies engage the party and have to approach others, and not just due to the difficulty - waiting through an enemy phase in which all 30 enemies acted would have been incredibly tedious. I also liked that at least several of the characters had a very distinct identity; it took two playthroughs, but on my second go I was able to find niches where the general, archer, and white mage were effective and it made a gigantic difference.

As you're likely already aware, there are a bunch of game-breaking bugs. Characters will randomly stop being useable as if they already moved, even if the enemy phase has happened. Sometimes units are stuck gray, other times they're stuck at their normal color but selecting them isn't possible (the game thinks you're selecting the ground tile behind them.) Given enough time, these bugs will eat away your entire party until you have no party left to attack with, making the bugs a greater threat than the actual enemies. I even tried downloading this game and playing it in Flash Player offline in case these were Ruffle-only issues (I REALLY wanted to play this game...) but they continued to persist on both platforms.

Other bugs mostly include gibberish text and add to the confusion of a game that already has a lot of variables without explaining them to the player.

Excepting the bugs, I think the best improvement to make to this game would be to slim down the party size and size of the opposition for the first battle to make it easier for the player to learn their own arsenal. Perhaps one close-range, one long-range, one support, and one cavalry character would be a good, diverse cast without overwhelming the player (especially since the graphical distinctions between different characters are going to be lost on a new player that thinks they all look the same.) To this point, having allied characters flash a different color from enemy colors would also be useful, as I occasionally got confused as to which ones were mine.

Also, one of the features I liked about FFT was the ability to attempt to use skills even if there were no targets in range. This made it easy to see how far a ranged fighter could reach BEFORE moving them, allowing you to keep from wandering unnecessarily deep into enemy territory.

Absolutely awesome concept and the execution is almost there, but it looks like this game massively overscoped for the time given.

Alex303 responds:

Thank you that means the world to me hopfully one day I finish something on time, but I do like to try unusal things I guess.

Funny thing about The Arcane Maiden mention I used to work with the guy who made that game. Maybe he rubbed of on me idk haha.

As for the battle scene It wasnt supposed to be a singular its acutally the fith map, but when I was combining the Dialouge with the battle scenes the embeds broke. So I just decided to show the scene with the most action. (Probably wasnt the best choice espically sense it had no explaniation of the controls). As for the characters I wanted them to all be speical. I took a lot of refrence Im glad you like it.

Im chiping away at bugs as we speak it used to be a lot worse believe me! Thank you for letting me know what bugs you got. I havent seen the units turning to gray bug in a min. As for the reason im pretty sure some characters are not selectable. It mainly happens when ally dies then sometimes it bugs out. And Ruffle does have some bugs Im not normally seeing. Let me know if it was different for you but was the battle ui working better when you downloaded it. Some key presses dont seeom to work anymore with ruffle and im not sure why. (Im saying let me know like this isnt a single post comment system). The rest is my iffy coding and learning pathfinding as I went on.

I said it below but the gibrish was because the embed broke. I had no idea how to fix it so I spent all night reseting the text. I know how to speak english (I think atleast haha).Im checking the text and some of the stuff I updated isnt changing ahhhh!

Yea that was the goal start of small with short tutorials to get things going. But you can see how that went. I couldnt explaining anything till the embed was fixed. But now theirs a small tutorial that should have been their from the start. But im gonna follow your advice! the opening 5 chapters dont have more then 5 party members. Ill update it as soon as I can to fix the text and add the other stages. And ill go back and reduce some enemies on the later stages. I gotta remember not to over do it.

I need to play final fantasy tactics Ill looking to giving it a shot. Might be a great place to find some cool ideas. Thank thank thank you again, you dont know how much this motivates me to fix my buggy mess one line at a time.

update - After some bug fixing I found some errors are ruffle specific I dont know why exactly yet!. Specifically when an enemy kills an ally, it removes an ally from the array for some reason. I tried to recreate the effect in flash, but it didnt work it only happens in ruffle for some weird reason. So ill just need to find some way around it.

[Riddle School]

I had never even heard of this game until a bunch of tributes popped up for the Game Jam this year. The Pico's School influence is obvious and it's mildly hilarious hearing random Madness Combat music throughout the whole thing, but ultimately these influences serve to remind that the mediocre quality of the graphics and animation are NOT just a sign of the times; similar content made the in the same era (or sometimes much earlier) had comparable or sometimes superior quality.

With all that out of the way, it's a solid recreation of a point and click adventure with a school setting, but it doesn't bring much new to the table. It's not terribly complex either from a design or gameplay standpoint to comb through each room for items and use them wherever you can from start to finish.

[Fun Home: Part 1]

The atmosphere is great and I really like the level design - you get some short, easy tasks (key, bedroom, bathroom) to familiarize yourself with the map (and simultaneously build suspense) before the chase sequences begin. The non-linear tasks do a great job of forcing you to visit areas where Mr. Fingers is likely to be, which of course lends itself to having to bait him away from your objective before circling back via an indirect route.

The controls are a bit goofy but make sense when you realize that the arrow keys are meant to be face buttons. A lot of the menu options are unnecessary (brightness does nothing, there's no reason to keep the notes separate from items when your inventory is so small, the map could easily be an item in your inventory instead of its own option, that kind of thing) and I also dislike that the selected item in the menu jumps back to the first option any time you go backward in the menu hierarchy - this is a small thing but makes a huge difference.

