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by Drug_Solo
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by Xplayerlol
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by Xplayerlol
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by Taprus
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by Xplayerlol
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by Cortex
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by Cortex
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by Cortex
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by Xplayerlol
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by ElCochran90
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by Drug_Solo
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by Drug_Solo
86 Reviews:
sonicdv
Somewhat enjoyable game that gets ruined by the final boss
[6] Likes
Rating: 7.5 75
Difficulty: 80 80
Nov 13, 2015
cLOUDDEAD
Crimson can be a hard game to appreciate in today's fangame scene. the engine is old and buggy, it has restarting music, it came from an era where several traps in nearly every save was commonplace and accepted, it has mandatory secrets that aren't obscure per say, but definitely not something you'll find blindly. reading all that its probably confusing to see the high rating I've given the game.
Before you go into crimson you have to accept that its not going to be a polished fangame with crazy cool gimmicks and smooth needle design. You have to accept that the design is hostile and unforgiving. you have to accept you are directly challenging an awful cursed world that is out to get you at every turn and will play dirty.
Lets talk about the structure of the game. you start in the (now) iconic crimson elevator room, with a pretty easy to find secret below. While i still think some of the secrets are bs to find blind, I appreciate starting the game with a very easy to find secret to clue you in on their existence. this area is pretty standard guyrock adventure needle with traps with a handful of jumps that are fairly cool for its time. there's nothing too hard in this area and once you clear you are taken to the hub to begin the meat of the game.
for a quick side note, anyone who knows me knows Yume Nikki is my favorite game of all time, and having an obsessive level of knowledge about that game I can immediately point out several parts where I feel crimson is inspired by it. First off, the title screen music and the music used in the crimson hell area (more on that later) are from yume nikki. The title screen music being a piano arrange of Yume Nikki's title screen music and the music in crimson hell being taking from the red hell maze in yume nikki. The design of the hub (and maybe to a tiny degree, the design of the game itself) feels directly inspired by yume nikki. In yume nikki you explore a vast surreal dreamworld, starting inside a hub with 12 doors, and you have to explore to find small connections or secrets within large vast maps. In this context the secrets and the hub start to make more sense. While Crimson is a hard platformer first and foremost, its pretty clear Carnival was inspired by yume nikki and wanted to adapt some of its qualities to fangames. And given the era it was made in, it makes sense that it turned out like this as opposed to something more experimental or open world.
Back to the game structure:
There are 8 warps in the hub that lead to new areas, along with a warp back to the short beginning area in case you missed the secret. To the right of the hub is a trophy room of sorts, displaying the secrets you've collected, and given the size of where they are shown you can get an idea of how many you have left.
The first area (going by roughly the order I went through them in since you are free to tackle them in any order) is a water area with guyrock tiles. probably one of the weaker areas just by virtue of being entirely underwater, especially with nekoron water (which delays inputs by 1 frame when inside of them and 1 frame jumps become full jumps) this area is fairly easy and the traps are more on the funny side than on the gameplay enhancing side. the two hard parts here are the secret and the save right after. the secret involves looping around a large water room 3 times, with traps changing every loop and includes a water double diamond in the center of the room. the consistency required here can be frustrating in combination with the sheer number of traps in this singular save. the save right after the secret involves doing an upwards plane but its fairly high off the ground so you can't use any setup from the ground so it feels very inconsistent. other than that this area mostly revolves around timed sections or cycle needle underwater. visually this area is quite plain but the music and the use of a water background instead of just plain blue water tiles give it a touch of atmosphere.
The second area is the black and white area. The secret is right here at the start and has a handful of annoying traps but the bigger issue is the fairly tight jump near the center of the screen you have to do twice. the rest of the area is fairly easy and the traps are fairly generic flying spikes and fake blocks but they do add some decent variety to the needle and sometimes involve interesting pathing. another fairly mediocre area unfortunately. the visuals are standard black and white visuals but the spike formations are occasionally visually interesting and the music feels a bit more intense than the area really deserves.
the third area using guy castle tiles but the background is a simple gradient edit of the blue night background and this combination works surprisingly well. the secret here is at the start of the area yet again and consists of a 6 screen long save with only a small number of traps. the real standout with this secret is that you must backtrack all 6 screens after getting the secret making this the longest single save in the game. despite how intimidating that sounds, the needle is fairly easy and I honestly enjoyed this secret quite a bit. its just hard enough to keep you on your toes when you get really far in but is never hard enough to feel bullshit when you die. the rest of the area is very trap filled but these traps serve to make the gameplay fairly interesting and in general is a fun area. probably one of the better areas in the game.
