Delicious Fruit
Download Game Screenshots
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by chrisg
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by chrisg
Creator's Comments:
YaBoiMarcAntony [Creator]
11/7/2022 Edit: https://www.mediafire.com/file/2s3wrhtchj65yyg/Nebulous_Thoughts_April%2527s_Iteration.zip/file
Hard version of the game, just play on medium to make it work. There are EXTREMELY minimal changes made to gameplay and essentially there are no changes.
Light version (if you get lag in a certain stage in the latter-half and it also removes an effect some may find irritating): https://mega.nz/file/CvhUTYbb#HuK9xY8I7b2FPlbJu4ktbwsEa-9UN_r7NcpNDWkY6G0
Hi! This is more or less a form of indulgence for me, to just talk about my game and the purpose/meaning behind everything I did. I recognize the whole idea of "show, don't tell," but personally, I've always loved hearing from makers about what their intentions were for the things they made, such as that series of CN3 videos that Kale recently released. While his was more about the design process and didn't cover too much about the emotional meaning for the most part (he generally left it all to imagination, which is quite alright by me), I'll entirely express what each stage means to me and why it is in the game. I do not want you, the reader, to go through this and then suddenly realize your opinion on the game is moot or unfair because oh no, it's a deeply personal game and it's mean to think negatively about a game that means so much to the maker! No, you may think as negatively of the game as you like because though it is a deeply personal expression of emotions and feelings to me, that does not therefore make it infallible and worthy of everyone's admiration and praise. Of course, as this is a community that is not fond of keeping negative thoughts silent, for better or for worse, I do not think that is something that really bears saying. All the same, I've said it! Furthermore, I do not want you to go into the game or come out of it (depending on when you read this) with preconceived notions, you should absolutely come to your own conclusions and beliefs about the game. You may interpret it however you like and you may believe I succeeded or failed in whatever I tried to do. I have my own interpretations and my own beliefs about the quality of my attempts at various different things.
In any case, let's get started.
For one, the title screen is not one that is supremely meaningful to me, but I am all the same attached to it. It features the song Enigma of the Absolute by Dead Can Dance, one of my favorites by them as well. This is a song that's always held a lot of mysticism and power for me, though what exactly it means to me is sort of hazy. I nonetheless thought it was a great title song because of how airy and powerful it is, as well as these opening lyrics:
"Saloman hung down her head
Laid bare her heart for the world to see.
She craved for intimacy.
Through darkened doors her aspect veiled with indecision, gazed out sea."
As for the intro, which was made entirely by Razzor, it more or less happened by chance that it came to be within this game. I had the idea for it halfway through production and immediately had to make it happen because of how attached I was to the idea. With that said, I was not personally able to make the thing myself, so I had to turn to a far more able friend, Razzor. I told him that I wanted the player to simply walk right while Keeblin' by Dinosaur Jr. played and that it would more or less be a simple lyrics video, and he totally delivered on that, bringing more personality and charm to it than I ever could have done. The way the lyrics come in is just brilliant to me, a touch brought by Razzor alone. Now, this is where the overall meaning of the game becomes sort of two-sided. In short, I originally meant for this game to be more a meditation on my father and his inevitable death, something which can be still found fresh throughout the game. On the other hand, most of the game is more a recreation of my reaction to my own mother's death. In any case, it deals strongly with grief, both of the theoretical and otherwise. At any rate, the song Keeblin' is one that is strongly connected to my father as it is one of his favorites by Dinosaur Jr., a song he discovered completely by happenstance not that long ago. As such, it's place in the game is much more about its connection to my life rather than its actual meaning, though I like what it brings to the game all the same and am myself in love with the song thanks entirely to its connection to my father.
