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phgQED
For: Serotonin
For: Serotonin
Serotonin is the first fangame I ever downloaded, after peeking into a lot of streams and watching several fangames in speedrun marathons over the years. Obviously, even for someone with a bit of tough platforming experience, this game was way too hard for me, so I shelved it, and the idea of playing fangames as a whole for a while, and wouldn't come back to them until many months later.
Being able to make it past the first save/screen when I couldn't manage a single jump was a monumentous feeling, but it didn't prepare me for the rest of the journey. Playing Serotonin felt like a religious experience, and that's much more down to the visuals and hypnotic, distorted music than any arbitrary importance placed on it by me. It seems more likely the order was the other way around—this game just so happened to be bordering on the profound in the first place, hence my fixation with/on it. Then again, maybe it's just a pretty good needle game. It is 'just' a needle game, after all.
As time goes on, there is a lot more I want to be able to say about needle games and/or the idea of fangames as a whole. I feel like I lack the vocabulary, as well as the skillset. In an endeavour to one day climb The Holy Mountain and see the beauty and complexity others see in games that, right now, just feel 'too hard' for me to understand. Serotonin is step in that journey, but it's also a beautiful game in an of itself. It delivers several complete and compact ideas, focused stages designed around similar but not repetitive elements, and moments of tension that are perfectly accented by the aesthetic choices. It's a game I found I couldn't play with the music off, as it stripped away too much of the experience.
Seeing more talented needle players blow through this game in under ten minutes is mind boggling to me. The spectrum of human skill is so vast that it's impossible to see either end from where you're currently standing.
This game was a great measuring tool, learning experience, and milestone. I recommend it to anyone who currently wishes to posses a soul.
Time: 8:40:46
Deaths: 10635
[3] Likes
Being able to make it past the first save/screen when I couldn't manage a single jump was a monumentous feeling, but it didn't prepare me for the rest of the journey. Playing Serotonin felt like a religious experience, and that's much more down to the visuals and hypnotic, distorted music than any arbitrary importance placed on it by me. It seems more likely the order was the other way around—this game just so happened to be bordering on the profound in the first place, hence my fixation with/on it. Then again, maybe it's just a pretty good needle game. It is 'just' a needle game, after all.
As time goes on, there is a lot more I want to be able to say about needle games and/or the idea of fangames as a whole. I feel like I lack the vocabulary, as well as the skillset. In an endeavour to one day climb The Holy Mountain and see the beauty and complexity others see in games that, right now, just feel 'too hard' for me to understand. Serotonin is step in that journey, but it's also a beautiful game in an of itself. It delivers several complete and compact ideas, focused stages designed around similar but not repetitive elements, and moments of tension that are perfectly accented by the aesthetic choices. It's a game I found I couldn't play with the music off, as it stripped away too much of the experience.
Seeing more talented needle players blow through this game in under ten minutes is mind boggling to me. The spectrum of human skill is so vast that it's impossible to see either end from where you're currently standing.
This game was a great measuring tool, learning experience, and milestone. I recommend it to anyone who currently wishes to posses a soul.
Time: 8:40:46
Deaths: 10635
Rating: 9.9 99
Difficulty: 59 59
Dec 10, 2021
phgQED
For: Stars
For: Stars
This is a mostly inoffensive beginner-ish needle game with a few somewhat egregious jumps thrown in seemingly at random. In particular, the first save of the second world stands out to me as incredibly annoying. The aesthetics/tileset are fine, tho a bit plain in the third area. The music is nice, but it sounds like a random Roblox minigame lobby.
This is the first game I have replayed explicitly on a different difficulty to see how different the experience might be. Weirdly, the 'Very Hard' mode doesn't remove saves in the first area, which I'm guessing means 'Impossible' mode is to do the entire thing in one go with no saves? It occurs to me that there's theoretically a thesis on difficulty in general in the notion that 'less saves = more hard' explicitly, but it also causes a different type of difficulty, and one that's a lot more dependent on level design than something with more plentiful saves. You'll get to know individual jumps better, and get more consistent at doing them, but you might also learn to hate certain jumps, that feel inordinately difficult or just get in the way of you otherwise having a solid, flowing experience. This game has quite a few of those.