next comes the area with the mother 3 music. visually its fairly similar to the last area but gameplay wise is more interesting. you have a small mini-avoidance that you have to do before accessing the secret, which has probably the funniest and most ridiculous trap in the entire game. the secret involves some very tight cycle needle that ends with a spike wall chasing you. once you grab the secret you'll quickly realize there's no way to escape the spike wall closing in on you. so what are you even meant to do? if you happen to die after activating the spike wall without grabbing the secret and don't reset immediately, you'll notice the spike wall will knock the secret item out of the way and off the screen. what you are intended to do is activate the spike wall then instantly backtrack as fast as you can to go just below the secret item, and catch it as the spike wall knocks it down. It's such a ridiculous sequence of events that involves the item functioning entirely different than any other item in the game and is so much harder than all the other secrets its honestly hilarious. Its so unbelievably cruel and difficult that it really hammers the point of how hostile this crimson world is.
Back to the stage. This stages mostly consists of a few-room-long chase sequence and then a large crushing ceiling of spikes you have to narrowly avoid. probably the most memorable hub area from the game and a serious highlight of the experience.
so far we've gone through hub worlds in a linear sequence of just going up the left side bottom-to-top, but I deviated from that pattern for the right side of the hub. The next area I visited was the Forest area. this area is mostly pretty easy trigger needle with a couple rough saves here and there. the visuals are quite basic guyrock tiles with colored backgrounds to give a sense of height and the music is just zelda music so its not memorable in terms of atmosphere. The entrance to the secret is pretty messed up however. If you thought the random passages hidden inside walls you'd never think to jump at were bad, then this secret entrance is utterly insane. One of the later screens in the stage consists of around 3 saves of trap/trigger heavy platforming with lots of fun and interesting movement. Near the end of the screen on the last save, however, there's a trap that has a block from another part of the screen fly over to block you off and trap you and you have to race out of the section you are in to not get stuck. the entrance of the secret requires you to trigger that trap, get out, then backtrack through the entire screen and if you died at all since the start of the screen (which you will because that's how traps work) that means all the traps are still there and you have to figure out how to backtrack through them, usually involving really creative or precise maneuvers to bait them out. once you make it to the start of the screen you can enter the secret. The secret consists of doing the same screen twice, but the second time its buffed and turns crimson red with a fairly hard diagonal at the very end of the secret. pretty hard but nothing crazy.
the next area is usually called the "touhou area" since visually its just guyrock tiles with a cloudy sky background with touhou music playing. this area holds up VERY well given the age of the game. the platforming here is really good and the traps genuinely add a lot of cool gameplay to the needle here. the secret here is pretty simple to get into, just go down a screen in the room where the downwards exit is only accessible by doing a corner. the secret here is pretty infamous for having you do a drop gate like 3 times on a fairly long needle save but I personally found it to not be too difficult. despite being my favorite area gameplay wise I don't actually have too much so say about this area.
with 2 areas left, we go to the moving spikes area. This area is surprisingly easy despite how intimidating it looks. the secret here is pretty obscure to find, on the second screen there's a trigger that causes a spike to slowly move up and you are supposed to know that it was a spike next to where you spawn in (despite the speed of the spike and how quickly it shows up on that screen after the trigger means its physically impossible to be the same spike, but whatever). the secret here involves easy platforming while dodging some moving objects and is honestly the easiest secret in the game; I first tried it completely blind. the rest of the area is pretty fun.
the final area of the hub is the gravity stage. I highly recommend doing this stage last because even the normal stage is hard here. unlike most gravity flippers, the flippers here rotate the entire screen. so don't worry too much if you are uncomfortable with controlling upside down kid. the platforming here is creative and honestly feels fairly modern at times. the secret here probably makes the least sense of out of any of them. You go halfway through the first save of the final screen, then backtrack to the screen you were on before. magically you are now in the secret instead of the screen you were just on. whatever. the secret is pretty hard here but given the difficulty of the stage itself here it doesn't feel harder than the stage like the rest of the secrets.