The first stage was, as you might expect, the first stage made for the game. What I knew going in was I wanted to use the main gimmick and that I wanted to use the song So Long by Abhi the Nomad. This is a song discovered by a close friend of mine, the sister to an even closer friend of me, that she shared with me and said closer friend one day, and I happened to find myself really liking it. Regardless, it came to represent more the extremely happy time in my life when a decent chunk of my life revolved around them, though in the grand scheme of the game itself, it is a sort of calm before the storm. This is, in essence, a stage somewhat removed from the grand catastrophe and instead focuses more on my life before said catastrophe. Insofar as gameplay is concerned, I am extremely proud of what I made for the stage. It is short, but I feel I eked out a ton of high quality gameplay from a gimmick that I immediately fell in love with upon getting it to work. Visually, it is also one of my preferred stages as it has a simple and clean aesthetic somewhat in the Wonderful style (though not so similar as to be derivative, I feel) that works very well for the gameplay.
As for the second stage, it acts more as the part two rather than being wholly a second stage. In short, this is just me trying to recreate the feeling of a panic/anxiety attack, something I don't suffer from often, though I nonetheless wanted this to represent the moments in a day when I would feel a hell of a lot worse than I did before. In any case, I knew going into the stage that I wanted it to be a very sudden shift from the previous, another stylistic choice that I lifted from Wonderful's games (think of the sudden move into the water tower, for example), but otherwise I was flying blind. The song I originally chose for the area was Long Road, No Turns by Daughters, a band I am not partial to but a song I rather like. With that song in mind, I decided to use moving spikes for the area as I felt the frenetic nature of the song necessitated a lot of movement on screen, this birthing the idea for the background as well. Rather late into production, I decided to change the song to Mr. Self Destruct by Nine Inch Nails as it is a far more personal song to me, not necessarily lyrically but certainly in a musical sense. I've always adored the way the song builds up at the very end, getting so damn overwhelming and powerful that I can sometimes feel my chest getting tighter alongside it listening to the song. This represented extremely well the feeling I was trying to evoke with the stage in the first place, so it worked out especially well. I also decided to change the background a tad according to the song change, which ended up really improving the stage in my eyes as I found it sort of middle of the road, not as memorable as I originally wanted it to be. Now, however, it sticks out quite positively for me.
With the third stage, I didn't have any sort of personal meaning I wanted to express in gameplay. Instead, I just wanted to make a really fun stage to a really fun song, As Good as New by ABBA. In that way, I accidentally followed in ABBA's footsteps of foregoing personal meaning and instead focusing on the most important thing, the music (or in this case, the gameplay). All the same, this stage still represents well the sort of free, easy-going mood that I can find myself in listening to music. This stage represents me lost in music, totally distracted from all that is going on in my life. Gameplay wise, I find this to be a somewhat messy but nonetheless rather great stage with an excellent sense of verticality that I am still proud of achieving. Visually, it is one of the greatest disappointments, but I find the rather bleh nature of the visuals to be charming enough that I don't truly mind it. I asked someone to make visuals for the stage close to the end of development, but I decided against it as I wanted that sort of thing to be only done by me.
Now then, for one of the big highlights of the game for me! What I knew with this stage was that I wanted desperately to use Feather by Devin Townsend, one of my ABSOLUTE favorite songs ever (in fact, it may as well be my favorite song), and so in doing that, I knew that the gameplay was going to need to be floaty and far-reaching. As such, the idea for using low-grav and jump refreshers came to mind. The symmetry and signs, however, came in later by chance, which is to say I designed some saves and then the stage sort of grew from there. The symmetry has no overt meaning, but the signs are the most obvious things in the world, I think. While I originally intended these signs to be my father speaking to me, they now represent both my father and mother, really, both major guiding forces in my life. Because of that, I wanted the signs to guide you much like a parent would guide their own son. This was a stage I knew I wanted to make from the start, hence why I also knew I wanted to use Feather, a song heavily focused on parenthood. Eventually, I had the cheeky idea to force the player into not being able to rely on the signs and having to make their own choices, seeing as that inevitably comes in a parent's relationship with their own children. When the end comes, however, that is the grand catastrophe of the game, the death of my own mother, as well as the ever-present reality of my own father's eventual death. Overall, this is likely my favorite stage in the game as I think it came together on all fronts wondrously, whether in gameplay or in meaning or visually, it all works so well that I almost find it hard to believe I was able to make it.
