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| Game | Difficulty | User's Rating |
|---|---|---|
| I Wanna Lockpick | 75.0 | 10.0 |
| WannaFest 22 | 60.0 | 10.0 |
| Crimson Needle 2.5 | 90.0 | 9.8 |
| I Wanna be the Vandal | 73.0 | 9.7 |
| Crimson Needle 3 | 90.0 | 9.5 |
| I wanna stop the Heart Beats | 50.0 | 5.0 |
5 Reviews
cousinoer5
For: Crimson Needle 2.5
For: Crimson Needle 2.5
So Crimson Needle 2.5 eh? I remember way back when I tried CN1 and 2 and didn't get too far in them. A couple years ago CN3 spurred me on with its clever gimmicks and it's huge open map on floor 31 and I ended up completing it against all odds. After doing that, I knew I had to jump right into this game on release and not watch a single moment of anyone else playing it. I could feel something special was in this game, and boy I was right!
(big spoilers within the rest of this review, I highly encourage anyone able to play this game to do so as blind as possible, it is peak as they say nowadays)
You first boot up the game, you see a little cutscene, and then you're off, starting in a very familiar room. This is the game you expect when you boot up CN2.5. Classic 100 floors of ever more intense needle, with some smatterings of gimmicks. Nice looking tilesets, bumping music, the works. Not having played CN2, I appreciated looking at old vids of CN2 and comparing the floors, looks like some rough edges got smoothed off, some floors were swapped around, and some floors changed entirely. The aesthetics were changed a lot too. I can't really write too many words about this part of the game, it was solid. I will say 85-87 is my favorite tileset gameplay wise (save for the first save of 87), and 88-90 had my favorite track of the 100 floors. It was a fun trick putting OG CN2 floor 100 as floor 99 in this game (I'm just glad there was a save on screen 3, in exchange there's also a completely unique 4th screen). With that you know this game's floor 100 is going to be unique and boy was it! The graphics and unique fog of war and warping boundries between sections look so good! After a little bit of time in here you can definitely guess what the scale of the save is, each tileset is represented here, and each one has one or more jumps in it, so there's a lot to get through here. The one boon you get is The Holy Cross which you get halfway through, it's an extra life that will put you back at the beginning of a section if you die. The music is a lot more introspective than the awesome buckethead shredding that accompanied CN3's 100, it fits well with the vibe.
Floor 100 was a rough grind for me, 14 hours long. Definitely not as long as CN3's 60 hours, but somehow more frustrating for me due to mindset issues. At this point I knew this game was more than meets the eye, and I knew this was the only challenge between me and the next chapter. I was mostly annoyed with my lack of consistency, even at the end of the grind it felt like a "good run" if I got just halfway in, there weren't any sheer walls like there were in CN3's 100, but there's just so many decently difficult jumps you're bound to get wrecked by something or other. But after all that I managed to beat it. It took about 80 hours total for this chapter (with a couple dips into the next chapter)
So what's next? Well after doing 100 floors, you've seen maybe the tip of the iceberg. You now get an item that lets you go back to previous floors. Why would you want to do that? Well it turns out each of the 33 tilesets before floor 100 have a very well hidden secret, that when performed unlocks a unique guest stage. I was looking forward to puzzling all of these out, but was informed that a lot of these were brutal for just one pair of eyes, and there was a lot of community effort to solve these, and I can see why having done them now, lots of real big brain stuff, and very minute details you have to notice. I'm talking stuff on the level of one spike in the corner of a room animates in a different way until you fail the condition for the secret, which you must then glean by figuring out why it stops animating in that way. I'm proud of solving a few of em on my own at least. The stages you unlock from these secrets are very diverse and interesting, some veer way off from standard fangame mechanics, and some present exciting twists to the platforming. I won't review all of them here, but I'll call out some choice ones.