By far the biggest issue in the game is that the combination of how easy it is to die and the lack of checkpoints can make for a very frustrating experience, especially with relatively slow animations throughout the game. The note to mash the down button to escape a grapple would have been nice if the font were a bit bigger, and I had to figure out on my own that tapping right (square?) repeatedly was necessary to actually run at a decent speed. This on its own is annoying, but it's also possible for Mr. Fingers to appear in a doorway just as you're trying to enter it, leading to you being caught immediately. Some kind of pity system (Mr. Fingers can't enter a door if you're close enough to it, and entering a room pushes Mr. Fingers back a minimum amount if he's right on the other side of the door) would make the game feel much more fair. As it is, there were points where I was tempted to just wait for him to show up so I didn't get flanked the instant I tried leaving a room, especially because restarting is so frustrating.

Aesthetically this game is great. The music is probably the high point, but the monochromatic blue of the house is surprisingly atmospheric for all its simplicity.

deathink responds:

Thanks for the in depth review.

First off, you are 100% about literally everything, but please let me explain why I did some of these mistakes, I'll address them in the order you brought them up:

Missing menu option: sadly, I just ran out of time before I could fully implement the brightness, but I do plan to patch it soon. And the lack of inventory items is because I plan to greatly expand this game in part 2 and 3, so I pre built out everything. Also regarding the "go back in menu" thing... man, I really dislike that too, I did have it set so It wouldn't do that, but there is a bug that I just couldn't fix. I will fix it, but it was just taking up so much time, so what I have now is like a band-aid,

The check point system is actually built and in the game, but just not turned on fully. I'm going release a band-aid patch for that too, so it will not be the full save system, but it will have check points. I really considered having it patched in from the start, I was just worried it would be too buggy.

The clown popping in and grabbing you is actually the pity system. Originally he'd just pop in and kill you, so my idea was to have him grab you with a chance to escape. It wasn't perfect, but I tried a few different things, and this was just the best I could come up with. I think once I implement the save/checkpoint system, this will be a lot less frustrating.

Again, thank you for all your feedback. It really help me a lot. With future releases, I will be able to play test it with people more and with luck it will be even better.

[Captain Laser Rabbit Saves The Earth!]

It took a few continues, but after finishing this game I found myself really enjoying it. The enemy and boss patterns are interesting and I like the idea of enemy chains rewarding the player with laser charge - it adds an incentive to hit optional criteria beyond just "kill all enemies."

The only time I ever used desperation bombs was on accident, and with maybe one exception I only ever used the laser against the boss. A big part of this was that there's so little room to breathe in the game that I didn't have much time to consider what alternative strategies or resources I might use; I was too busy blocking incoming fire to think about much else.

This also translates to a somewhat frustrating experience with the cannon speed moving a bit slower than you would want, combined with the fact that none of the enemies really have "vulnerable" states where they don't attack; in frantically trying to block and attack at the same time, it never feels like you can quite do what you're trying to do; nearly all of your time/bullets is spent on defense, making offensive progress move at a snail's pace. In a sense this is a legitimate design decision as it does keep the player challenged and engaged, but it feels Sisyphean at times. I actually found the final boss to be the easiest for this reason, as you could score a lot of hits on the boss' hurtbox while panning the cannon between the bullets being shot at you.

Having some kind of indicator when the mouse rolls over the planet to indicate that clicking it would use a desperation bomb would be useful (at least for desktop players) to prevent accidental usage.

There's a huge gap in difficulty between Normal and Hard and I think it might have made more sense to have a single difficulty (easy or normal) but some kind of ranked scoring at the end where getting an A rating required a similar amount of skill as completing Hard does now.

Visually the game assets look solid, but the UI could use some cleaning up.

Fun and well-designed, but also a bit overwhelming at times.

TeamTamago responds:

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, my biggest worry was that because I've played it so much, and I wasn't really able to have other people play test it, was that I would make it crazy hard for the normal folk! The number one thing I'd like to improve is balancing and ranking, but it is possible to hit every single enemy! Anyway, a lot to consider, thanks!

[Based Defense]

This is a really rough experience. The 2-4 buttons at the bottom suggest you can recruit allies and independently assign characters to defend different areas of your base, but having to select your character before moving and attacking when you only have one results in the game feeling massively more difficult to control. It seemed like I just couldn't get my character to do what I wanted them to, or they did it so slowly that I watched helplessly as I lost.

The small UI, overabundance of buttons, lack of explanation, and high difficulty also make this a really unfriendly game. A slower difficulty curve with some better explanation toward the beginning would make it easier for the player to experiment with the different features and get a sense for how the game worked before being thrust into difficult situations that could result in early game overs. Even after playing several times, I found myself heavily reliant on the ion cannon, with upgrades feeling so prohibitively expensive that I couldn't survive long enough to get a feel for what was worth buying and what wasn't.

Regarding the theme, it's really hard to parse out how many layers of irony there are here and if there's any kind of sincere message or if it's just provocative for the sake of provocative.

Jin responds:

Thanks for the substantial feedback! This is really valuable information and I really appreciate it. Have made some changes to hopefully be more player friendly, but I also see many areas requiring improvements. For the theme, it's just something I find funny. It's very light-hearted, meant to entertain.

[Faceless Assassin]

This game is broken beyond belief. The mission briefings tell you no useful information on how to identify the target, failing the first mission breaks the game and makes it impossible to start another mission, and the audio overlaps each time you visit the menu.

Beyond that, of the three working missions in the game, all of them just show characters standing around; there's no animation or movement and characters don't react to gunshots, so there's really no difficulty because you can always try to shoot again if you somehow miss.

The art isn't bad and the plain black on white color scheme looks more reminiscent of Xiao Xiao 4 while the assassin theme feels more like Sift Heads. Not bad in concept, but this is blatantly unfinished.

ErasmusMagnus responds:

Permadeath mode removed based on feedback. Scorned client email viruses remain dangerous until next update. Three and a half stars to go!