Immediately after comes a stage that I lifted from an older game, one that will never see the light of day because it essentially turned into Nebulous Thoughts. It was called Memories Inmazes, a name which combines a general concept, Memories, and the name of a beloved song by a band called VOLA which very much represented what I wanted to try and do with that game. In short, I wanted to create a game that represented a haze of memories, and overall I wanted the game to be this sort of maze of emotions and feelings that the player created themselves and can't get out of. As such, the maze stage was created, that game died, and then it was brought here to Nebulous Thoughts. Now, it is a stage of deep grief, the immediate reaction to my mother's death. The song is plodding and brooding, totally overwhelming and hazy like the rest of the stage. Visually, you suck the color out of your surroundings, surroundings which aren't even that colorful in the first place, and it all blends together in a vomitous haze. This stage is about feeling lost, in short, and the end sees you falling into nothingness and becoming so totally overwhelmed that everything turns to static.
How funny that one of the biggest successes in the game would be followed up by what is probably the most filler-esque stage in the game. Truthfully, this whole game came together merely a few weeks before it released, if that. The production cycle of the game was 90% me just making stages without too much knowledge of how they were all going to come together in the end. This stage was one of the later ones made and it was originally made with the intention of using Moja Si by Idoli, a song from one of my favorite albums ever, Odbrana i Poslednji Dana (so much a favorite that I have that mess of letters memorized). Because I felt the end visuals did not support the song well/I did not think I would be capable of making gameplay that fit the song, I switched it to Sve Ove Godine made by a prog rock band called Indexi. In the end, what I tried to get with this stage emotionally was a sense of "pretty static," a stage that sounded far more pleasant than the previous, but was just a mess of sound and colors that ultimately meant nothing and just filled the brain with nonsense. Of course, the song is not ACTUALLY nonsense, it's just in a language I do not speak nor understand, and the gameplay itself is something I do to a much better degree in a later stage. As such, I find this stage has little purpose in the game other than to pad out content and help the flow of the overall game. Thanks to the difficulty of the stage in its original form, however, it ended up actually HURTING the flow. All the same, I let it stay in the game because I enjoyed the stage in its own right and didn't feel comfortable cutting out an entire stage something like a week before I would actually release the game, a game that I already worried was a bit too short. The ending was created some time after the stage was finished and is a result of a comment made by very cool in the IWC as he commented on the moving bars in the background and I felt that I would need to meet the expectation brought up by him of the bars being apart of a gimmick. I could not change the entire stage, but I could at least make a screen which delivers on those expectations. This screen I wanted to be a departure from the sort of positive and happy-go-lucky nature of the screens before, being silent except for an industrial hum and a somewhat confusing visual mess of spikes and triggers. I like the screen, but it does not completely redeem the stage for me.
California, as I've taken to calling it, is another stage that is more a part one than anything else. This and the next stage, Night Life, come from Memories Inmazes also, but they are fairly different from what they were in that game. In any case, what the stage is in this context is somewhat like the third stage with As Good As New, being more a stage focused on enjoyable gameplay. Whereas that stage was the positive end of my focusing on music, however, this is the negative end, being a representation of me sort of throwing myself into music to ignore all my issues. In the end, it does not work out for me as at the end you fall into a massive body of water and eventually drown away into the next stage. Otherwise, I find the stage to be great fun with a lot of reasonably clever design. I enjoy the gimmick utilized and I find it is one that can be used to a far greater degree than it has been. As you can see, I don't have too much to say about this stage, but I don't think of it as filler like I do the previous stage. What I do really enjoy about this stage is that while it does have that sense of running away, you end up falling right into the problems you're avoiding, or rather I do, I suppose.
