Amereep's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Welcome to Winkletown]

Phew... 960... it took 960 traits reveled until I finally got the 'Amateur Psychologist' medal. What was that last trait that wouldn't show itself? 'Hypocrite'. Truly ironic as I found that a few of these clues misleading, but makes perfect sense if one stops to think about them.

Take for example, the witness info that said... 'Thinks it's a good time to start a family' ...I tend to think that mid 20s is the appropriate time since it happened with my parents, uncles, and grandparents. The game appears to be more inclined to believe that around 40 is the right age. Being someone who's 32, the thought of a family hasn't crossed my mind. And while I may be an autistic pessimist with self-doubts that tends to be haunted by chronic depression (you learn to live off the madness), I might change that in another 5 years or so... I hope.

My point is that this game isn't so much of you making sense of the clues, but rather using the game's sense of making out the clues. Game says that the head is a football, you mean English's round ball while I think American's oval pigskin. Game says that their body doesn't work like it used to, you mean that they use a cane while I think they're 80. It's almost like you're trying to learn another language in order to master the game.

The presentation is charming, the music fits the situation, the voices are enjoyable until you hear them 3 dozen times, but things really get dangerous with the gameplay as you're trying to keep track of Winkles and the meaning of the clues. Not so much of a detective game rather than a game of 'Guess Who?', and you'll likely find yourself frustrated as you try to learn what the clues are directing at, but I found myself enjoying it.

Giving it 5 stars seems a little out of place for something that made me so frustrated for nearly revealing a thousand trait for a simple 10 point medal.

What can I say? I'm a hypocrite, it's not the right word... but it's not wrong.

[Wordly Defence]

Big Headed, hee hee hee, it's gotten so big that it's about to EXPLODE!!! Forest, editor, invest, resort, and I swear I got another word, but that's at least 4 times I've gotten a word just before that third phase started, but every time, the medal doesn't register. I even got the word through the daily challenge by exploiting the clock, but it still doesn't register for me. I'm basically given two tries to guess for this medal, right?

It's gotten to a point where I'm noticing that this is an interesting blend of Hangman, Codebreaker, and Tower Defense. However, I'm beginning to notice the odd design choices. Take the TD portion, It's fun at first, but it starts to feel like a loading screen after some time as I wait for another chance at the word guessing. The enemies start to become pushovers once you know what each tower does and where to place them effectively. The driller can take a beating, so missing a few won't cause it too much trouble.

Don't know why you would want to have a daily challenge other than to brag about getting a word in under so many tries. As far as I'm aware, there's no score system.

Resetting the page feels a little redundant. From a developer point of view, I see it as a means to speed up views, but I'm sure a simple 'return' button is possible to construct.

Maybe this game's original design of not having a 'practice mode' would've been better to keep the players invested. I think you made the right choice by adding a practice mode because people can be stubbornly demanding, but after the 20th time, things can get stale.

Stepford responds:

These are all super valid criticisms. Most of these issues are elements of the game being made in about a day in a half. I'm still happy with it despite its flaws, but yeah, there ARE flaws. If this game had a much longer development cycle, there would be more incentive, things to unlock, more enemy/turret types, things to add more random/dynamic interactions with the gameplay...

But for now, it's just a lil neat puzzle game that you can play once or twice and enjoy! : P

[paranoia]

What's this? Yet another soul seeks to descend my well?

...it's a Tower of Heaven joke/reference. Thought it would be appropriate as it pulls a similar mechanic as this game does. It was clever and makes you think outside the box, but much like a magic trick, it loses its finesse once you realize the secret.

Music in the tunnels might've been nice to have, and some spelling errors can be found in the notes...

"At least I'm save for now"

...I believe you meant 'safe', not 'save'.

Although this game appears straightforward and bland, players will be in for a surprise if they don't play in a straightforward and bland fashion as well.

[(Medals Fixed) Pokemon Encounter]

It's a Christmas miracle!!!

A Shiny finally appeared and I got myself a Shiny Caterpie.

...I feel hollow now. Wasting my time in search of a pokemon that I'll never get to use or see again after I close the game.

I've heard that Scratch games tend to be bland and difficult to work with. It pretty much shows in this as it's just a character moving on a grid that has no collision with anything outside of the boarder. The option to see what you've caught and drag them around is a little nice, but I would chuck this game up as being an experimentation and hardly considered a game at all.