First off, of course I gotta give it up for Cherry Treehouse, who put an entire ninja adventure game inside of this game, and it was amazing. Solid mechanics, great progression of rooms, insane boss fights, amazing graphics. I actually did this secret first before I was done with needle, I was alerted to its presence by someone who knows what I love in video games and knew this would be my jam, and it was. This was the moment I realized this game is special, and it helped inspire me to push through the tough moments throughout the 100 floors. Next up is Patrick, who made a fun speedrun sort of deal, you have 16 unique tools, and using each one you must clear 16 floors from CN2.5 within a time limit. Chatran really hit it out of the park with Echus Chasma, a very fun secret focused around very unique key and lock gimmicks. Kale himself made a guest stage, is that even legal? Probably, it's a really fun one based around Snake mechanics. kady made a stage that spoke to me as a Celeste lover, all about bunny hopping to gain speed and make it over wide chasms. LAWatson made a cool minigame where you have to shoot cherries to cause chain reaction explosions to get enough points to win, I somehow did this first try! Wolfie hits us with some fun tower climbing shenanigans with some cool gimmicks along the way. EchoMask treats us to some very flow based and satisfying platforming. There's a lot of other good ones in here I didn't mention so don't think if your name isn't here I didn't like it, you all really cooked with these stages, and it's such a cool concept just letting 32 different people loose to make whatever they see fit for a secret stage for your game.
So how do you cap off a section of the game with a bunch of guest stages? Well, with a devas fight of course! There's 2 phases to it, the first one I loved a lot! It was fun strategizing and experimenting and learning all about the various mechanics and interactions at play to find the way I wanted to tackle this fight. Executing the plan afterwards wasn't too bad at all, a very enjoyable experience. Phase 2 annoyed me sadly, it's a more linear style of boss fight where you fight each deva 1 on 1 in a set order and too many chokes at the end eroded my patience. It is very well made though, and if you have the mindset for it you'll love it. Overall though, really cool stuff. Both phases combined took 11 hours. The ending was really nice too, I liked the song, and I'm glad both credits sequences so far have shown me time/death stats.
So that's it right, GG? Haha wrong! You get an item that lets you warp to any guest stage, it pulls up a menu with 33 names, but technically there's only 32 guest stages because the chapel is its own thing... John 10:9? "I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture.". Select that option and off you go, welcome to chapter 3, this is a doozy! After a small intro, you find yourself in a very familiar place if you played CN3, floor 100! With a different buckethead track too boot. Thankfully you'll find a couple saves within this time, and there's an opening at the end of purple? Keep going along this path, and you'll find The Moment. That's right, a warp statue appears in front of you, and back in green room of CN3 100. You go back and see 3 lasers leading you down new paths that opened up. Welcome to the floor 31 experience, hard mode!
This part of the game is absolutely bonkers, I don't even know how I can encapsulate it into a review like this. I'll just give a broad overview of the setup here: On the 3 different paths off 100, there's many branches and some dead ends you'll run into until you've done a certain thing on another path. The platforming content at this point is incredibly varied, you don't know what you're going to get next, and that is an exciting feeling. Very often you find a gimmick that's very unique and it's used for just a couple saves then you're off to a completely new thing. That's the essence of this chapter, you never settle into a comfortable groove for the most part, by time you're getting used to the challenge in front of you, the next challenge flips the script. It's a blessing and a curse, because sometimes I'm like "oh man this gimmick is so cool you could make a whole game around this" and it's gone in 2 screens. By that same token, if there's a gimmick you're not vibing with, you can take solace that the next switch up is likely right around the corner.
I'll list some notable areas for me personally: The tower coming out of the sea hub with the shoot walls that give you your jump and later lock your y position for a moment is my favorite. The way the mechanic works and keeps building with new twists was amazing, and thankfully it was a rather chunky section comparatively, I thoroughly enjoyed that area. Close behind is the area with the purple zones that accelerate you upward, I like that sort of gimmick and the level design works perfectly with it. Within these paths lie some screens that I call "expert remixes" of past CN3 screens. Of those, 97's remix was really fun for me, I liked the original screen, and this built upon it in a cool way. 91 Expert Remix was really fun too. The area where your double jump is replaced with a horizontal dash and a high jump is an amazing area, very Celeste-pilled, I loved the gimmick and the twists on it that are introduced later on. The save right after it really appealed to me too, apple rings like this always make me think of the Distorted Travesty games, as that's an infamous obstacle type in those games, so seeing stuff like that here tickled my fancy. The area where you can only rejump in air had some creative setups and a funny ending that I somehow sight read. The fields that make you blink in a certain direction after a couple seconds in them were a really creative gimmick and I loved most of the platforming revolving around them.
