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phgQED
For: renex needle
For: renex needle
A charmingly aesthetic retro needle packages with some questionable decisions. The second jump of save 2 on the first screen has been mentioned elsewhere, but it really is more difficult than anything else in the game. There are air saves here and there, and most of the levels feel somewhat empty without much to do. The custom death effect is kind of cool. Also on the second screen there appear to be up to two (?) alternate paths, one for a dplane and one for some corner shenanigans. I liked it but wouldn't necessarily recommend to beginners.
Tagged as: Needle
[2] Likes
Rating: 5.6 56
Difficulty: 39 39
Aug 12, 2022
phgQED [Creator]
For: Stranded.
For: Stranded.
This is a game I made while I was stuck alone with no means of communication or interaction with the outside world. It is also my collection of dedications to inspirations in the needle community. Thank you.
Difficulty rating estimate includes extra.
[1] Like
Difficulty rating estimate includes extra.
Rating: N/A
Difficulty: 65 65
Aug 7, 2022
phgQED
For: I wanna detach myself from reality to stop being depressed
For: I wanna detach myself from reality to stop being depressed
Please add a difficulty with more saves. As is I do not believe this game is 65 difficulty, nor is it precision needle.
[0] Likes
Rating: N/A
Difficulty: N/A
Jul 29, 2022
phgQED
For: I wanna be the Xoner
For: I wanna be the Xoner
Another goner game. My feelings on this one are mixed, and I'm going to try to review every jump to see why.
Firstly, the game pulls a little trick with the tileset. I could take it or leave it, but it does seem like more effort went into that than the actual jump construction.
The jumps themselves are almost always simple named jumps stretched near a theoretical limit, and not in a particularly elegant or even brutal way.
For save one, we have a corner into a 3/4 diamond: that's it. While the individual pieces of this jump were fun to pull off, it very much feels like a 'do this to actually start playing the game'.
For save two we have an extra cramped ledge-grab (which, while it looks menacing, didn't feel that bad) into a sort of double corner. Not very inspired but still interesting on a conceptual level for the first part.
Save three is a diamond into a 4.5/required bhop. It's probably the least creative save and I kind of hate it.
Save four is a t-boned diamond followed by an m-jump. Again, nothing special going on at all, though it does feel somewhat satisfying to pull off, considering how easy it is relative to the rest of the screen.
Save five could have been my favorite if the savepoint hitbox/mask was properly configured. As is, you can't save unless you're aiming at the save, and you also can't save on the very last pixel of the ledge, which means every time you die you'll be required to do the setup before attempting the jump (which is a sort of buffed steak into a 32px ledge). The game has the one-frame tap fix which makes the setup much less painful, but it's still a bit tedious to do every time. The jump itself is pretty fun.
Save six is two baby corners into a... well okay, here we have a jump that's familiar but that I can't name exactly. You're required to stagger/stutter your forward press off the ledge, then hold forward and full jump as soon as possible. It's quite simple but still felt satisfying to execute.
Save seven is yet ANOTHER ledge grab, by now emphasizing what is probably my least favorite part of any goner game. My problem with ledge grabs is that you can include them at theoretically any point in a jump to increase its difficulty exponentially, and once you start following that formula theoretically every single jump you make can start and end with a 32px ledge grab. Playing on controller, my dpad doesn't seem to suffer extensively anywhere else quite as much as 32px ledges, and so when I run into them so frequently it gives me a mild pause. After the ledge grab? Nerfed plane into what is basically a half diamond.
Save eight is a ceiling double diamond. But, oh, wait—right after there's an air save, and below that, a line of conveyor blocks. If you don't react to the save or the conveyor, you can 'make the jump' but still die. That happened a few times.
Save nine is conveyor diamonds into a weird corner thing. The corner thing is kind of simple, still kind of cool, but in the context of the conveyor, is mostly just luck.
Save ten is a jump I know has a name, but I'm not sure what it is: a half invert, maybe? The point is that it's easier with cancels, but cancels aren't required. This is probably my favorite jump in the game, which is a bit sad, in my view.
The last save is a hold left two-block diagonal setup into a corner + uplane. Because the warp is in the uplane you're not actually 'doing' the uplane so much as 'getting inside it'... why do both of those sound highly suggestive? Needle, spikes, penetration... ew.
If you complete the game on it's default 'Xoner' mode, you unlock the hint for goner mode. I played the game again after this unlock because I wanted to see if I had missed something—it turns out, not so much. I do think the game plays better with the default goner tileset tho.
All in all, looking back at each save itemized like this, it seems pretty clear the problem I had with this game is lack of creativity. Even if some of the jumps felt fun or technical to pull off, they were all so rote and ultimately reduced to their named equivalents that pulling them off wasn't rewarding in retrospect. Consider "I did the wacky third save of [goner game x]", as opposed to "I did a ceiling double diamond". To me, the former is much more interesting just because it is composed of unique pieces. But maybe that's not the case for everyone.
A very by the numbers entry in the genre that has a little creative juice in terms of presentation but not much in terms of level design.
