Kwing's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[A Dress Up Game]

Well, it's a dress-up game, taken a bit more literally than anyone expected. The music and graphics are solid, but the clicking and dragging mechanic is a bit frustrating because the depth of the objects being manipulated can make it so the mouse gets stuck dragging objects around.

Some simple QoL improvements would be to have a toggler for things that are obviously meant to go in one place (such as clothes and accessories) and allowing the player to dynamically spawn and delete decorations like arrows, circles, and spirals, rather than just having a bunch of them shoved into the corner. Also, manipulating the background with something other than the spacebar would be nice, it seems like a total non-sequitur to include keyboard controls.

Cyberdevil responds:

Indeed it is, though hopefully that unexpected literal twist was an appreciable entertainment factor too; redeeming point of an otherwise functionally I agree somewhat limited game. ;) Mmm, I've wondered why the mouse sometimes gets stuck like that, it doesn't seem to happen often (for me at least) but I do agree, not ideal. An extra click seems to let go of the item that's being dragged when this happens.

Such things go beyond my coding capabilities, but all good ideas for sure. In regard to the background you can toggle it via one of the on-screen arrow buttons as well. Personally I feel like keyboard shortcuts are always a benefit; the quickest way to perform an action. If however you're on mobile/touchscreen everything but music can be toggled within the game also, thinking of it now I really should've added a button for music too if you actually do not have a keyboard, essential feature...

Appreciate the feedback Kwing! Maybe I'll up my coding capabilities a bit till next year.

[Tidying Up + Secrets of the Sewers]

The aesthetic for this game isn't my style, but there's no denying it works really well. The UI and music just look really polished, and you even have some filters (film grain and the scan lines over the character avatars) to make the game visually pop.

That said, there are a couple UI things that I found a bit annoying which should be easy fixes. The dialogue and music buttons take up a lot of the screen, and I'd rather just have a settings button for music and a popup for dialogue that went away completely after the cutscene finished, as they take up a lot of real estate and make the game screen look cluttered. The controls on the right also seem cluttered until you realize they're there for mobile players. This could potentially be something a desktop user could hide to free up more space, but it's less important. Finally (and this is really a 5 minute fix) I was confused by the fact that the only way to tell who the player is controlling is the "ACTIVE: 1" indicator at the top of the screen (and the sparkles, which only pop up for a fraction of a second and then are gone completely.) Why not have some kind of effect or even just a color change over the active player character?

One more small nitpick regarding presentation is that the amount of juice in the transitions and the quantity of dialogue (which is kind of cliche) make it feel like too small a percent of the time the player spends with the game open is actually gameplay, which only becomes more annoying with the puzzles themselves being so easy. I finished this game feeling unsatisfied, and while the level creation system hypothetically allows players to enjoy more content and more difficult levels, it feels a bit like outsourcing an important part of the game onto the player when the content included in story mode is so lean.

On a more fundamental level, there's an interesting concept here, but I REALLY didn't like the level design. Most of the levels are braindead easy, and the ones that are even slightly hard hinge entirely on keeping one of the characters trapped until the end of the level. Sliding puzzles where a character can only stop when they hit an obstacle are common, and the idea of being able to manipulate an obstacle (the capybara) so as to put the sliding character in optimal positions is a novel twist, but if all of the difficulty comes from keeping Capy locked away in a little area where she can't help, your level design has undone the exact mechanic which differentiates this game from every other slider puzzle.

I get why you made an easy game. Harder games score significantly lower on the site and it's clear whoever designed the game knew their audience. At the same time, there are ways to reward more skilled play, even if basic completion of the game is easy. The most obvious idea is to keep count of how many moves the player has made, and recognize if a player is able to complete the same level in fewer moves.

4.5/5 for a really solid concept, but I'd like to see a player pack flesh out the content with a bit more difficulty and replayability.

Bleak-Creep responds:

Thanks for the in-depth review! The character portrait labels are a bit buggy yet and could definitely use some work, I agree there. We're planning on having the characters flash briefly when switching between them in a future build too, we just ran out of time and used the sparkles as a simple replacement for the time being.