All that said, these areas are just a small sample of things you'll find in this giant labyrinth. I'd run out of characters if I were to list all of the unique gimmicks that you'll find here. It truly tests every aspect of platforming ability and then some.
So how does this chapter conclude? Once you get the 3 ghosts, you can open the church and come face to face with The Goliath, a huge towering save with many challenging and interesting jumps. Long endurance saves are my weakness, but just like EchoMask's stage, the flow is immaculate, and that really helps smooth over the grind, it got pretty consistent too, only a couple pain spots and even those fell away once I properly found a strategy. I loved it
Doing this opens up the ceiling over The Ankh, the thing that started this whole journey. After a story sequence, you're at the final save of the game, and boy is it a doozy. The screens in this save contain wild combos of gimmicks you've seen thus far, with familiar but still different jump setups. There's 9 screens in all, and if this was in a linear order, it'd be a mean save due to how learny each screen is. Instead, in a genius move, they randomized the order of the screens after the first intro screen, this means you can slowly build up your skill on each screen as it comes up until eventually you become good enough to complete each screen, then you have to grind the consistency to make sure you can do whatever screen comes up last with the nerves that will follow. It's brilliant! The music in this area is suitably chaotic, never resolving to one melody for longer than a minute, a true encapsulation of this chapter as a whole, an amazing capstone to an amazing journey. The surprise final screen that waits for you after you complete the first 9 screens tilted me with how much I died to it, but in the end it only took 7.5 hours, a little over half of what floor 100 did.
The ending sequence is brilliant, that's all I say about that. There's a big chain of secrets in chapter 3 that unlock an extra part of the ending but that requires redoing a bunch of platforming I've already done and at this point I've had my fill. There's also New Game+ which adds some more stuff for truly hardcore players, Celeste style golden berries for each tileset of the main 100 floors, a unique challenge for each guest stage, and a buffed version of floor 100 that looks absolutely bonkers.
With 290 hours of game time and 129009 deaths, I've been absolutely obsessed with this game since it released, and for good reason, it's awesome! I don't think we'll see another fangame on this scale for a long time. Kale and everyone else involved in this gigantic project should be very proud of what they've made.
[2] Likes
(big spoilers within the rest of this review, I highly encourage anyone able to play this game to do so as blind as possible, it is peak as they say nowadays)
You first boot up the game, you see a little cutscene, and then you're off, starting in a very familiar room. This is the game you expect when you boot up CN2.5. Classic 100 floors of ever more intense needle, with some smatterings of gimmicks. Nice looking tilesets, bumping music, the works. Not having played CN2, I appreciated looking at old vids of CN2 and comparing the floors, looks like some rough edges got smoothed off, some floors were swapped around, and some floors changed entirely. The aesthetics were changed a lot too. I can't really write too many words about this part of the game, it was solid. I will say 85-87 is my favorite tileset gameplay wise (save for the first save of 87), and 88-90 had my favorite track of the 100 floors. It was a fun trick putting OG CN2 floor 100 as floor 99 in this game (I'm just glad there was a save on screen 3, in exchange there's also a completely unique 4th screen). With that you know this game's floor 100 is going to be unique and boy was it! The graphics and unique fog of war and warping boundries between sections look so good! After a little bit of time in here you can definitely guess what the scale of the save is, each tileset is represented here, and each one has one or more jumps in it, so there's a lot to get through here. The one boon you get is The Holy Cross which you get halfway through, it's an extra life that will put you back at the beginning of a section if you die. The music is a lot more introspective than the awesome buckethead shredding that accompanied CN3's 100, it fits well with the vibe.