With all the Keys collected from beating the stages, you can now fight the vampire bat. This boss is the first time you see carnival's.... interesting drawn art style. The bosses Carnival draws are simple unshaded ms paint circles with accessories and uncanny chibi-esque faces. despite their simplicity, the characters Carnival draws just feel very... off. Why are these silly drawings so difficult to beat? why are they always stuck in a weird expression between pain and excitement? It's hard to accurately put into words the feelings these simple scribbles give me when playing Carnival's games. The Bat boss here is pretty infamous, actually. the only way to damage it is to shoot these blocks with numbers on them that count down and then explode. You basically have to hope that these bosses happen to count down to zero and explode on top of the boss and not just in some random corner. the boss itself was quite easy in my experience (it took me 5 tries blind), but im not going to downplay the sheer hatred of this boss from everyone else. I admit its poorly designed, but I'm thankful to have not struggled with it. As you hit the boss, it slowly becomes more cut up and bloody until its split in half and destroyed. After you kill him you get your rainbow leek bow back in the form of the final "secret" item. (oh yeah forgot to mention, he steals your bow for some reason). No longer wearing the bow, and with all the secrets collected, you can go to the trophy room of the hub and and enter the final warp.
this semi-final area is a medley of screen from older carnival games. I'll be 100% honest here. these screens fucking suck. they're hard, long, and have ridiculous traps and you will die here more than anywhere else in the game most likely. I recommend watching a video to see the traps ahead of time. its not like you found the secrets legit anyways. besides, the game cheats you and fucks you over all the time, no shame in fighting back.
once you are done with the short medley section, you meet the regular version of the kid in a hellish room, and he gives you a rainbow key to unlock the gate to hell before being brutalized by a cherry. ouch.
You are now in the crimson hell. pure evil needle with a few ridiculous sequences. I very much enjoyed this area and its hard enough to be engaging without being bullshit like the medley. Interesting sidenote: if you made the mistake of trying this game on very hard mode, you have to complete this entire area (except the final save) in one go. that includes the plane jump on the first screen. that includes the awful platform ride with the gate sticking just a mere 4px above the platform. that involves the section you have to loop through 3 times due to a trap on the final jump. that involves part where you land on a block with a spike that's moved exactly 1 px so you can land on that 1 fucking pixel. that involves the portion with spikes that swap position every second or so and involves a few fairly precise timed maneuvers to safely navigate. that involves the ridiculous transition between a vertical platform to a horizontal one but this time you are like 2 minutes into your attempt and don't have the benefit of being guaranteed a good cycle like you would on medium.
I don't recommend playing hard because of this area, but it almost feels fitting for this area to be so unfair and evil on very hard. You're in the Hellish abyss of a world that already hates you, why would it be fair?
Once you complete the final screen you are faced off with the crimson gods. My favorite boss out of any fangame boss. probably my favorite boss out of any video game. You are in a room with platforms spawning on the side and moving across the screen, and 4 differently colored gods tormenting you. Their twisted unrecognizable expressions taunt you. are they playing with you? are you their prey? do they enjoy killing you over and over so cruelly? why does blue crimson god have permanent ahegao face while sweating?? did carnival know its impossible to survive after killing green and he requires you to kill him last?
The 4 gods all have seperate HP as you would expect, and each shot of damage has serious consequences for the rest of the fight. Let's start with the Red Crimson God. He shoots fast aimed cherries at you as long as he is alive and he WILL shoot you from below just before you land on a platform with an unreactable cherry. You NEED to keep track of how long its been since he last shot if you don't want to get instagibbed by him. I recommend killing him first. Unfortunately, the Gods all have lasting curses for damaging and killing them. as you damage Red he will spawn PERMANENT bouncing cherries, so killing him is really just trading the fast aimed shots for bouncing cherries. You will despise Red by the time you clear this boss.
The Yellow Crimson God shoots out a ring of cherries on being shot, and when shot under about half hp, his cherries start curving, which means they are also permanent. the only way to make this manageable is to only shoot yellow from the same position under half hp so all the curving cherries follow the same predictable path. it's very tempting to kill yellow second. there's no curse for killing him and his curving bullets don't seem too bad to deal with, but we'll get to that later.
The Blue Crimson god spawns cherries from the corners that are aimed at the center when shot. first its just 1 cherry at a time, and eventually becomes 4 cherries, making a sort of X shape. Blue seems like the easiest to deal with, so its also tempting to kill blue early, but there's one MAJOR issue. At about 2/3rds HP, Blue will replace your platforms in the center of the screen with patches of Water 2 (which means no double jump, and no standing still). this puts you seriously at the mercy of the state of your screen and which curses you are dealing with. This is the reason I eventually switched to dealing with yellow as late as possible, since the curving walls of cherries can completely block you off from any possible way to survive when you are barely staying afloat in water rather than platforms. Killing blue brings no curse, but the water curse is what brings this fight to its high difficulty.
lastly, I'll mention the Green Crimson God. His attack is similar to Big Kid from lovetrap, where shooting him spawns horizontal and vertical cherries, starting at 1 horizontal, and ending with 2 horizontal and 2 vertical once he's around half hp. Green's Curse on death is the worst. He spawns a giant skull that chases you around constantly, and this skull is impossible to dodge. If you kill Green, you have seconds to live, just flat out. You HAVE to kill green last.