As for the levels themselves, I know we did struggle a bit at first at trying to determine exactly what levels mechanics would be kind of make sense in the house setting as well as how to keep Capy from feeling too "OP" once he's able to move around freely.

There's a good chance we might go back in and add some bonus levels that add more challenge later too, but we aimed toward making the storyline a more accessible experience so players could get the whole story within a a single sitting without getting too frustrated.

[Shadow Gauntlet]

I really wanted to like this. The concept is really cool, balancing the recoil for movement as well as attacking targets or grappling.

That said, the physics are really an acquired taste. The recoil is too weak and the player's momentum decays too slowly, making everything feel really floaty. I couldn't get past level 6 because of how unequipped the recoil strength is to counteract gravitational force.

Having a bit snappier controls, specifically stronger recoil and weaker gravity, would make this much more accessible.

EDIT: Finally figured out that where you grab the bird in level 6 affects its tilt and therefore the direction it flies (it flies straight, relative to where it's facing.) Still totally lost on how to unlock the portal in level 8.

VicBiss responds:

Thanks for the feedback! I've had to do all of the level design and testing over the past week or so to get it out for the Flash Forward Jam. So it's quite rushed. I actually just weakened the gravity a bit and think it is feeling better.

[CypherGrid]

The high-effort graphics (excepting the big boobs which are very annoying,) animation, and juice really made me want to rate this highly, but after reading the whole thing about row priority 3-4 times, I just don't get it and I honestly don't want to. The logic is too obscure and its level of complexity outpaces the actual degree of fun a puzzle like this might have. Ultimately I brute-forced all of the puzzles past the tutorial.

I can understand that the quantity of digits by a row or column indicates how many tiles in that line need to be marked off, but the priority system feels incredibly arbitrary, and trying to figure out whether a 5 is the product of 1+4 or 2+3 just feels obscure and annoying. The fact that there are really only 4 puzzles after the tutorial, and two of them essentially have a timer going on during them, makes it prohibitively difficult to actually spend the time learning the mechanics, despite all of the time you've spent constructing a tutorial.

My biggest issue with this game is the ruleset itself; explaining the rules better, or having some kind of random mode that gives the player a set number of easy puzzles before gradually ramping it up, would make things more enjoyable, but I don't think any amount of QoL improvements would make the underlying game fun to play. Games like Sudoku have a certain intuitive simplicity to them, and the rules around priority in this game are the antithesis of this principle.

Veinom responds:

If you feel that the puzzles get hard early, that's because I wanted to showcase what my puzzle concept is capable of (like the Hack-time and the Quick Time Events in the final boss). If I had more time, I would add more puzzles in between, which is something I plan to do in future updates.

I will try to improve the tutorial regarding Priorities. Thank you for your long and detailed review.

[Pizza Tower Defense]

Tower defenses are a pretty basic formula, and while this doesn't add much to the formula, there are plenty of shortcomings with the basic implementation.

The biggest issue here is that there's no way to see the actual speed and damage of a tower, or how those stats change as upgrades are applied. My first time trying the game I didn't upgrade the towers and was frustrated by not being able to kill anything. Then, after buying one tower and dumping 2-3 upgrades in it, I saw that I started killing enemies in one hit. I still don't really understand the functional difference between the three tower types, as pepperoni is strong enough to kill enemies on its own, negating the need to buy other towers except for getting the relevant medals (which are currently broken.)

Aside from essential information not being available to the player, my next biggest complaint is that the game freezes a little bit when an enemy spawns in, probably because it's running a pathfinding algorithm. There's no reason to do this for every enemy; run the algorithm once at the start of the wave and reuse it for all of the enemies that spawn in. Alternatively, bake the paths into the game instead of making the towers and enemies occupy the same game space. The way it's done now is really boring because you can just use the towers to create a winding path - and if you don't, enemies just go straight to the right and then down.