Floor 100 was a rough grind for me, 14 hours long. Definitely not as long as CN3's 60 hours, but somehow more frustrating for me due to mindset issues. At this point I knew this game was more than meets the eye, and I knew this was the only challenge between me and the next chapter. I was mostly annoyed with my lack of consistency, even at the end of the grind it felt like a "good run" if I got just halfway in, there weren't any sheer walls like there were in CN3's 100, but there's just so many decently difficult jumps you're bound to get wrecked by something or other. But after all that I managed to beat it. It took about 80 hours total for this chapter (with a couple dips into the next chapter)
So what's next? Well after doing 100 floors, you've seen maybe the tip of the iceberg. You now get an item that lets you go back to previous floors. Why would you want to do that? Well it turns out each of the 33 tilesets before floor 100 have a very well hidden secret, that when performed unlocks a unique guest stage. I was looking forward to puzzling all of these out, but was informed that a lot of these were brutal for just one pair of eyes, and there was a lot of community effort to solve these, and I can see why having done them now, lots of real big brain stuff, and very minute details you have to notice. I'm talking stuff on the level of one spike in the corner of a room animates in a different way until you fail the condition for the secret, which you must then glean by figuring out why it stops animating in that way. I'm proud of solving a few of em on my own at least. The stages you unlock from these secrets are very diverse and interesting, some veer way off from standard fangame mechanics, and some present exciting twists to the platforming. I won't review all of them here, but I'll call out some choice ones.
First off, of course I gotta give it up for Cherry Treehouse, who put an entire ninja adventure game inside of this game, and it was amazing. Solid mechanics, great progression of rooms, insane boss fights, amazing graphics. I actually did this secret first before I was done with needle, I was alerted to its presence by someone who knows what I love in video games and knew this would be my jam, and it was. This was the moment I realized this game is special, and it helped inspire me to push through the tough moments throughout the 100 floors. Next up is Patrick, who made a fun speedrun sort of deal, you have 16 unique tools, and using each one you must clear 16 floors from CN2.5 within a time limit. Chatran really hit it out of the park with Echus Chasma, a very fun secret focused around very unique key and lock gimmicks. Kale himself made a guest stage, is that even legal? Probably, it's a really fun one based around Snake mechanics. kady made a stage that spoke to me as a Celeste lover, all about bunny hopping to gain speed and make it over wide chasms. LAWatson made a cool minigame where you have to shoot cherries to cause chain reaction explosions to get enough points to win, I somehow did this first try! Wolfie hits us with some fun tower climbing shenanigans with some cool gimmicks along the way. EchoMask treats us to some very flow based and satisfying platforming. There's a lot of other good ones in here I didn't mention so don't think if your name isn't here I didn't like it, you all really cooked with these stages, and it's such a cool concept just letting 32 different people loose to make whatever they see fit for a secret stage for your game.
So how do you cap off a section of the game with a bunch of guest stages? Well, with a devas fight of course! There's 2 phases to it, the first one I loved a lot! It was fun strategizing and experimenting and learning all about the various mechanics and interactions at play to find the way I wanted to tackle this fight. Executing the plan afterwards wasn't too bad at all, a very enjoyable experience. Phase 2 annoyed me sadly, it's a more linear style of boss fight where you fight each deva 1 on 1 in a set order and too many chokes at the end eroded my patience. It is very well made though, and if you have the mindset for it you'll love it. Overall though, really cool stuff. Both phases combined took 11 hours. The ending was really nice too, I liked the song, and I'm glad both credits sequences so far have shown me time/death stats.
So that's it right, GG? Haha wrong! You get an item that lets you warp to any guest stage, it pulls up a menu with 33 names, but technically there's only 32 guest stages because the chapel is its own thing... John 10:9? "I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture.". Select that option and off you go, welcome to chapter 3, this is a doozy! After a small intro, you find yourself in a very familiar place if you played CN3, floor 100! With a different buckethead track too boot. Thankfully you'll find a couple saves within this time, and there's an opening at the end of purple? Keep going along this path, and you'll find The Moment. That's right, a warp statue appears in front of you, and back in green room of CN3 100. You go back and see 3 lasers leading you down new paths that opened up. Welcome to the floor 31 experience, hard mode!