There's one thing I must stress, the most annoying thing in this game... the music. It's nice to hear at first, nostalgic to the Viridian Forest you're trying to recapture, but that music is driving me nuts. I would use the mute button you provided, but the music begins to start up again soon after (making it more of a hassle than it is at finding a Shiny).

This game is fine for what it's trying to be, but this feels more like a test of the creator's understanding of the program and the toleration of the players that seeks out the medals it's offering.

VaporeonVortex responds:

Wow... I really appreciate the thought on the little game that I made. You're probably sick of the game already, but you can play on the scratch website https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/606564372/ and play the updated version (Theres a real time day/night cycle with exclusive Pokemon like ghastly, hoothoot, etc) and save your game progress by downloading the game in it's current state. I don't really plan on updating the game but I really appreciate your very expressive thoughts.

[Glitcheon]

Okay... I played through this game at least 5 times, got majority of the medals, decoded the messages ('How long has it been', 'Built upon lies', 'Attempt 1001 has failed', ect), got to a point where I entered the unloading part so many times that you say 'I'll handle this' and apparently do or say nothing after, and I've reached the undisclosed area found near of where I got the Ad Blocker only to find that this was not the secret lab, but a dead end (intentional?).

...I'm not sure if I should say this game is broken or not given the nature of what it's directing towards, but it's difficult to master as I had to make over 2 dozen attempts just to reach those difficult areas. Seeing the world distorting itself around me slowly over the course of the game was very unique, a little difficult to discern on what could be stepped on, but not enough for it to be an issue.

There's one glitch I'm certain about that you guys didn't intend. At the beginning of the last room, I hit the checkpoint next to the door and went back to the previous room. I fell into the pink 'no touchy' zone and was sent back to that checkpoint I hit a moment ago, but I found myself on two occasions where I was beyond the wall to the left of both checkpoint and door. Heading further left dropped me into a death zone and I respawned at the checkpoint like normal.

It seems like it'll be a promising game, I can see how you guys could play around with the glitching portion of the game in various ways to keep the player guessing.

YaenGames responds:

Thank you for spending so much time with the game and writing such in-depth feedback!

It's impressive you got so many of the medals. Some of them are quite hard, like getting the secret ending (and you got it many times lol) congrats!

The dead end near the adblocker is a different easter egg about a meme on our discord server ^^ The lab is in the ceiling of the same area above the ad that is rotated 45° near the ceiling. You can get there by glitch-pulsing against the ad from the top right corner of the room with a very long jump.

Glitcheon can certainly be a difficult game, you're right. Sometimes, for some special secrets or extreme mode, we just build level sections that still feel difficult to us, the devs. Even after we played the game for so many hours to test it. But if it's still doable, we keep it in as a special challenge for our best players.

Yeah, I must admit, our save-load system can still sometimes cause issues like the one you described. Seems to be inconsistent too. It's just something we need to put more work into / overhaul for the full release.

Thanks again for playing and for your detailed review! I hope you'll be there to see it when we eventually finish the steam version! :)

[Piconjo Sp33ch]

Okay, let me try, *ahem*...

Pikachu iz b3tt3r than joo!

...I pronounced it correctly, right?

[Uddercover]

This is ridiculous.

After all these years, since this game first came out, I still can't get that 'Moo' medal. I tried Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, nothing is giving me that medal. I'm suppose to wait after the credits, right? That's when I'm seeing the medal appear, so why does it hate me?

*Sigh* ...but I shouldn't let my frustration alter the overall game, that being Perry the Platypus shenanigans with a cow. For 72 hours, this was nicely made. After playing through it 5 times in the past hour, this game isn't very challenging. The ball helped a little to the 'stealth', but it's more about patience with this game.

...patience that I've placed into trying to obtain that medal for FAR TOO LONG!

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EDIT: OKAY... after placing some thought into it, I considered on something and tried it with the Newgrounds Player. And it gave me the medal.

That player has really been opening a lot of locked doors since I got it.

Rooster responds:

I'm sorry

[Lower Lower]

I have climbed through the elaborate caverns, endured the treacherous mechanics, experienced a hundred lives, and I met the elusive albino grinch, gaining its respect after it pulled a GLaDOS.