Time: ~11min
Deaths: 449
Firstly, the game pulls a little trick with the tileset. I could take it or leave it, but it does seem like more effort went into that than the actual jump construction.
The jumps themselves are almost always simple named jumps stretched near a theoretical limit, and not in a particularly elegant or even brutal way.
For save one, we have a corner into a 3/4 diamond: that's it. While the individual pieces of this jump were fun to pull off, it very much feels like a 'do this to actually start playing the game'.
For save two we have an extra cramped ledge-grab (which, while it looks menacing, didn't feel that bad) into a sort of double corner. Not very inspired but still interesting on a conceptual level for the first part.
Save three is a diamond into a 4.5/required bhop. It's probably the least creative save and I kind of hate it.
Save four is a t-boned diamond followed by an m-jump. Again, nothing special going on at all, though it does feel somewhat satisfying to pull off, considering how easy it is relative to the rest of the screen.
Save five could have been my favorite if the savepoint hitbox/mask was properly configured. As is, you can't save unless you're aiming at the save, and you also can't save on the very last pixel of the ledge, which means every time you die you'll be required to do the setup before attempting the jump (which is a sort of buffed steak into a 32px ledge). The game has the one-frame tap fix which makes the setup much less painful, but it's still a bit tedious to do every time. The jump itself is pretty fun.
Save six is two baby corners into a... well okay, here we have a jump that's familiar but that I can't name exactly. You're required to stagger/stutter your forward press off the ledge, then hold forward and full jump as soon as possible. It's quite simple but still felt satisfying to execute.
Save seven is yet ANOTHER ledge grab, by now emphasizing what is probably my least favorite part of any goner game. My problem with ledge grabs is that you can include them at theoretically any point in a jump to increase its difficulty exponentially, and once you start following that formula theoretically every single jump you make can start and end with a 32px ledge grab. Playing on controller, my dpad doesn't seem to suffer extensively anywhere else quite as much as 32px ledges, and so when I run into them so frequently it gives me a mild pause. After the ledge grab? Nerfed plane into what is basically a half diamond.
Save eight is a ceiling double diamond. But, oh, wait—right after there's an air save, and below that, a line of conveyor blocks. If you don't react to the save or the conveyor, you can 'make the jump' but still die. That happened a few times.
Save nine is conveyor diamonds into a weird corner thing. The corner thing is kind of simple, still kind of cool, but in the context of the conveyor, is mostly just luck.
Save ten is a jump I know has a name, but I'm not sure what it is: a half invert, maybe? The point is that it's easier with cancels, but cancels aren't required. This is probably my favorite jump in the game, which is a bit sad, in my view.
The last save is a hold left two-block diagonal setup into a corner + uplane. Because the warp is in the uplane you're not actually 'doing' the uplane so much as 'getting inside it'... why do both of those sound highly suggestive? Needle, spikes, penetration... ew.
If you complete the game on it's default 'Xoner' mode, you unlock the hint for goner mode. I played the game again after this unlock because I wanted to see if I had missed something—it turns out, not so much. I do think the game plays better with the default goner tileset tho.
All in all, looking back at each save itemized like this, it seems pretty clear the problem I had with this game is lack of creativity. Even if some of the jumps felt fun or technical to pull off, they were all so rote and ultimately reduced to their named equivalents that pulling them off wasn't rewarding in retrospect. Consider "I did the wacky third save of [goner game x]", as opposed to "I did a ceiling double diamond". To me, the former is much more interesting just because it is composed of unique pieces. But maybe that's not the case for everyone.
A very by the numbers entry in the genre that has a little creative juice in terms of presentation but not much in terms of level design.
Time: ~11min
Deaths: 449
Tagged as: Needle
Goner_Game
[1] Like
Rating: 4.0 40
Difficulty: 50 50
Jul 18, 2022
phgQED
For: I wanna be the immortal butterfly
For: I wanna be the immortal butterfly
A hyper-traditional butterfly needle game which heavily explores the tropes of the genre without contributing much new of its own. For those of you new to butterfly needle likes (as I am/was), here are some of the tenets. Check as many as possible if you can.
- Screen layout is as follows: 1 single jump screen, 2 full size screens but with heavy usage of empty space, 3 single jump screens, clear
- 'inverted shurikens' (where the points of each spike touch the base of the next)
- shiny space-themed background
- default-ish tileset with a lean towards blue
- player must fall into each level from the top left
- 8px stacked platform chain that boosts you instantly, usually through some fruit
- intense vine usage, especially vines on kill blocks
- a line or more of kill blocks integrated into the level/jumps
- heavy fruit usage
- jumps lean towards invert flavors for single jumps and more traditional usage for larger screens
- jumps tend to push the limits of technical possibility and/or require specific align usage/knowledge
- jumps tend to squeeze the maximum out of all possible elements (eg. if you see a vine you will almost certainly have to save your jump, if you see a platform you will almost certainly have to leave with your double jump intact, etc.)
The more of these your game has, the closer it is to being a 'needle butterfly like', whatever that ultimately means.