Night Life, on the other hand, is another wild success for me. With that said, it is fundamentally removed from the overall meaning of the game, or at the very least its emotional meaning is focused much more on a supremely negative experience of mine from my High School years, and it is an experience shared by many high schoolers that was just like me, lovesick over someone that didn't feel the same way. In short, I was (and am) desperately in love with that closer friend of mine that I spoke of way back in the first stage, but she simply did not reciprocate those feelings, at least not in a way that was anything more than platonic. This lead to a lot of pain for me in high school that sort of came to a head with my 11th grade prom experience in which I spent the entire night feeling shitty watching her dance with someone else. That night ended up positively, but the experience was nonetheless permanently ingrained in my head as one of the most embarrassing, shameful, overall awful moments of my entire life, bar none. Thus, I created Night Life to try and recapture those feelings to some degree. This is why the design is somewhat abrasive and mean compared to the rest of the game, why I decided to use the more generic and precise jumps in tandem with longer saves as well as scummy transition deaths because while I did want an overall positive game experience, I wanted the stage to exude negativity despite featuring those colorful tiles set beautifully on the black background with that hazy fog, all set to the wondrous Run Away With Me, one of the best pop songs released in the past two decades. Whether you think I succeeded with this stage or not, what needs to be made known is that I did NOT design with the intent to create unfun saves, nor did I want to just piss the player off by putting in precise jumps for the sake of it. While I did want a reaction from the player, I made absolutely certain that the save was immensely fun to play and that it would not just end up irritating. At the end of the day, I could only make sure that was true for myself, but I could not do so for others. The stage ends with a pitched down scream from me, somewhat mimicking the static of the maze stage and more accurately being a release for me.
Fly Away, so the stage is called in-game, originally came from a now-defunct collab. All the same, I find it fits quite well into the game in basically every way it can. On the one hand, it acts as a very nice palate cleanser after what is a rather dark and tough stage, and it also adds gimmick variety as it utilizes the ever-wonderful sideways gravity! I absolutely adore my design for this stage, if I am allowed to be so bold about myself, but I have to admit the stage is emotionally redundant to some degree as it sort of rehashes the same ideas that California does, though this one more obviously captures the idea of running away seeing as the chorus is literally about flying like an eagle. Nonetheless, I am not dissatisfied with the stage being in the game because I find it helps the overall flow and is just great in the first place. ABBA is also a band my mother loved, and so being able to bring that into this game also is very nice.
Kyrie Eleison is the title of this stage, named for a moment in the song wherein that phrase is said four times over. It translates to "Lord, have mercy," though if I am being honest, I originally thought it translated to "Lord, forgive me." In either case, it fits the stage well. This is my other favorite stage alongside the Feather stage, which works out seeing as the both use two of my favorite songs ever, for similar reasons. The gameplay, visuals, meaning, EVERYTHING is just perfect for me. As for the actual meaning of the stage, it is one that can only really be evident to me as I really only give one suggestion as to what it is that I am inevitably asking God to have mercy on me for, that being with the title of the outro stage, "Murderer." Truthfully, I imagine this is a feeling that most feel after someone passes away, but for my own part I felt and do still feel to some degree strong guilt over my mother's death. Whether it's because I didn't try to make her live more healthily or because I didn't get her to go to the hospital the night before she passed, I felt as if her death was on me and that is not a feeling I would wish on ANYONE. To have lost someone you love dearly is beyond any real comprehension, but to feel responsible for that loss is like Hell. Of course, I am not actually responsible for her death, but I imagine even if her death had nothing to do with her state of health and instead occurred entirely by chance thanks to nothing at all, such as in a car crash or something, I imagine I'd feel guilt all the same because I sort of get the feeling that guilt over the loss of someone you know is a common feeling. All that is to say, this stage represents that guilt and acts sort of as a prayer to God to relieve me of it. The climb at the end can be seen sort of as a reference to the Tower of Babel, though in this case the reasons I climb to God would not be for the same reasons. In the end, I do not reach Him.