A folly claim you say? Well as far as you know, it could have been... because I'm lacking proof due to the fact that the medals didn't go off.

It appeared in the game, but after a certain point, it stopped. Granted, I did leave the page a few times to give myself a break from it, but I don't think it has anything to do with that.

That cavern atmosphere is met with this game and the mechanic are nice too, but only at first as it gets under your skin after a while. I guess it fits with the game, but trying to perform perfect jumps off of walls are difficult. Throwing the anchor mid flight is tolerable (if not, a bit tricky), but making these leaps of faith is ridiculous as you need to make your best judgement of when to dethatch the anchor or even if you think you're going the right direction.

The game is still good, hardcore players would probably have more fun with this than casual players. It has a mid-high range in difficulty, and it increases in leaps and bounds the higher up you go.

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Interesting thing I need to note though, pressing the 'R' key resets the entire game and doesn't reset you to the last campfire. This could lead to some furious players if they accidently push it.

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EDIT: Well say that I'm a glutton for punishment, but I went through it again. Used prior experience to zip though the place, saw some of the changes you made, cursed the heavens for the added obstacle in the secret path, and somehow met up with the white devil again. I checked to see if the medal activated, it did (yays), and as I clicked the screen to reestablish control to begin my escape, the game goes black. ...oy vey.

bokononyossarian responds:

Congrats on making it to the end! And sorry about the medals. We have another report of the Grinch's Path medal (and I guess the secret medals after that) not showing up in people's profiles, but popping up in the game. I just logged into my individual account and confirmed that I was able to unlock the Grinch's Path medal and have it show up in my profile (so now the only medal owners are myself personally and the dev team account, whoops).

This is our first game with medals so I'm still trying to reproduce the issue. I will probably have to keep making dummy accounts to try and figure out the conditions under which the medal is awarded or not. The only thing I can try to do is reproduce it and see if anything notable shows up in the developer console. Again, sorry you missed your medal- you'd be one of the first to have it if it were working.

Thanks for the report though- we are very impressed you made it that far. The difficulty ramp-up was intended- finding an albino grinch is not for everything. We had to try and strike a balance with not making things too frustrating by sprinkling in bonfires for the player to spawn at.

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EDIT: We upgraded the game to force reinitialize the connection to the NG backend if the window loses focus. We don't know for certain that was causing the issues with the medals not showing up but hopefully that will do the trick for players who make it all the way to the secret rooms.

[Rat Game: Roaming of the Wretched Rat]

The best way to describe this game, is that it's ambitious.

It switches between strategy and luck as its core mechanic. Using strategy to conserve equipment and health, hope luck will grant 'that' item within the chests, and then tempt luck with a potion or plan a strategy with equipment before you repeat the process. It's a game that relies on RNG quite heavily, and it only gets more intense the further it goes.

Not in a playthrough, but the entire game itself.

Proceeding through the game unlocks achievements and an item to add to that RNG, making it that much more harder to get that one item that could save you from a tight situation you're in now or later on (such as a shield). It also makes it harder to unlock certain achievements (which could be a good thing to prevent another item being added to the RNG list, but I'll get back to this in a moment).

I've read in these reviews that you guys (or at least, Levi) took inspiration from 'The Binding of Isaac' to make this game. I have the game, never played it, but I do know the basic structure of it being very customizable. Having Nips choosing between what items and actions to make defiantly lives up to that inspiration, but as I compare the two games, Isaac is more unbounded (ironically) from the RNG as you don't really need all the customization in order to finish the game. But in this game, you need the RNG on your side in order to stay strong and ready. If the chest order is Dagger, HP Down Potion, Magic Herb, Dagger, Dagger, Arcane Up Potion, Evil Eye... you'd be screwed before reaching the third Dagger.

So I have a suggestion that might help Nips to break free from his own binds the RNG has on him. How about you give the player the choice on what item they'll find in chests before starting a playthrough. It'll still be random upon reaching a chest, and you could add mandatory restrictions that need to be met before starting a run (such as needing so many amount of weapons and only one super weapon allowed as examples).

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Going back to unlocking achievements, I have been trying and trying to get that blasted 'Enchanted Staff" one. Choosing the class with the highest starting Arcana stats (Mage), I'm given 7 chances to get at least 3 potions that could increase my Arcane stats. If I ever went past 4 or got a potion that decreased my Arcane, I try to get Nips killed to return back to the start and try again.