If anything, I'd say a second, 'harder' playthru of the game made me enjoy it less. All of the jumps I had trouble with came back (in Pog© form!) and were just kind of exacerbated. I would still sort of recommend this game to a needle beginner, but I think there are many better choices out there.
-Medium-
Time: ~27min
Deaths: 376
-Very Hard-
Time: ~1hr5min
Deaths: 899
[0] Likes
This is the first game I have replayed explicitly on a different difficulty to see how different the experience might be. Weirdly, the 'Very Hard' mode doesn't remove saves in the first area, which I'm guessing means 'Impossible' mode is to do the entire thing in one go with no saves? It occurs to me that there's theoretically a thesis on difficulty in general in the notion that 'less saves = more hard' explicitly, but it also causes a different type of difficulty, and one that's a lot more dependent on level design than something with more plentiful saves. You'll get to know individual jumps better, and get more consistent at doing them, but you might also learn to hate certain jumps, that feel inordinately difficult or just get in the way of you otherwise having a solid, flowing experience. This game has quite a few of those.
If anything, I'd say a second, 'harder' playthru of the game made me enjoy it less. All of the jumps I had trouble with came back (in Pog© form!) and were just kind of exacerbated. I would still sort of recommend this game to a needle beginner, but I think there are many better choices out there.
-Medium-
Time: ~27min
Deaths: 376
-Very Hard-
Time: ~1hr5min
Deaths: 899
Rating: 4.5 45
Difficulty: 21 21
Dec 6, 2021
phgQED
For: I wanna Cigarette
For: I wanna Cigarette
Firstly, great title. I love puns.
This game was a lot longer than I expected. It's a bunch of mostly easy but fun jumps, some completely free ones, and some inordinately hard ones that are almost always a tight diagonal. It occurs to me as an abstract thesis that since jump 'tightness'/'narrowness' roughly equals an increase in difficulty, jumps should almost always get more precise as the game goes on, rather than less precise. This isn't to say that every individual jump must be harder than ones in beginning screens, but maybe that, if you're going to put hard jumps early and easy jumps late, you should do so with a care and purpose that helps arrange your saves toward the aim of some kind of 'reward'... a sensibility in design that makes a player want to keep going because their skills are tested on an incremental level, not like darts being thrown at a board.
Does anyone else view needle games as inherently 'poetic'? Not to say that they have highly artistic elements, which they do, as all fangames do to an extent—more so that, because the gameplay of needle is often so barebones, and the title of the game so abstractly related to the actual experience of playing a precision platformer, a certain metaphorical gratitude is required of the player. If you play a needle game, you are in a sense reading a poem with that title, and the jumps and saves and screens and music and tileset are all an accompaniment to the author/designer's attempt to deliver the thesis/qualia of that metaphorical conversion.
To that end, I don't think this game felt very much like a 'cigarette'. It was quite long, for one thing, whereas an individual cigarette or the experience of smoking one is often quite short. The music loop, while pleasant, felt far too triumphant/bombastic, and by the seventh loop or so (it's quite a short track as well) began to feel almost parodic, like it was making fun of me for taking so long to finish my smoke break. Someone else translated the general metaphor of smoking to needle games, which I think is a better translation than I could ever do.
Despite a general obtuseness, a real cohesive design comes out towards the end of this game, and even though it didn't remind me of smoking, it was a satisfying clear regardless. Hard to recommend, but a personal favorite for some weird reason.