So with all these curses and consequences, there's a lot of ways to tackle the boss and depending on your skillset you may find different orders to do this boss. For me, the bouncing cherries were evil and were the main source of difficulty throughout the fight but the fast aimed shots were too much to handle so I chose to kill red first every time. I initially killed yellow next, but later decided to bring him to only half hp instead since the water makes his attacks much harder to deal with for extended periods. I was horrible with the water, so I brought green to 1 hp before activating the water.
The exact order I did this boss was this:
Kill red, and do moderate damage to blue green and yellow when red isn't in the position to be shot.
get blue and yellow close to their threshold for their next phase.
get green down to 1 hp. his attacks are RNG dependent so I take this very slowly.
next push blue into the water curse and kill him.
with just 1 hp on green, you only have to deal with yellow now. Since you've saved yellow for this late you spend very little time actually dealing with his curving rings.
after yellow is dead, get the final shot on green and fall into the lava pit to clear.
This is not a short boss. It only took me around 500 deaths to clear but so many attempts died several minutes into the fight so its a very grueling experience. The catharsis of finally overcoming this boss is unreal, though. Maybe more skilled fangame players don't really feel much from this boss, but I cannot explain how much I loved this boss and the feeling of clearing was amazing.
Crimson is definitely more than just the sum of it's parts, and I think it's an experience worth giving a shot, even with all the ways it can be hard to appreciate in today's era of fangames. Before I got particularly far into the game, I felt the game was only okay, but every time I was asked about it I couldn't help but describe an appreciation for it despite being so unpolished and so poorly designed by conventional standards. It really feels like a cohesive experience and I will probably remember Crimson far longer than I'll remember all the well designed but forgettable needle games I've played. There's an undeniable spirit to this game that few fangames can claim to have.
If you haven't already tried it, I can only ask that you give Crimson a chance. It deserves it.
And if nothing I said convinced you to give it a try or maybe a second chance, at least consider that I just spent over 3600 words telling you about how this game makes me feel when I can usually barely say more than an unfunny one-liner when reviewing a game.
[5] Likes
Before you go into crimson you have to accept that its not going to be a polished fangame with crazy cool gimmicks and smooth needle design. You have to accept that the design is hostile and unforgiving. you have to accept you are directly challenging an awful cursed world that is out to get you at every turn and will play dirty.
Lets talk about the structure of the game. you start in the (now) iconic crimson elevator room, with a pretty easy to find secret below. While i still think some of the secrets are bs to find blind, I appreciate starting the game with a very easy to find secret to clue you in on their existence. this area is pretty standard guyrock adventure needle with traps with a handful of jumps that are fairly cool for its time. there's nothing too hard in this area and once you clear you are taken to the hub to begin the meat of the game.
for a quick side note, anyone who knows me knows Yume Nikki is my favorite game of all time, and having an obsessive level of knowledge about that game I can immediately point out several parts where I feel crimson is inspired by it. First off, the title screen music and the music used in the crimson hell area (more on that later) are from yume nikki. The title screen music being a piano arrange of Yume Nikki's title screen music and the music in crimson hell being taking from the red hell maze in yume nikki. The design of the hub (and maybe to a tiny degree, the design of the game itself) feels directly inspired by yume nikki. In yume nikki you explore a vast surreal dreamworld, starting inside a hub with 12 doors, and you have to explore to find small connections or secrets within large vast maps. In this context the secrets and the hub start to make more sense. While Crimson is a hard platformer first and foremost, its pretty clear Carnival was inspired by yume nikki and wanted to adapt some of its qualities to fangames. And given the era it was made in, it makes sense that it turned out like this as opposed to something more experimental or open world.
Back to the game structure:
There are 8 warps in the hub that lead to new areas, along with a warp back to the short beginning area in case you missed the secret. To the right of the hub is a trophy room of sorts, displaying the secrets you've collected, and given the size of where they are shown you can get an idea of how many you have left.
The first area (going by roughly the order I went through them in since you are free to tackle them in any order) is a water area with guyrock tiles. probably one of the weaker areas just by virtue of being entirely underwater, especially with nekoron water (which delays inputs by 1 frame when inside of them and 1 frame jumps become full jumps) this area is fairly easy and the traps are more on the funny side than on the gameplay enhancing side. the two hard parts here are the secret and the save right after. the secret involves looping around a large water room 3 times, with traps changing every loop and includes a water double diamond in the center of the room. the consistency required here can be frustrating in combination with the sheer number of traps in this singular save. the save right after the secret involves doing an upwards plane but its fairly high off the ground so you can't use any setup from the ground so it feels very inconsistent. other than that this area mostly revolves around timed sections or cycle needle underwater. visually this area is quite plain but the music and the use of a water background instead of just plain blue water tiles give it a touch of atmosphere.
