wjhollyart's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Just One Boss]

I played this back when it came out and I keep coming back to it. It's such a well constructed boss battle. The character portrayed is fantastic, and the combinations of different attacks the boss can perform are super satisfying.

[Labyrinth]

Definitely has the qualities of being a first game, so I'm going to offer what I think is some constructive criticism.

First, the rooms are mostly big, empty, and mostly serve no purpose nor have any kind of interactivity. Just because it's a maze doesn't mean that it needs to look bland- quite the contrary! If you're going to make a game where the entire focus is navigating a winding environment it would be wise to make that environment interesting to look at. I'm familiar enough with RPG Maker MV to know the default assets can be enough to make things interesting. Have fun with architecture! Tell a story with your environments, or set a mood.

Secondly, perhaps it is only because of the route I took through the labyrinth, but as far as I could tell the final boss was the only actual enemy in the game. Given that there was no combat before the final boss, it was kind of jarring when I suddenly had to make use of the protagonist's magical skills to win a fight. It's just really inconsistent. A final battle should be the test of all that the player has learned in the game so far, but here it felt more like a different game started right at the end.

Third, there are a few technical errors. The music volume varies pretty wildly between rooms, and you didn't set the boss to have a directional fix so when I approached him from the side his world sprite changed to a different monster sprite altogether. These are pretty minor, but something you might want to look out for in your future projects.

Fourth, the game itself felt pretty directionless. I understood that I was attempting to find my way out of a maze, but there wasn't really much of a story leading up to the protagonist's quest, and any story is retrofitted during the final battle.

Anyway, I hope you find these criticisms helpful as you move forward and make more games. Keep working at it, I'm sure you'll be making some amazing projects in no time.

[It came from outside]

Super foreboding and thick with atmosphere. I pretty quickly guessed what was going on, but still found the suspense and slow uncovering of the atrocities throughout the village to be really well executed.

Nirag responds:

Thank you! And thanks for making me discover Bitsy, too!

[The Twilight]

As far as being a rage game goes, you've certainly got a bit going for being upsetting. As for being functional as a game, there's a few issues that I feel make it a bit less frustrating by design and more of frustrating by execution.

For example: The way the keys stick to one direction when using the keyboard make the movement feel pretty claustrophobic. When dealing with the moving ghosts, especially, I often felt like the reason that I wasn't getting past them at first wasn't because of my inability to time correctly but rather because I was getting faked out by stiff controls.

Another thing: certainly aspects of a game probably shouldn't be randomized. Going back to the ghost level, I managed to clear it by simply holding the Up key and running into my death over and over again until the randomization of their speed meant that my character ran right passed them. Took less than a minute.

The slimes level was also certainly frustrating because of execution. Making somebody perform pixel-perfect movements is a classic way to cause rage, but after examining that none of my character's visible pixels were on a collision course with a slime's visible pixels and I still got hit I understand why people think that this level is unbeatable. I can only imagine something like this is either due to a glitch or intentionally unclear collision masks, both of which are a death sentence for a rage game. If the game feels genuinely unbeatable then the response isn't going to be rage- it's going to be somebody unenthusiastically closing the game and moving on to the next one; especially so early on as the second level, when the player is nowhere near invested enough to want to see the whole game through.

Once I realized I couldn't trust the visible pixels to be an indication of collision masks I stopped playing, and it's a major reason why I'm not giving this what likely would have been at least 3 stars otherwise.

Keep making games! I can't wait to see what else you make moving forward.

ACatGames responds:

Hey! Sorry for missing you for a few days, I'm working on a new game.
About your review: After I finished the game, I really felt that people would have a serious difficulty with Level 2 of the game, with this, probably more ahead I will make a super update of the game that will fix several bugs and functionalities about the game. This update will take a while to launch because I'm working on a new game right now.
Thank you for your feedback!

-Galactic Penguin