Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Hex Merge]

It's actually a really fun game, but it really needs instructions.

My first impression of the game was that it was really slow. It became interesting toward the end to try and keep the bigger numbers at the bottom, and to rectify your mistakes by sneaking lower numbers down to match with any stragglers you left there by accident. However, when I realized how many more ways there were to combine numbers, I had to completely reevaluate my strategy.

I didn't realize you could select more than one number to combine, that you could combine multiple items that weren't in a row, or that you could combine different kinds of numbers (for instance 8+8+16.)

Even after learning this, it seems like the safest way to play is to combine numbers two at a time, so that you're not surprised by tons of tiles coming in at once. Small moves mean fewer new tiles, which means it's easier to change your plans gradually according to what comes up.

This should be balanced out by big combinations rewarding you with bonus points, but unfortunately it's not clear how the scoring system works, you just see your score go up. I notice 2+2 gives 2 points, 2+2+2 gives 3 points, and 2+2+2+2 gives 4 points. 4+4 gives 4 points, so it looks like the points you get are just the base number times the number of tiles you combine it with? The player could get the same number of points by combining them individually, with the added benefit that they have more opportunities to keep small numbers from falling to the bottom.

Currently it's possible to combine a whole screen of 4s into 128 and have the respawning tiles bury a 4 beneath a huge tile. This heavily disincentivizes big combos as it's risky and doesn't give any sort of bonus at all. Generally I found it was only useful to do big combos to combine odd numbers of small numbers I was trying to get rid of, or if I combined straight down so that I could ensure big numbers fell lower.

- Add some instructions for the player.
- Allow the player to click once and roll over tiles to select multiple, and preview what number you're combining to. This will make it easier for players to know what number they'll end up with if they combine a bunch.
- Add bonus points for combining more tiles, and display the point value of each move with a popup (for instance, 2+2+4+4 = 8 points x2 bonus = 16 points.) Reward the player for big, risky combos.
- More colors after 512, it's easy to cruise past this number and it's visually hard to play after that point.

Cool concept but missing some things that would balance it.

[<lightBot 2.0>]

There's way more here than there was in the first game, but I think the added complexity demands a better QoL experience for the player. For instance, the break feature which is introduced for recursion is explained poorly. I couldn't understand why I kept hitting code after my break statement when it triggered. It wasn't clear that you have to use the light command to make the ROBOT a certain color before calling a conditional on it.

It would be nice if the player was able to see the call stack, as well as set breakpoints to pause mid-execution and look at what's going on.

For easier levels I wished I could add commands with one click instead of clicking and dragging. For harder levels I wished I could select multiple commands and reposition them up and down, in instances where I needed to shift several commands forward or backward a couple slots to add in something I missed.

The game also feels poorly optimized, I have to play with low quality to get a decent framerate.

All that criticism aside this really is a big step up from the previous game.

[Shift: Freedom!]

The full game really is a blast to play.

The story and minigames feel forced and like they were included "just because" and the game also lags and glitches more and more the longer the game is opened. Still, the harder puzzle levels really are fantastic, even though the hardest ones tend to be spread out among filler levels.

[AltSHIFT]

This is a BIG step up from the Shift I remember. I legitimately got stuck on a lot of the puzzles, especially in chapter 2.

The bevel effect is overused, the animations when you enter doors is a little long which is annoying, and it's easy to get stuck and have to replay long chunks of levels which can be more tedious than challenging, and the pushing and gravity mechanics are kind of par for the course for a lot of puzzle platformers. However, when the puzzles started involving manipulating the gravity and color of the boxes the game really came into its own and felt genuinely challenging and engaging.

Double Hole is currently bugged; if you push the box into the shift icon, it doesn't actually flip/change color.

[SHIFT]

I'm surprised I never reviewed this.

It's a good game. The negative space mechanic may not be as polished or realized as Gap Monsters, but this game is also 15 years old at this point. The level design is solid but it is a bit light on the puzzle aspect; usually levels don't take much more thought than finding which key is reachable, grabbing it, then checking which key is obtainable after the key has caused something to move. That said, it's still relatively enjoyable and satisfying to shift between the white and black parts of the screen.

The snarky Portal-derivative comments about the high score timer are kind of dumb, especially for a puzzle platformer where the meat of the game comes from the player's first-time experience of problem solving (meaning there's little reason to replay for a high score.)

[Karoshi:Suicide Salaryman]

This is a game that shows its age, but I don't think that's necessarily a good thing. I really liked that the puzzles are a mix of lateral thinking as well as skill. I also find it interesting that some levels have certain inessential elements that can distract and confuse the player, it means that it's just as easy to overengineer a solution as well as miss it and incentivizes the player to also consider the obvious solution. Some may find this bad design because of how many non-sequiturs there are, and the lack of cohesion when some levels toward the end actually end up being the easiest, but I like that the unpredictability keeps the player on their toes.

IMO, the design falls apart when it comes to the addition of new mechanics, especially later in the game where you have to use the keyboard, mouse, return to menu button, reversed controls, etc. I also found it grating that sometimes the map loops horizontally and sometimes it doesn't, it's a level of inconsistency that feels like it's designed only to troll the player rather than make them think. There's no need to imitate The Impossible Quiz, this game is able to stand on its own two feet without cheap gimmicks. This is different from my above point about unpredictability being a good thing; unpredictable design allows the player to reason the solution out on their own, but unexplained mechanics deprives the player of the information needed to generate a solution.

[Tuper Tario Tros.]

This game is almost completely ruined by the ridiculously slow scrolling speed of the map. Building bridges is also so easy you could fall asleep doing it. The concept is interesting but its execution makes it actively unpleasant to play.

[Lava and Aqua]

Very good puzzle game, I really like the concept and the execution is smooth and satisfying (undoing moves is a great feature.) I liked that the water could sometimes be hazardous, it made it so that there was more to the game than just "lava good, water bad."

The one thing I disliked was how formal most solutions were; being exactly one step ahead of failing for so many of the levels really hammered home the fact that most of the time there's ONE solution, so solving a level is the player uncovering that one solution. Because of that, the experience doesn't feel very personal, so much as it feels like they're running along a very deliberate path the developer has laid out for them. This also lends itself to some unintentional hints; when you block one lava path with one turn to spare, it confirms to the player that they've done something correctly, so they know with confidence they'll never have to undo past that point again. Reduction of the solution space makes a lot of the levels easier than they probably should be.

I also disliked how many of the later puzzles had timed blocks on them, this again felt like a cheap way to point the player in the right direction by basically telling them what order they had to do things in.

Overall the game is pretty easy, with level 16 being the only one that really stumped me.

[Destruct Blocks]

It's a simple concept but offers a surprisingly modern take on the cursor maze genre. I wish the hitboxes on the spikes had been squares or at least static circles instead of moving along with the spikes themselves, and the isometric view really is the way to go to the point of the 3D graphics feeling kind of dumb.

Other than that, pretty good if simple.

[Sliding Puzzle]

I can't help but wonder if this is shovelware. The game itself is coded well enough, but feels like a cheap excuse to show off some artwork, most of which doesn't look finished as the scanned/photographed pencil art just doesn't show up that well on a digital screen.

While functional, it's really simple and not very engaging. It's also rather silly that the different images have their own leaderboards when all of the 3x3 and 4x4 puzzles are identical to each other in terms of difficulty.

JG0328 responds:

Thanks for playing. It isn't shovelware, I just like to share what I do and try to learn with each different game.