Having a way for me to reset mid run would've been nice to have.

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The last thing I wanna talk about are Items in general. I can grasp which ones are the strong weapons, and I understood what items did after use, but giving a description would really help. When I saw the 'Big Cheese' for example, I thought it was a 'Cookie'. It served the same expectation I thought it would, but the 'Magic Herb', I haven't the slightest clue on what it does.

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Never the less, effort was placed into this game. It can take a few plays to figure out, but because of the ambition it has, it seems to have overlooked some elements that could've made it more easier on the player to follow and enjoy.

LeviRamirez responds:

genuinely a great read regaurding the game, thank you for writing this!

I definitely see where you are coming from, this game IS heavily reliant on RNG and for the most part I plan to keep it that way, the reason I give the player so many items is cause I wanted them to change up how they play on the fly. It's definitely not the best designed rouge-like game out there, not even on this site, but I wanted to try out something different in regaurds to my other game.

However! In a planned update that will be overhauling a lot of the game's issues along with adding more content, I'm hoping that some of these issues will be fixed! Some of these are just "hard-coded" problems that you and many others might not like about the game, but I find enjoyable. Trust me, Even when I was making this I assumed most people would think the exact same thing you're thinking and this game wasn't gonna do to hot. Now that peeps like it, I gotta actually make it playable ig lol.

Anyways, thanks for the feedback!

[Pixel Detective]

I've dabbled in writing a couple of detective stories before over at FIMFiction, and I like to play with the readers expectations in some of my other stories while showing a solid reasoning behind it, so I like to think that I know what I mean when I say that making an airtight detective story is both difficult and easy.

It starts with a goal in mind that stays strong as it leads itself backwards to the beginning of the case with branching possibilities along the way that are weaker in comparison. Let's take the first chapter for example, so...

!SPOILERS!

Three suspects: a wife, a son, and a mistress. The mistress usually have the weakest reason to kill their lover, and it plays no different here. The son has some bad ties with his father (it shows with the torn photo, stating that it was in the son's room in the evidences) and the idea of killing is there, but his father is trying to mend it (based off of the text messages). The wife... well what woman wouldn't want to kill her cheating husband? But she seems to show concern in the text messages as well (asking if he's home).

With poison at play, unfinished food present, and the lack of foresight on disposing the evidence, we can call this case closed. The son had unclear reasons at possibly wanting his father dead, but the wife holds the 'weapon' that was used in the soup. Yet there's an issue at present here...

There are 2 bowls that I'm seeing on the table.

This leads many into assuming that someone was with him, possibly eating from the 2nd bowl, and that's when the path to the culprit begins to crumble.

The wife placed poison in the pot of soup. She wasn't present based off of the text, so the victim must be eating with his son or mistress. It would be understandable that the wife wanted the mistress dead, but she's alive, so she couldn't have been eating the second soup. The son is alive too, but unlike the mistress, he hates his father. He said that he had to walk home, but that could've been a lie to cover his tracks. The son now seems to be the most likely suspect, because why would his mom try to poison him too?

1 pot, 2 bowls. The only two ways for the son to have escaped death was if he knew the soup was poisoned, or that he poisoned his father's soup. If the latter, how did the poison get in his mother's bag? He could've planted it, but he didn't really show any signs of him hating his mother. However, there is no other explanation.

Thinking up the murder is easy, but because of overlooking one small thing, the intended path of logic begins to collapse for another hypothesis to fill its place.

It's difficult to disguise the truth while still leaving solid clues to it.

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In other issues, there's a typo in chapter 0 when we examine the body.

"Victim has bruises all over 'her' face. 'He' had to be badly beaten."

I assume you mean "all over 'his' face."

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I'm giving this a three because it made me think for a while on the answer (even if that extra bowl misguided me) and that it feels complete. But because it feels complete, I'm feeling kinda bummed that there's really only one chapter. I know that this is considered a test for feedback and I hope you take my word and everyone else's words to heart, but after finally getting into the swing of things and then it's momentarily done, I'm left feeling... 'blueheaded'? 'Blueminded'? Whatever the term used for 'blueballed', but for the brain.

But in any case, I'm likely to change the stars the further progress you guys make.