Instead, I arrive at the final stage, a stage which more or less represents an endgame headspace, one where I am all but fragmented and drifting in nothingness. The song was chosen for its personal meaning, obviously, and the gameplay itself was meant to be entirely stripped of everything but raw needle. This is meant to be a no frills journey through a mess of a stage, one that is totally nonsensical, hence the non-Euclidean design combined with the invisible blocks. The game overall utilized invisible blocks as a sort of guiding hand, hence why their largest use is in the stage with the song Feather, but here whether the blocks are a guiding hand or a twisted representation of that hand is itself not really meant to be confirmed or denied by me, mostly because I am not even entirely sure of it and I like it that way. In any case, the stage itself asks this one simple question: do you recognize me? Something I've felt about myself for a long time now since my mom died is that I've lost parts of myself become someone new, someone ravaged by grief and sadness and overall lesser, so much so that I would wonder if my mom would even really recognize me in this stage. The stage itself is rather simple, having a basic meaning and basic design, but I am also quite proud of it, as this is the best pure needle I have ever designed by far. I made it halfway through development, I'd say, and it came out of nowhere for me, being designed mostly within the span of a day or two. The final save was an addendum later down the line after I felt that what originally was the last save was a bit disappointing, so I added in what is now the last save, one that is hopefully memorable for positive and not negative reasons.
The outro used to be the intro, actually, and it was the first thing I made for Nebulous Thoughts. Overall, there is nothing different about it from then to now, but I find its recontextualization to be particularly moving. While I wrote the dialogue at the end, I actually came up with the title of the game, actually. As for its overall meaning, it essentially comments on the depressive episode I feel like I've been in for so long now. I've had moments like this before, and I've always forced myself to view them as temporary, so this is no different. All the same, I can't help but worry that this moment in time is not something that will go away easily, that it is simply a nightmare from which I am trying to awake and yet can never do so. The outro ends with a drop into the credits, a drop I originally intended as a way to force the player to take a plunge that they won't know they'll survive, but now it is a much darker ending.
The credits is simply the intro remade, though I did so not out of laziness and instead to suggest a sort of cyclical feeling to the game. The overall struggle of the game is one that I have gone through time and time again, and will do so again and again even after the game's release. What is by far the most important part of the credits, however, and also the most important part of the game for me, is its ending. This is, as I explain somewhat in the readme, a voicemail left to me by my mother, one I didn't hear until a week or two after her death. She called me on the first day of college back in August of 2019, but I never answered the call as I was busy and thanks to my phone's idiocy, I didn't even know she had left a voicemail until after she had passed in the beginning of January 2020. As for what I'm actually apologizing for, while I'm sure you can guess what, I think this is one thing I can leave private.
Overall, I am immensely proud of Nebulous Thoughts. For all its faults and missteps, it is an artistic expression the likes of which I have never accomplished before and that alone makes it infinitely important to me. Not every stage is a complete success, the overall flow of the game is messy, the meaning muddled by four different strands, but it all comes together to represent something more than the sum of its parts. As such, I think the title of the game fits perfectly even though I didn't design the game with the intention of that being the case. Every stage feels nebulous in nature, like it is a moment in time that will flitter away only to be replaced by the next. Every moment is a thought which passes through my head, some far more tortuous than others, and as such I can't see this game as anything less than an extension of myself. Whether or not this game touches you in any meaningful way, it is nonetheless a game that will forever mean the world to me.
Thank you for reading, and thank you for playing.
[2] Likes
Hard version of the game, just play on medium to make it work. There are EXTREMELY minimal changes made to gameplay and essentially there are no changes.