There are certain elements which are harder to pin down, like aesthetic choices and the exactitude of jumps which is difficult to describe. One of those is the 'maximum out of all possible elements', which ties into jump intuition: there is a way of looking at a jump in a butterfly game in which you will almost instantly realize what the creator intends you to do, and exactly how painful it intends to be. These can be simple things like the proximity of a platform to a spike in a boost segment, or how tight the vine usage has to be in terms of directional inputs. In any case, there is a level of communication inherent to this genre—which, conversely, is almost entirely abandoned for the single jump screens, in a way that feels mostly rewarding. Usually because of the nature of these single jumps you'll be expected to cancel somewhere, but there might be more intricate movements or patterns of movement required, and the sensation of breaking up a hard grind screen or save with a single focused grind is really refreshing, and one of my favorite things about the genre and its tropes.
As for this game in particular, there is not much being done here that you won't see in the list, and even most of the more interesting jumps are based on the inverted shurikens interacting. In particular, some of the jump utilization and orchestration feels 'rote'... there's a segment where you're meant to scale a series of vines while holding your double jump, and the jump at the very top which requires your double jump is just a 3/4 diamond. Nothing fancy, no angles or learning or precision going on besides your normal 3f and stutter or 2f hold right or whatever it is you normally do for that type of jump. So the player can, yes, read instantly that they are required to save their double jump until the top of the climb, but they're not then doing anything interesting with it once they get there: it feels like just filling out the boxes to a math equation, and while potentially satisfying conceptually, was not that rewarding to execute.
The music is a Touhou song from (I think?) Imperishable Night, which does a decent job of evoking feelings of spacey mysticism. This game seems like a sort of decent introduction to butterfly concepts for someone who's never encountered the genre, but most of those concepts are executed so straightforwardly, it seems like the game might only be fascinating from the perspective of digesting its tropes and then moving on.
Overall not sure if I had fun or would recommend, but it definitely is a very butterfly-ish butterfly game.
Time: ~13min
Deaths: 1079
- Screen layout is as follows: 1 single jump screen, 2 full size screens but with heavy usage of empty space, 3 single jump screens, clear
- 'inverted shurikens' (where the points of each spike touch the base of the next)
- shiny space-themed background
- default-ish tileset with a lean towards blue
- player must fall into each level from the top left
- 8px stacked platform chain that boosts you instantly, usually through some fruit
- intense vine usage, especially vines on kill blocks
- a line or more of kill blocks integrated into the level/jumps
- heavy fruit usage
- jumps lean towards invert flavors for single jumps and more traditional usage for larger screens
- jumps tend to push the limits of technical possibility and/or require specific align usage/knowledge
- jumps tend to squeeze the maximum out of all possible elements (eg. if you see a vine you will almost certainly have to save your jump, if you see a platform you will almost certainly have to leave with your double jump intact, etc.)
The more of these your game has, the closer it is to being a 'needle butterfly like', whatever that ultimately means.
There are certain elements which are harder to pin down, like aesthetic choices and the exactitude of jumps which is difficult to describe. One of those is the 'maximum out of all possible elements', which ties into jump intuition: there is a way of looking at a jump in a butterfly game in which you will almost instantly realize what the creator intends you to do, and exactly how painful it intends to be. These can be simple things like the proximity of a platform to a spike in a boost segment, or how tight the vine usage has to be in terms of directional inputs. In any case, there is a level of communication inherent to this genre—which, conversely, is almost entirely abandoned for the single jump screens, in a way that feels mostly rewarding. Usually because of the nature of these single jumps you'll be expected to cancel somewhere, but there might be more intricate movements or patterns of movement required, and the sensation of breaking up a hard grind screen or save with a single focused grind is really refreshing, and one of my favorite things about the genre and its tropes.
As for this game in particular, there is not much being done here that you won't see in the list, and even most of the more interesting jumps are based on the inverted shurikens interacting. In particular, some of the jump utilization and orchestration feels 'rote'... there's a segment where you're meant to scale a series of vines while holding your double jump, and the jump at the very top which requires your double jump is just a 3/4 diamond. Nothing fancy, no angles or learning or precision going on besides your normal 3f and stutter or 2f hold right or whatever it is you normally do for that type of jump. So the player can, yes, read instantly that they are required to save their double jump until the top of the climb, but they're not then doing anything interesting with it once they get there: it feels like just filling out the boxes to a math equation, and while potentially satisfying conceptually, was not that rewarding to execute.
The music is a Touhou song from (I think?) Imperishable Night, which does a decent job of evoking feelings of spacey mysticism. This game seems like a sort of decent introduction to butterfly concepts for someone who's never encountered the genre, but most of those concepts are executed so straightforwardly, it seems like the game might only be fascinating from the perspective of digesting its tropes and then moving on.
Overall not sure if I had fun or would recommend, but it definitely is a very butterfly-ish butterfly game.
Time: ~13min
Deaths: 1079
Tagged as: Needle
NeedleButterfly-like
[0] Likes
Rating: 5.0 50
Difficulty: 55 55
Jul 17, 2022
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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