TheWanderingShadow's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Towers of Hanoi]

Well it's functional. That's more than could be said for most games here. Would have liked to be able to stop the victory music by returning to the main menu.

[Mafia Girl Action 2]

Very generic and lifeless. Way too easy, no interesting context, annoying music loop, and shows you all it has to offer within the first 2 minutes. Only thing to say is that it controls fine.

[Don't Escape 3]

Yet another beautiful and immersive point and click game by Scriptwelder. The puzzles felt challenging but were pretty intuitive. There was very little pixel hunting to do. There were few too many red herrings for my taste; I wish I could have at least attempted to put something I brewed up onto my pancakes. Very great work anyways!

[Nobody catches Juancho: first nightmare]

Biggest frustration with the game was not being able to tell what was wall and what was shadow, as well as where Juan was inside the shadow. Second biggest frustration was how imprecise the controls were, with Juan sliding like an ice skating pro and throwing rocks in incredibly unreliable ways. The repetitive music loop didn't help much either.

What's left after that is a basic stealth game with a bunch of mechanics thrown together that don't really interact in particularly interesting ways; half of which don't need to be used to complete a level. It feels like you got a lighting engine and a pathfinding engine, put them together and didn't think about how to design a really solid game around them. It took talent to put this together, but it needs a lot of work before it can be a particularly good game.

[Avoid the B]

Difficulty pacing is fucked up, no way to get past ~11 seconds, you can at least get a fuckin replay button to work withing 30 minutes, 0/10 IGN

[The Last Soul]

After the first night, the flower vase stopped displaying the "interact" symbol when moused over. On the third day, the flower vase text read "There are 1 flower" when it should be "There is 1 flower". In addition, it would have been nice to interact using the up and down keys, considering there are only two things to interact with in the game and you literally don't use those keys at all.

If you use mouse control, I think you should allow people to use WASD to control movement as well as the arrow keys, because only using the arrow keys and mouse makes right-handed people awkwardly shift both of their hands to the right side of their computer which can be uncomfortable.

In the first night, if you drop into a location where a platform spawns and it appears on top of you, the player is destroyed and the game softlocks; there is no way to progress and you are forced to reset.

Whenever you die and restart a level, the audio begins playing the heartbeat loop again, but doesn't stop the old one. This causes the tracks to overlap, and if you die enough times, the audio becomes a constant cacaphony of beats. Learn to restrict your audio to one track, or at least cut off the old one before starting another.

We are not all artists, but I would have appreciated at least a little more effort than gradients for a background. Gradients are extremely unprofessional looking when used excessively, to the point where you may as well had a flat color for a background.

There were already barely any gameplay sections, but you didn't even try during the third night; from the bedroom, one click takes you straight back into the bedroom and the end of the game.

There are so many issues and not enough game here to really justify giving it as serious a review as I have done. You have an interesting vision and style for your game, but it's going to take much more effort if you want anybody to take it seriously. I hope you consider this for future projects.

[REGEN]

I have to compliment the platforming itself, I felt almost completely in control of the character in terms of jump height and distance. That said, i see little point in choosing paths if the rooms will be randomized regardless, entering into other rooms often leads to unavoidable damage, and without any sense of progression (aside from upgrades, which are horribly overpriced and very boring), I really don't feel any reason to push forward and complete the game.

I see that this game is a strong technical and design achievement. I hope that you will use your engine and experience for much greater things in the future.

[ascend]

The controls were quite responsive, the level design solid (Though I do believe I'm now sick of spike-covered moving blocks). I liked how many detours you could take throughout the level for more flowers.

The atmosphere was very well crafted and very foreboding. The sound design in particular was wonderful, with the song playing near flowers being a highlight.

The art was good quality, though the cutesy player sprite clashed considerably with the tone of the rest of the game, as did the (main) ending. I did not have much interest in the story as given by the text, as it scrolled very slowly and was excessively cryptic.

I did not see anything particularly bad about this game. A nice and short experience.