This part of the game is absolutely bonkers, I don't even know how I can encapsulate it into a review like this. I'll just give a broad overview of the setup here: On the 3 different paths off 100, there's many branches and some dead ends you'll run into until you've done a certain thing on another path. The platforming content at this point is incredibly varied, you don't know what you're going to get next, and that is an exciting feeling. Very often you find a gimmick that's very unique and it's used for just a couple saves then you're off to a completely new thing. That's the essence of this chapter, you never settle into a comfortable groove for the most part, by time you're getting used to the challenge in front of you, the next challenge flips the script. It's a blessing and a curse, because sometimes I'm like "oh man this gimmick is so cool you could make a whole game around this" and it's gone in 2 screens. By that same token, if there's a gimmick you're not vibing with, you can take solace that the next switch up is likely right around the corner.
I'll list some notable areas for me personally: The tower coming out of the sea hub with the shoot walls that give you your jump and later lock your y position for a moment is my favorite. The way the mechanic works and keeps building with new twists was amazing, and thankfully it was a rather chunky section comparatively, I thoroughly enjoyed that area. Close behind is the area with the purple zones that accelerate you upward, I like that sort of gimmick and the level design works perfectly with it. Within these paths lie some screens that I call "expert remixes" of past CN3 screens. Of those, 97's remix was really fun for me, I liked the original screen, and this built upon it in a cool way. 91 Expert Remix was really fun too. The area where your double jump is replaced with a horizontal dash and a high jump is an amazing area, very Celeste-pilled, I loved the gimmick and the twists on it that are introduced later on. The save right after it really appealed to me too, apple rings like this always make me think of the Distorted Travesty games, as that's an infamous obstacle type in those games, so seeing stuff like that here tickled my fancy. The area where you can only rejump in air had some creative setups and a funny ending that I somehow sight read. The fields that make you blink in a certain direction after a couple seconds in them were a really creative gimmick and I loved most of the platforming revolving around them.
All that said, these areas are just a small sample of things you'll find in this giant labyrinth. I'd run out of characters if I were to list all of the unique gimmicks that you'll find here. It truly tests every aspect of platforming ability and then some.
So how does this chapter conclude? Once you get the 3 ghosts, you can open the church and come face to face with The Goliath, a huge towering save with many challenging and interesting jumps. Long endurance saves are my weakness, but just like EchoMask's stage, the flow is immaculate, and that really helps smooth over the grind, it got pretty consistent too, only a couple pain spots and even those fell away once I properly found a strategy. I loved it
Doing this opens up the ceiling over The Ankh, the thing that started this whole journey. After a story sequence, you're at the final save of the game, and boy is it a doozy. The screens in this save contain wild combos of gimmicks you've seen thus far, with familiar but still different jump setups. There's 9 screens in all, and if this was in a linear order, it'd be a mean save due to how learny each screen is. Instead, in a genius move, they randomized the order of the screens after the first intro screen, this means you can slowly build up your skill on each screen as it comes up until eventually you become good enough to complete each screen, then you have to grind the consistency to make sure you can do whatever screen comes up last with the nerves that will follow. It's brilliant! The music in this area is suitably chaotic, never resolving to one melody for longer than a minute, a true encapsulation of this chapter as a whole, an amazing capstone to an amazing journey. The surprise final screen that waits for you after you complete the first 9 screens tilted me with how much I died to it, but in the end it only took 7.5 hours, a little over half of what floor 100 did.
The ending sequence is brilliant, that's all I say about that. There's a big chain of secrets in chapter 3 that unlock an extra part of the ending but that requires redoing a bunch of platforming I've already done and at this point I've had my fill. There's also New Game+ which adds some more stuff for truly hardcore players, Celeste style golden berries for each tileset of the main 100 floors, a unique challenge for each guest stage, and a buffed version of floor 100 that looks absolutely bonkers.
With 290 hours of game time and 129009 deaths, I've been absolutely obsessed with this game since it released, and for good reason, it's awesome! I don't think we'll see another fangame on this scale for a long time. Kale and everyone else involved in this gigantic project should be very proud of what they've made.