The second area is the black and white area. The secret is right here at the start and has a handful of annoying traps but the bigger issue is the fairly tight jump near the center of the screen you have to do twice. the rest of the area is fairly easy and the traps are fairly generic flying spikes and fake blocks but they do add some decent variety to the needle and sometimes involve interesting pathing. another fairly mediocre area unfortunately. the visuals are standard black and white visuals but the spike formations are occasionally visually interesting and the music feels a bit more intense than the area really deserves.
the third area using guy castle tiles but the background is a simple gradient edit of the blue night background and this combination works surprisingly well. the secret here is at the start of the area yet again and consists of a 6 screen long save with only a small number of traps. the real standout with this secret is that you must backtrack all 6 screens after getting the secret making this the longest single save in the game. despite how intimidating that sounds, the needle is fairly easy and I honestly enjoyed this secret quite a bit. its just hard enough to keep you on your toes when you get really far in but is never hard enough to feel bullshit when you die. the rest of the area is very trap filled but these traps serve to make the gameplay fairly interesting and in general is a fun area. probably one of the better areas in the game.
next comes the area with the mother 3 music. visually its fairly similar to the last area but gameplay wise is more interesting. you have a small mini-avoidance that you have to do before accessing the secret, which has probably the funniest and most ridiculous trap in the entire game. the secret involves some very tight cycle needle that ends with a spike wall chasing you. once you grab the secret you'll quickly realize there's no way to escape the spike wall closing in on you. so what are you even meant to do? if you happen to die after activating the spike wall without grabbing the secret and don't reset immediately, you'll notice the spike wall will knock the secret item out of the way and off the screen. what you are intended to do is activate the spike wall then instantly backtrack as fast as you can to go just below the secret item, and catch it as the spike wall knocks it down. It's such a ridiculous sequence of events that involves the item functioning entirely different than any other item in the game and is so much harder than all the other secrets its honestly hilarious. Its so unbelievably cruel and difficult that it really hammers the point of how hostile this crimson world is.
Back to the stage. This stages mostly consists of a few-room-long chase sequence and then a large crushing ceiling of spikes you have to narrowly avoid. probably the most memorable hub area from the game and a serious highlight of the experience.
so far we've gone through hub worlds in a linear sequence of just going up the left side bottom-to-top, but I deviated from that pattern for the right side of the hub. The next area I visited was the Forest area. this area is mostly pretty easy trigger needle with a couple rough saves here and there. the visuals are quite basic guyrock tiles with colored backgrounds to give a sense of height and the music is just zelda music so its not memorable in terms of atmosphere. The entrance to the secret is pretty messed up however. If you thought the random passages hidden inside walls you'd never think to jump at were bad, then this secret entrance is utterly insane. One of the later screens in the stage consists of around 3 saves of trap/trigger heavy platforming with lots of fun and interesting movement. Near the end of the screen on the last save, however, there's a trap that has a block from another part of the screen fly over to block you off and trap you and you have to race out of the section you are in to not get stuck. the entrance of the secret requires you to trigger that trap, get out, then backtrack through the entire screen and if you died at all since the start of the screen (which you will because that's how traps work) that means all the traps are still there and you have to figure out how to backtrack through them, usually involving really creative or precise maneuvers to bait them out. once you make it to the start of the screen you can enter the secret. The secret consists of doing the same screen twice, but the second time its buffed and turns crimson red with a fairly hard diagonal at the very end of the secret. pretty hard but nothing crazy.
the next area is usually called the "touhou area" since visually its just guyrock tiles with a cloudy sky background with touhou music playing. this area holds up VERY well given the age of the game. the platforming here is really good and the traps genuinely add a lot of cool gameplay to the needle here. the secret here is pretty simple to get into, just go down a screen in the room where the downwards exit is only accessible by doing a corner. the secret here is pretty infamous for having you do a drop gate like 3 times on a fairly long needle save but I personally found it to not be too difficult. despite being my favorite area gameplay wise I don't actually have too much so say about this area.
with 2 areas left, we go to the moving spikes area. This area is surprisingly easy despite how intimidating it looks. the secret here is pretty obscure to find, on the second screen there's a trigger that causes a spike to slowly move up and you are supposed to know that it was a spike next to where you spawn in (despite the speed of the spike and how quickly it shows up on that screen after the trigger means its physically impossible to be the same spike, but whatever). the secret here involves easy platforming while dodging some moving objects and is honestly the easiest secret in the game; I first tried it completely blind. the rest of the area is pretty fun.