Time: ~51min
Deaths: 665
[1] Like
This game was a lot longer than I expected. It's a bunch of mostly easy but fun jumps, some completely free ones, and some inordinately hard ones that are almost always a tight diagonal. It occurs to me as an abstract thesis that since jump 'tightness'/'narrowness' roughly equals an increase in difficulty, jumps should almost always get more precise as the game goes on, rather than less precise. This isn't to say that every individual jump must be harder than ones in beginning screens, but maybe that, if you're going to put hard jumps early and easy jumps late, you should do so with a care and purpose that helps arrange your saves toward the aim of some kind of 'reward'... a sensibility in design that makes a player want to keep going because their skills are tested on an incremental level, not like darts being thrown at a board.
Does anyone else view needle games as inherently 'poetic'? Not to say that they have highly artistic elements, which they do, as all fangames do to an extent—more so that, because the gameplay of needle is often so barebones, and the title of the game so abstractly related to the actual experience of playing a precision platformer, a certain metaphorical gratitude is required of the player. If you play a needle game, you are in a sense reading a poem with that title, and the jumps and saves and screens and music and tileset are all an accompaniment to the author/designer's attempt to deliver the thesis/qualia of that metaphorical conversion.
To that end, I don't think this game felt very much like a 'cigarette'. It was quite long, for one thing, whereas an individual cigarette or the experience of smoking one is often quite short. The music loop, while pleasant, felt far too triumphant/bombastic, and by the seventh loop or so (it's quite a short track as well) began to feel almost parodic, like it was making fun of me for taking so long to finish my smoke break. Someone else translated the general metaphor of smoking to needle games, which I think is a better translation than I could ever do.
Despite a general obtuseness, a real cohesive design comes out towards the end of this game, and even though it didn't remind me of smoking, it was a satisfying clear regardless. Hard to recommend, but a personal favorite for some weird reason.
Time: ~51min
Deaths: 665
Rating: 7.9 79
Difficulty: 37 37
Dec 6, 2021
phgQED
For: I Wanna LoveSpike
For: I Wanna LoveSpike
A short needle game with a few gimmicks and a lot of highly painful jumps. There are too many spots for me to count where a low cancel or 1-3f jump seemed almost required. Those, plus lots of diagonals, and some 16px thrown in at the end for fun. Kinda fun bouncy song and look tho, and the save placement was really generous and incentivized a continued playthru. Not a bad romp if you're able to let the frustration bounce off.
Time: ~36min
Deaths: 1008
[1] Like
Time: ~36min
Deaths: 1008
Rating: 6.4 64
Difficulty: 33 33
Dec 5, 2021
phgQED
For: I wanna recover the Quality
For: I wanna recover the Quality
I feel like I missed something important while playing this game... maybe it has secrets to reveal on harder difficulties? Most of the time I felt lost and wasn't sure what I was doing anyway. Not overly hard, just confusing.
Time: ~16min
Deaths: 215
[1] Like
Time: ~16min
Deaths: 215
Rating: 2.1 21
Difficulty: 16 16
Dec 5, 2021
11 Games
| Game | Difficulty | Average Rating | # of Ratings |
|---|---|---|---|
| I wanna be the (mis)Nomer | 68.4 | 4.9 | 11 |
| I Wanna be the AIW | 56.2 | 6.9 | 26 |
| I Wanna be the Fleeting Flower Forever | 70.0 | 7.2 | 6 |
| Heart-Shaped Triangle | 61.8 | 7.6 | 10 |
| I Wanna Meet the Oracle at Delphi | 65.2 | 5.8 | 10 |
| I Wanna One Day Wonder | 44.6 | 7.5 | 11 |
| Stranded. | 67.6 | 6.5 | 9 |
| Suffering | N/A | 6.5 | 4 |
| I Wanna [VERB] the [ADJECTIVE] [NOUN] | 67.9 | 6.3 | 11 |
| I Wanna – | 61.0 | 5.9 | 7 |
| I Wanna — | 53.0 | 7.8 | 10 |
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