Rating: 9.8 98
Difficulty: 90 90
Jan 3, 2025
cousinoer5
For: I Wanna Lockpick
For: I Wanna Lockpick
An absolutely incredible puzzle experience.
[0] Likes
Rating: 10.0 100
Difficulty: 75 75
Mar 25, 2024
cousinoer5
For: I wanna stop the Heart Beats
For: I wanna stop the Heart Beats
This one had potential, it's set up like a cool adventure game, has different stages with neat gimmicks, I liked that part, but there's too many issues that really set it back in my eyes. Many of the save points are floating above ground which annoyed me to no end. There's way too many "screw you" traps near the end of saves for my taste. The bosses were pretty cool except for the last ones, a lot of it came down to the first part of the fight was easy then the hard stuff is crammed in at the end and it got boring after a while. Then the final phase of the final boss has such an inexplicably long startup time, you have to shoot an object that slowly fades in, then the boss will fade in, then the title card will tell you the name of the boss you've been fighting for the past half hour, then you can finally start playing. After enough annoyance with that I ended up giving up. It would've been a pretty standard boss without the long intro, but it was just painful dying knowing the next 30 seconds of my life would be just waiting for the chance to try again.
There's secrets as well, I didn't go for them but I watched them, they look okay too, some get pretty spicy.
Don't let my review sway you away from at least trying it, there is some good stuff here, but it just hit wrong for me.
[0] Likes
There's secrets as well, I didn't go for them but I watched them, they look okay too, some get pretty spicy.
Don't let my review sway you away from at least trying it, there is some good stuff here, but it just hit wrong for me.
Rating: 5.0 50
Difficulty: 50 50
Oct 20, 2023
cousinoer5
For: I Wanna be the Vandal
For: I Wanna be the Vandal
What a wonderful game! Lots of fun gimmicks introduced and combined in creative ways. There's many unique and fun to pull off jump sequences, and each set of floors has its own identity. The graphics and music are on point as well. Had a real fun time overall!
7246 deaths, a bit under 10 hours to clear.
[1] Like
7246 deaths, a bit under 10 hours to clear.
Rating: 9.7 97
Difficulty: 73 73
Nov 22, 2022
cousinoer5
For: Crimson Needle 3
For: Crimson Needle 3
What an incredible journey!
I don't have much to say that isn't said by the other glowing reviews of this game. Floor 31 was real fun, and the end game was insanely fulfilling, it got frustrating at times, but I persevered and cleared the whole game!
Final stats on floor 100: 25873 deaths, just under 60 hours
Final stats overall: 125398 deaths, just over 209 hours
[3] Likes
I don't have much to say that isn't said by the other glowing reviews of this game. Floor 31 was real fun, and the end game was insanely fulfilling, it got frustrating at times, but I persevered and cleared the whole game!
Final stats on floor 100: 25873 deaths, just under 60 hours
Final stats overall: 125398 deaths, just over 209 hours
Rating: 9.5 95
Difficulty: 90 90
Nov 16, 2022
User's games list is empty!
6 Favorite Games
| Game | Difficulty | User's Rating |
|---|---|---|
| I wanna be the Justice Guy | N/A | N/A |
| Crimson Needle 3 | 90.0 | 9.5 |
| I Wanna be the Vandal | 73.0 | 9.7 |
| I Wanna Lockpick | 75.0 | 10.0 |
| WannaFest 22 | 60.0 | 10.0 |
| Crimson Needle 2.5 | 90.0 | 9.8 |
6 Cleared Games
| Game | Difficulty | User's Rating |
|---|---|---|
| I wanna be the Justice Guy | N/A | N/A |
| Crimson Needle 3 | 90.0 | 9.5 |
| I Wanna be the Vandal | 73.0 | 9.7 |
| I Wanna Lockpick | 75.0 | 10.0 |
| WannaFest 22 | 60.0 | 10.0 |
| Crimson Needle 2.5 | 90.0 | 9.8 |