the final area of the hub is the gravity stage. I highly recommend doing this stage last because even the normal stage is hard here. unlike most gravity flippers, the flippers here rotate the entire screen. so don't worry too much if you are uncomfortable with controlling upside down kid. the platforming here is creative and honestly feels fairly modern at times. the secret here probably makes the least sense of out of any of them. You go halfway through the first save of the final screen, then backtrack to the screen you were on before. magically you are now in the secret instead of the screen you were just on. whatever. the secret is pretty hard here but given the difficulty of the stage itself here it doesn't feel harder than the stage like the rest of the secrets.
With all the Keys collected from beating the stages, you can now fight the vampire bat. This boss is the first time you see carnival's.... interesting drawn art style. The bosses Carnival draws are simple unshaded ms paint circles with accessories and uncanny chibi-esque faces. despite their simplicity, the characters Carnival draws just feel very... off. Why are these silly drawings so difficult to beat? why are they always stuck in a weird expression between pain and excitement? It's hard to accurately put into words the feelings these simple scribbles give me when playing Carnival's games. The Bat boss here is pretty infamous, actually. the only way to damage it is to shoot these blocks with numbers on them that count down and then explode. You basically have to hope that these bosses happen to count down to zero and explode on top of the boss and not just in some random corner. the boss itself was quite easy in my experience (it took me 5 tries blind), but im not going to downplay the sheer hatred of this boss from everyone else. I admit its poorly designed, but I'm thankful to have not struggled with it. As you hit the boss, it slowly becomes more cut up and bloody until its split in half and destroyed. After you kill him you get your rainbow leek bow back in the form of the final "secret" item. (oh yeah forgot to mention, he steals your bow for some reason). No longer wearing the bow, and with all the secrets collected, you can go to the trophy room of the hub and and enter the final warp.
this semi-final area is a medley of screen from older carnival games. I'll be 100% honest here. these screens fucking suck. they're hard, long, and have ridiculous traps and you will die here more than anywhere else in the game most likely. I recommend watching a video to see the traps ahead of time. its not like you found the secrets legit anyways. besides, the game cheats you and fucks you over all the time, no shame in fighting back.
once you are done with the short medley section, you meet the regular version of the kid in a hellish room, and he gives you a rainbow key to unlock the gate to hell before being brutalized by a cherry. ouch.
You are now in the crimson hell. pure evil needle with a few ridiculous sequences. I very much enjoyed this area and its hard enough to be engaging without being bullshit like the medley. Interesting sidenote: if you made the mistake of trying this game on very hard mode, you have to complete this entire area (except the final save) in one go. that includes the plane jump on the first screen. that includes the awful platform ride with the gate sticking just a mere 4px above the platform. that involves the section you have to loop through 3 times due to a trap on the final jump. that involves part where you land on a block with a spike that's moved exactly 1 px so you can land on that 1 fucking pixel. that involves the portion with spikes that swap position every second or so and involves a few fairly precise timed maneuvers to safely navigate. that involves the ridiculous transition between a vertical platform to a horizontal one but this time you are like 2 minutes into your attempt and don't have the benefit of being guaranteed a good cycle like you would on medium.
I don't recommend playing hard because of this area, but it almost feels fitting for this area to be so unfair and evil on very hard. You're in the Hellish abyss of a world that already hates you, why would it be fair?
Once you complete the final screen you are faced off with the crimson gods. My favorite boss out of any fangame boss. probably my favorite boss out of any video game. You are in a room with platforms spawning on the side and moving across the screen, and 4 differently colored gods tormenting you. Their twisted unrecognizable expressions taunt you. are they playing with you? are you their prey? do they enjoy killing you over and over so cruelly? why does blue crimson god have permanent ahegao face while sweating?? did carnival know its impossible to survive after killing green and he requires you to kill him last?
The 4 gods all have seperate HP as you would expect, and each shot of damage has serious consequences for the rest of the fight. Let's start with the Red Crimson God. He shoots fast aimed cherries at you as long as he is alive and he WILL shoot you from below just before you land on a platform with an unreactable cherry. You NEED to keep track of how long its been since he last shot if you don't want to get instagibbed by him. I recommend killing him first. Unfortunately, the Gods all have lasting curses for damaging and killing them. as you damage Red he will spawn PERMANENT bouncing cherries, so killing him is really just trading the fast aimed shots for bouncing cherries. You will despise Red by the time you clear this boss.
