goldenPiGames's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[MEATBALL the MITE (Classic)]

This game surprised me with its depth and enjoyability. I like the animations and some of the mechanics, but as you admit, the level design isn't always great, especially the straightaways with not much happening.

Just a minor gripe, when you go up through a screen transition, those blocks should be non-solid, so you don't see yourself hit your head as the screen fades to black. Also maybe you should get some horizontal velocity in the new room so you don't immediately fall back down.

Also I got softlocked. I'll send you a screenshot.

[Stranded on a Raft]

This is pretty neat in theory, but getting spawncamped by frogs because I can't even sort out my inventory and craft a machete before they kill me, or watching a rock float down and destroy my stuff suddenly, wears kinda thin. Also there's seemingly no way to reenter fullscreen without refreshing the page, and the google doc containing your terms and conditions was removed for violating google doc's terms and conditions, which is deeply ironic.

[Sinful Scoops]

Man, this game would probably be pretty good if the text actually displayed all three lines instead of cutting off the last one. And if the symbol detection wasn't terrible.

BluePinGames responds:

Sorry about the text rendering, it must be a browser specific issue. The game was only tested on Google Chrome due to the constraint of the game jam. I will update it to ensure text rendering works well on all browsers in the next 24hrs

edit : I have reviewed the gameplay on all four main browsers and there doesn't appear to be an issue with the text displaying incorrectly. Perhaps its a setting or more niche browser issues that I can't address. Sorry :(

[Toilet Paper Please!]

I'm giving up on level 13, after playing through a dozen boring levels of the same crap. Despite being themed around toilet """humor""" it's awfully sterile. I've played some pretty bad games in the course of monthly voting but none of them are as plainly uninteresting as this one. Why you expect people to purchase it is beyond me.

[DARK SWORD: The Light of Ainn]

Literally the first thing I did in the game was click the "click here!" button. It didn't work right because you put "linktr.ee/mrdoth" instead of the full address "https://linktr.ee/mrdoth" so it was interpreted as a relative address. I'll admit that leaves an awfully bad first impression for the quality of your code.

The tutorial is lacking. It doesn't teach you basic things like blocking and doesn't provide any sort of repetition or reinforcement to make sure you understand important things like dashing.

The first boss is unremarkable. The idea of switching between melee and ranged weapons to mirror yours is interesting at least. But the extreme delay between attacks conflicts with the vibe I get that this is supposed to be a game where you attack while bosses are attacking. And the sword slam with all the projectiles is disproportionately hard to avoid compared to all his other attacks.

For a game supposedly focused on combat, it's devoid of regular enemies. Apart from the room of useless spiders in the dungeon. Regular enemies and minibosses are immensely underappreciated in the genre. They keep you on your toes, fill out otherwise empty areas, and let you get a feel for the systems and your weapons.

The dungeon's "platforming", if you can call it that, is awful due to the invariable length of your dash. Falling off puts you back to the beginning. Falling off multiple times consecutively due to the janky collision will result in you teleporting back multiple times.

Overall, this game gives off the strong impression of someone who did a bunch of things he thought was cool instead of thinking about why makes those things contribute to the experience. Dark Souls is cool, so you talk up the "brutal boss battles" and do that things with the area names but the areas are devoid of enemies, or, well, anything, I mean, if you're going to have the areas be so completely nothing, you might as toss out the overworld and make it menu-based instead. Limited color palettes are cool, so you made everything grey, black and red, but what they represent isn't consistent and you also have so many particle effects that visual clarity suffers. Screen shake isn't cool and I have no idea why you put it in and made it so excessive even for basic attacks. Teleporting back to the hub after finishing a dungeon or finding some secret is cool, but you made it automatic and unexplained instead of like putting in a teleporter for you to step into, so it's annoying if you want to continue exploring, and confusing regardless.

And, the last straw, it seems the game saved while I was in combat and two hit points down and had a line of bullets shooting at me, so since I can't beat this boss (the nito claw guy two to the north) I am actually softlocked.

[Mimic Lens (Dungeon Crawler Jam 2024)]

I'm afraid I've missed the premise of the game. So, I'm looking for a real thing (cow?) that can be distinguished from a mimic thing... somehow, and to do that I have to solve puzzles? I did the easy one with the torches, no idea about the others. And the audio recordings have useful information maybe? I'm lost. I'm not going to criticize a dungeon crawler game for being a dungeon crawler, I'm an Etrian Odyssey fan after all, but why don't I have a compass, and why is QE turn and AD strafe instead of the other way around?

[Voiceless Demo]

Tutorial is awful. Here's each a mechanic, now here, use it one time before we move onto the next one. "if you are playing as X or Y you can" please, I don't even remember the name of the character I just picked. It seriously needs to be individualized per character/moveset, more spread out, and less filled with extranea like tricks and rails, what even are those

[Wibby's Adventure]

There's a neat idea here but the uncontrollable jumping, one-hit death, short vision range due to screen transitions, losing all the current row upon death, and enemies with an unpredictable hair trigger make it entirely frustrating and unfun to play.