Light version (if you get lag in a certain stage in the latter-half and it also removes an effect some may find irritating): https://mega.nz/file/CvhUTYbb#HuK9xY8I7b2FPlbJu4ktbwsEa-9UN_r7NcpNDWkY6G0
Hi! This is more or less a form of indulgence for me, to just talk about my game and the purpose/meaning behind everything I did. I recognize the whole idea of "show, don't tell," but personally, I've always loved hearing from makers about what their intentions were for the things they made, such as that series of CN3 videos that Kale recently released. While his was more about the design process and didn't cover too much about the emotional meaning for the most part (he generally left it all to imagination, which is quite alright by me), I'll entirely express what each stage means to me and why it is in the game. I do not want you, the reader, to go through this and then suddenly realize your opinion on the game is moot or unfair because oh no, it's a deeply personal game and it's mean to think negatively about a game that means so much to the maker! No, you may think as negatively of the game as you like because though it is a deeply personal expression of emotions and feelings to me, that does not therefore make it infallible and worthy of everyone's admiration and praise. Of course, as this is a community that is not fond of keeping negative thoughts silent, for better or for worse, I do not think that is something that really bears saying. All the same, I've said it! Furthermore, I do not want you to go into the game or come out of it (depending on when you read this) with preconceived notions, you should absolutely come to your own conclusions and beliefs about the game. You may interpret it however you like and you may believe I succeeded or failed in whatever I tried to do. I have my own interpretations and my own beliefs about the quality of my attempts at various different things.
In any case, let's get started.
For one, the title screen is not one that is supremely meaningful to me, but I am all the same attached to it. It features the song Enigma of the Absolute by Dead Can Dance, one of my favorites by them as well. This is a song that's always held a lot of mysticism and power for me, though what exactly it means to me is sort of hazy. I nonetheless thought it was a great title song because of how airy and powerful it is, as well as these opening lyrics:
"Saloman hung down her head
Laid bare her heart for the world to see.
She craved for intimacy.
Through darkened doors her aspect veiled with indecision, gazed out sea."
As for the intro, which was made entirely by Razzor, it more or less happened by chance that it came to be within this game. I had the idea for it halfway through production and immediately had to make it happen because of how attached I was to the idea. With that said, I was not personally able to make the thing myself, so I had to turn to a far more able friend, Razzor. I told him that I wanted the player to simply walk right while Keeblin' by Dinosaur Jr. played and that it would more or less be a simple lyrics video, and he totally delivered on that, bringing more personality and charm to it than I ever could have done. The way the lyrics come in is just brilliant to me, a touch brought by Razzor alone. Now, this is where the overall meaning of the game becomes sort of two-sided. In short, I originally meant for this game to be more a meditation on my father and his inevitable death, something which can be still found fresh throughout the game. On the other hand, most of the game is more a recreation of my reaction to my own mother's death. In any case, it deals strongly with grief, both of the theoretical and otherwise. At any rate, the song Keeblin' is one that is strongly connected to my father as it is one of his favorites by Dinosaur Jr., a song he discovered completely by happenstance not that long ago. As such, it's place in the game is much more about its connection to my life rather than its actual meaning, though I like what it brings to the game all the same and am myself in love with the song thanks entirely to its connection to my father.
The first stage was, as you might expect, the first stage made for the game. What I knew going in was I wanted to use the main gimmick and that I wanted to use the song So Long by Abhi the Nomad. This is a song discovered by a close friend of mine, the sister to an even closer friend of me, that she shared with me and said closer friend one day, and I happened to find myself really liking it. Regardless, it came to represent more the extremely happy time in my life when a decent chunk of my life revolved around them, though in the grand scheme of the game itself, it is a sort of calm before the storm. This is, in essence, a stage somewhat removed from the grand catastrophe and instead focuses more on my life before said catastrophe. Insofar as gameplay is concerned, I am extremely proud of what I made for the stage. It is short, but I feel I eked out a ton of high quality gameplay from a gimmick that I immediately fell in love with upon getting it to work. Visually, it is also one of my preferred stages as it has a simple and clean aesthetic somewhat in the Wonderful style (though not so similar as to be derivative, I feel) that works very well for the gameplay.