The Yellow Crimson God shoots out a ring of cherries on being shot, and when shot under about half hp, his cherries start curving, which means they are also permanent. the only way to make this manageable is to only shoot yellow from the same position under half hp so all the curving cherries follow the same predictable path. it's very tempting to kill yellow second. there's no curse for killing him and his curving bullets don't seem too bad to deal with, but we'll get to that later.
The Blue Crimson god spawns cherries from the corners that are aimed at the center when shot. first its just 1 cherry at a time, and eventually becomes 4 cherries, making a sort of X shape. Blue seems like the easiest to deal with, so its also tempting to kill blue early, but there's one MAJOR issue. At about 2/3rds HP, Blue will replace your platforms in the center of the screen with patches of Water 2 (which means no double jump, and no standing still). this puts you seriously at the mercy of the state of your screen and which curses you are dealing with. This is the reason I eventually switched to dealing with yellow as late as possible, since the curving walls of cherries can completely block you off from any possible way to survive when you are barely staying afloat in water rather than platforms. Killing blue brings no curse, but the water curse is what brings this fight to its high difficulty.
lastly, I'll mention the Green Crimson God. His attack is similar to Big Kid from lovetrap, where shooting him spawns horizontal and vertical cherries, starting at 1 horizontal, and ending with 2 horizontal and 2 vertical once he's around half hp. Green's Curse on death is the worst. He spawns a giant skull that chases you around constantly, and this skull is impossible to dodge. If you kill Green, you have seconds to live, just flat out. You HAVE to kill green last.
So with all these curses and consequences, there's a lot of ways to tackle the boss and depending on your skillset you may find different orders to do this boss. For me, the bouncing cherries were evil and were the main source of difficulty throughout the fight but the fast aimed shots were too much to handle so I chose to kill red first every time. I initially killed yellow next, but later decided to bring him to only half hp instead since the water makes his attacks much harder to deal with for extended periods. I was horrible with the water, so I brought green to 1 hp before activating the water.
The exact order I did this boss was this:
Kill red, and do moderate damage to blue green and yellow when red isn't in the position to be shot.
get blue and yellow close to their threshold for their next phase.
get green down to 1 hp. his attacks are RNG dependent so I take this very slowly.
next push blue into the water curse and kill him.
with just 1 hp on green, you only have to deal with yellow now. Since you've saved yellow for this late you spend very little time actually dealing with his curving rings.
after yellow is dead, get the final shot on green and fall into the lava pit to clear.
This is not a short boss. It only took me around 500 deaths to clear but so many attempts died several minutes into the fight so its a very grueling experience. The catharsis of finally overcoming this boss is unreal, though. Maybe more skilled fangame players don't really feel much from this boss, but I cannot explain how much I loved this boss and the feeling of clearing was amazing.
Crimson is definitely more than just the sum of it's parts, and I think it's an experience worth giving a shot, even with all the ways it can be hard to appreciate in today's era of fangames. Before I got particularly far into the game, I felt the game was only okay, but every time I was asked about it I couldn't help but describe an appreciation for it despite being so unpolished and so poorly designed by conventional standards. It really feels like a cohesive experience and I will probably remember Crimson far longer than I'll remember all the well designed but forgettable needle games I've played. There's an undeniable spirit to this game that few fangames can claim to have.
If you haven't already tried it, I can only ask that you give Crimson a chance. It deserves it.
And if nothing I said convinced you to give it a try or maybe a second chance, at least consider that I just spent over 3600 words telling you about how this game makes me feel when I can usually barely say more than an unfunny one-liner when reviewing a game.
Rating: 9.3 93
Difficulty: 75 75
Mar 28, 2021
Raganoxer
This fangame has a special spot in my heart. Back when i was 13 or 14 and didn't have a tolerance for fangames, i gave up on 5/8 of the stages. I came back age 18 and finished it, i collected the secret items and killed The Four Gods. This was the very first fangame i EVER played where i honestly though "i'd never be able to beat this." It's amazing how we as players continuously go and try to achieve our goals.. We have a tolerance built for fangames like this.
Also i still want to believe this fangame has the most traps in any fangame ever, i mean holy fuck every screen felt like 30 traps, and that ending segment in red hell!? oh my god that was insane.
First boss is meh, 2nd boss is one infamous mother fucker. If you don't have patience you wont beat this boss.
[5] Likes
Also i still want to believe this fangame has the most traps in any fangame ever, i mean holy fuck every screen felt like 30 traps, and that ending segment in red hell!? oh my god that was insane.
