Amereep's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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.

[Drop Cannon]

A reflex game, huh?

I tend to lose my cool and mix buttons up the longer these games go, so the little periods where we have to deal with intruders is welcoming. Though, I seem to have some problems when I get to Denver during these moments.

Basically, there are a few of those buzzards that park themselves just outside the game boundaries. Twice it has happened to me during the last invasion, and they parked off the right end of the screen. Not sure if this is a bug, an oversight, or that I'm just too slow for something that may have been intended.

Outside of that, I don't really have any issues with it. Good drawings, smooth animation, distinct presentation, and a simple concept with a bit of a twist.

P.S. The issue people seem to point out that the last medal has zero points. I've noticed that sometimes medals that haven't been obtained by anyone will usually have 0 points until someone obtains it. At least, that's how it went for me when I got the last medal in 'Island Destroyer'.

TomFulp responds:

The bugs parking outside is a bug I need to solve.

I'm hoping the last medal will show points once someone unlocks it and we should probably change how the site handles that in the page.

[Enter into Darkness 2]

Oh boy, this game is a mess.

- The password system doesn't work.
- The 'Enter' key doesn't work upon death (meaning no returning to a bookmark).
- Enemies and obstacles can get past by without the necessary class or item.
- When the mummy appears, it drains hearts if I stall (it makes sense, but since this is the only enemy that I've encountered that does this, I'm assuming that this is a bug).
- I don't think any of the items in the beginning have a point as I never got a moment to use any.
- I can still recover hearts by pressing space without a Heart Crystal.
- On the 7th floor (Warthog Power Circle) when I take the ladder to go up, it says that I've traveled up two floors; but instead of the text telling me I'm on the 9th floor, it says I'm on the 8th floor.
- On the 11th floor (Terroritory Camp Site), if I choose to ignore the view and head on to the exit, I'm being told that I'm checking the craft bar.
- On floor 15 (Natural Crossing Way), if I choose on heading to the right tunnel, I find myself on floor 3 after gaining a heart.
- 20th floor (Gallow Sinn Empire Crossing), chose C, and the 'Enter' key is replaced with the 'Space Bar'. This issue stays with floor 21 after choosing B.
- And Vamprica. Once I go past floor 22, no matter which path I take, all the paths lead up to her. This wouldn't be a big deal, but the issue here is that none of the keys are assigned to anything. I can't use the keyboard to pick 'A', I can't click with the mouse to choose 'B', nothing works and my only option is to end the game.

This game has potential, but it was never tested from start to finish as it seems to get worse the further I get into it.

And while I got your attention, I tried playing the first game to this one... and it doesn't work. While this game allows me to play it using the Newgrounds Player, the other just says 'Adobe Flash Player is no longer supported'. I don't know why this one works over the other, but the point stands that these games are broken.

Newshield responds:

The game is not broken, none of them are. This game was suppose to be updated but, other things have come up since the Covid situation. Nothing has been updated. None of the games, not this one or others.

All are currently being switched over so that they can be played here and that's going to take some time because the codes have to be rewritten and tested. So, the reason you've had such problems with this game and the others is because you're playing a very outdated, never update version.

[RAPTUS]

Hm hm hmm. After all these years, I've become the 7th person to display their 'Free Will'. It was thanks to the subtle clue you made in one of your responses. Appropriate, given by the many subtle choices you made to make this game feel more 'in tune' with itself and the player.

The way you presented the commands and how it slowly starts to become unstable. The little warning that he was lying and losing himself. And your choice in music, how it synced up with the game, it was very enlighting.

[ZS Dead Detective - Pumpkin Head]

A headless guy is part of the hunting association... he's a head(less)hunter... cute.

I'm going to miss these guys. Truth be told, I kinda took inspiration from this for a series of stories I've written called, 'The Shroomlock Holmes of Mushroom Mares'. Basically it's 'My Little Pony' X 'Monster Girls' and a mushroom pony is solving cases in a monster society with a fairy following her for support. I often reflect upon how Margh and Ghvnn work off each other and try to use that as one of the references on how the mushroom and fairy should interact between themselves (throw in a bit of a big/little sister vibe to the mix).

Anyways, I enjoyed the game, congratulations on the marriage, and good luck on your next project.

P.S.: There's also a typo with one of the evidence on the top left. 'Yeow knex exactly how to activate the gas bomb'.

Muja responds:

Thank you a lot for your very nice review, and I'm extremely glad my games have been an inspiration for another writer! Good luck with your projects, and thanks again!