Graphics and music are unremarkable.

clarkiagames responds:

I understand it's hard to balance the game on my own taking account of all the possibilities, for now i just tested it a couple of times, I will make some adjustments. You got a point for the lagguish part I basically wanted to have the ability to add tower mid game but found out it would be too difficult and removed that. I might actually calculate the path once as you suggest. Basically the slow tower is useful for speed wave and splash tower for tanking waves. But the upgrade are too powerful for now i'll also adjust that. I don't know if you know the basic War3 TD in which you basically have to create a winding path. I find this kind of fun knowing there are multiple path you can use to optimize tower usefulness so i implemented it like that. I obviously said I done it in less than a week so yeah this is not some ultimate art. I appreciate the feedback though.

[Pixel Puzzle]

It's a not a bad concept (though simple) but is there no way to register when the player has solved a puzzle? The pieces don't snap into place. I also dislike that you have to click on the area where the pieces spawned from to rotate them.

Graphics and music are simple, gameplay could be decent but putting the pieces together and then just going back to the parent menu to do another feels really underwhelming.

Veinom responds:

I wish I could fix the 3 problems you mention (and I tried multiple times) but they are beyond my programing skills. So this is the best I could do. I understand why someone would expect the pieces to snap, but the game works fine as it is and the concept is clearly presented. And that's a win in my book.

[Hollow Knight Demake]

I wanted to give this a higher score based on the high quality pixel art but the game itself is a pretty miserable experience.

The sword attack has barely any range and the delay between when you wind up and when you attack is extremely frustrating. The UI dialogue goes too slowly and there's no way to make it go by faster. The cutscenes are unskippable, which is a bigger deal when you consider that the delay in your attack leads to you eating hits, and you only have 3 masks of health whereas you start with 5 in the original game - the deaths send you back to the cutscenes over and over. I also found myself hitting my head on platforms while trying to jump at an angle. All of this put together makes an experience that's slow and clunky.

If you're trying to remake the full game, the stuff I've mentioned should be some of the first things you address before you continue adding content.

Elv13s responds:

yeah the engine i used to make this at the time is really limiting, it might be better now but I plan to start from scratch with all the things I learned from this little experiment, thank you

[Dead Fish Clicker]

The most impressive thing about this is the fact that Cookie Clicker was itself meant to be satire, and you somehow managed to take it a step further. The narration feels like the drunk cousin of Getting Over It. Your hesitation and stumbles really add to how hackneyed and thrown together everything is.

Despite looking like stupid spam, there are some interesting choices of juice going on here, specifically the chimes varying in pitch when you accumulate maggots. The images are also surprisingly high-resolution, and you picked great music.

Obviously I can't give a high score to something that's basically spam but this was surprisingly amusing.

LeviRamirez responds:

thank you :-)

[Vizzy & The Lost Cat]

You know I was mad when I got 5:01 on my 3rd run.

This game looks awesome in terms of development, but in terms of design it doesn't seem to know what it wants. The mechanics make it out to be a collect-a-thon, based on the counter going up instead of down, and enemies dropping a lot of loot. However, getting the hardest medal for collecting money is still absurdly easy and after that there's really no point to continue hunting down pickups.

On the other hand, the ridiculously fast pace of the game, including movement and jumping speed as well as no cap on your firing rate, make this feel like it would be much more at home if speed were the primary goal of the game. And the game is much, MUCH more fun to play this way! Unfortunately, the one time-based achievement is based on the completion time of the entire game and feels tacked on.

What this game really needs is a more robust scoring system, and a level selection screen so players can practice individual levels. You could probably mix the collect-a-thon and speedrun playstyles by having some kind of ranking system that requires a certain score AND completion under a certain time, but whatever your preference is, I really do think this game could have played to its strengths better.

The graphics are decent but it's the smoothness of how everything feels that really steals the show. The music REALLY gets your adrenaline going and feeds more into that speedrun mindset.

Simple concept with perhaps a somewhat misguided execution, but even that one speedrun achievement is enough to bring out the potential this game has.

Just-a-ng-dummy responds:

Under 15 days I didn't really think much about this kind of stuff. You listed a lot of great ideas, mostly the speedrunning potential and I want to implement them after voting ends. I think misguided execution happens a lot of Game Jam Games. Hopefully I'll improve on this game in later updates

Thank you for the review Kwing!