First boss is meh, 2nd boss is one infamous mother fucker. If you don't have patience you wont beat this boss.
Rating: 9.0 90
Difficulty: 80 80
Sep 10, 2015
CanusAntonius
Crimson is a game that gives me a lot of mixed thoughts, I enjoy parts of it and absolutely despise others. It's still an interesting game worth playing at some point, though I wouldn't say it's top-of-the-line at all anymore.
Some of the things I do like involve the main stages, some of the secrets, as well as the final boss. The parts I didn't like involved having to find the secrets which are awfully hidden generally, the bat boss which is just genuinely atrocious, and all of the platforming in the medley/crimson stage since it was highly unenjoyable. I think if you're going to play this game it would be best to have a guide or video on where the secrets are, and would also recommend the same for the final boss if you find it frustrating to learn.
Overall, I've both enjoyed and hated this game. I don't regret playing it but I'm happy it's over. I'd probably recommend it at this point, but who knows if that changes over time.
[4] Likes
Some of the things I do like involve the main stages, some of the secrets, as well as the final boss. The parts I didn't like involved having to find the secrets which are awfully hidden generally, the bat boss which is just genuinely atrocious, and all of the platforming in the medley/crimson stage since it was highly unenjoyable. I think if you're going to play this game it would be best to have a guide or video on where the secrets are, and would also recommend the same for the final boss if you find it frustrating to learn.
Overall, I've both enjoyed and hated this game. I don't regret playing it but I'm happy it's over. I'd probably recommend it at this point, but who knows if that changes over time.
Rating: 7.0 70
Difficulty: 78 78
Jan 5, 2022
DerpyHoovesIWBTG
When I first started playing this game I managed to get really far, then kinda stopped. Then I had the urge to stop playing because I thought this wasn't one of Carnival's best games, and now I finally decided to finish it.
It's a really fun experience. You need to find the 8 keys for the first boss and 8 secrets for the final boss. It's really tough, especially some of the secrets which require you to backtrack quite a bit. Saves are also uncommon if you play on Hard or higher (I played through Medium, Hard is too much for me.) especially with certain sections you need to do in order to get to the secret with less saves. Towards the end, the game also pays homage to several of Carnival's older games, like Picture. I really liked both bosses. The first boss relies on luck, patience and timing. You need to shoot these blocks which explode after 5 seconds but you also need to aim these at the boss. Depending on how they move, this can either be really easy or a chore. Towards the end of the boss you especially need to be lucky and hope that one of the blocks don't come right in your face. Now the final boss is really fun. Definitely one of the highlights of this game. You have these 4 demon creatures which come in Red, Yellow, Blue and Green. Each have their own ability which activates when the boss gets hit or dies. For example, Green spawns his giant skull that it has been wearing the whole time. However, the skull is homing, so it keeps chasing you. It's incredibly easy to die that way, so you need to kill him last. You need to dodge a lot and hope that you won't get hit. It's RNG is less worse than the first boss you've already beaten, in my opinion. Once they are all dead you fall into a pit of lava and the game is over. How long did this boss take me? 5 minutes.
This and Justice are probably my two favorite games of Carnival, excluding collabs. It's definitely worth a try, even after all these years.
[4] Likes
It's a really fun experience. You need to find the 8 keys for the first boss and 8 secrets for the final boss. It's really tough, especially some of the secrets which require you to backtrack quite a bit. Saves are also uncommon if you play on Hard or higher (I played through Medium, Hard is too much for me.) especially with certain sections you need to do in order to get to the secret with less saves. Towards the end, the game also pays homage to several of Carnival's older games, like Picture. I really liked both bosses. The first boss relies on luck, patience and timing. You need to shoot these blocks which explode after 5 seconds but you also need to aim these at the boss. Depending on how they move, this can either be really easy or a chore. Towards the end of the boss you especially need to be lucky and hope that one of the blocks don't come right in your face. Now the final boss is really fun. Definitely one of the highlights of this game. You have these 4 demon creatures which come in Red, Yellow, Blue and Green. Each have their own ability which activates when the boss gets hit or dies. For example, Green spawns his giant skull that it has been wearing the whole time. However, the skull is homing, so it keeps chasing you. It's incredibly easy to die that way, so you need to kill him last. You need to dodge a lot and hope that you won't get hit. It's RNG is less worse than the first boss you've already beaten, in my opinion. Once they are all dead you fall into a pit of lava and the game is over. How long did this boss take me? 5 minutes.
This and Justice are probably my two favorite games of Carnival, excluding collabs. It's definitely worth a try, even after all these years.
Rating: 9.3 93
Difficulty: 71 71
Jan 17, 2018