As for the second stage, it acts more as the part two rather than being wholly a second stage. In short, this is just me trying to recreate the feeling of a panic/anxiety attack, something I don't suffer from often, though I nonetheless wanted this to represent the moments in a day when I would feel a hell of a lot worse than I did before. In any case, I knew going into the stage that I wanted it to be a very sudden shift from the previous, another stylistic choice that I lifted from Wonderful's games (think of the sudden move into the water tower, for example), but otherwise I was flying blind. The song I originally chose for the area was Long Road, No Turns by Daughters, a band I am not partial to but a song I rather like. With that song in mind, I decided to use moving spikes for the area as I felt the frenetic nature of the song necessitated a lot of movement on screen, this birthing the idea for the background as well. Rather late into production, I decided to change the song to Mr. Self Destruct by Nine Inch Nails as it is a far more personal song to me, not necessarily lyrically but certainly in a musical sense. I've always adored the way the song builds up at the very end, getting so damn overwhelming and powerful that I can sometimes feel my chest getting tighter alongside it listening to the song. This represented extremely well the feeling I was trying to evoke with the stage in the first place, so it worked out especially well. I also decided to change the background a tad according to the song change, which ended up really improving the stage in my eyes as I found it sort of middle of the road, not as memorable as I originally wanted it to be. Now, however, it sticks out quite positively for me.
With the third stage, I didn't have any sort of personal meaning I wanted to express in gameplay. Instead, I just wanted to make a really fun stage to a really fun song, As Good as New by ABBA. In that way, I accidentally followed in ABBA's footsteps of foregoing personal meaning and instead focusing on the most important thing, the music (or in this case, the gameplay). All the same, this stage still represents well the sort of free, easy-going mood that I can find myself in listening to music. This stage represents me lost in music, totally distracted from all that is going on in my life. Gameplay wise, I find this to be a somewhat messy but nonetheless rather great stage with an excellent sense of verticality that I am still proud of achieving. Visually, it is one of the greatest disappointments, but I find the rather bleh nature of the visuals to be charming enough that I don't truly mind it. I asked someone to make visuals for the stage close to the end of development, but I decided against it as I wanted that sort of thing to be only done by me.
Now then, for one of the big highlights of the game for me! What I knew with this stage was that I wanted desperately to use Feather by Devin Townsend, one of my ABSOLUTE favorite songs ever (in fact, it may as well be my favorite song), and so in doing that, I knew that the gameplay was going to need to be floaty and far-reaching. As such, the idea for using low-grav and jump refreshers came to mind. The symmetry and signs, however, came in later by chance, which is to say I designed some saves and then the stage sort of grew from there. The symmetry has no overt meaning, but the signs are the most obvious things in the world, I think. While I originally intended these signs to be my father speaking to me, they now represent both my father and mother, really, both major guiding forces in my life. Because of that, I wanted the signs to guide you much like a parent would guide their own son. This was a stage I knew I wanted to make from the start, hence why I also knew I wanted to use Feather, a song heavily focused on parenthood. Eventually, I had the cheeky idea to force the player into not being able to rely on the signs and having to make their own choices, seeing as that inevitably comes in a parent's relationship with their own children. When the end comes, however, that is the grand catastrophe of the game, the death of my own mother, as well as the ever-present reality of my own father's eventual death. Overall, this is likely my favorite stage in the game as I think it came together on all fronts wondrously, whether in gameplay or in meaning or visually, it all works so well that I almost find it hard to believe I was able to make it.
Immediately after comes a stage that I lifted from an older game, one that will never see the light of day because it essentially turned into Nebulous Thoughts. It was called Memories Inmazes, a name which combines a general concept, Memories, and the name of a beloved song by a band called VOLA which very much represented what I wanted to try and do with that game. In short, I wanted to create a game that represented a haze of memories, and overall I wanted the game to be this sort of maze of emotions and feelings that the player created themselves and can't get out of. As such, the maze stage was created, that game died, and then it was brought here to Nebulous Thoughts. Now, it is a stage of deep grief, the immediate reaction to my mother's death. The song is plodding and brooding, totally overwhelming and hazy like the rest of the stage. Visually, you suck the color out of your surroundings, surroundings which aren't even that colorful in the first place, and it all blends together in a vomitous haze. This stage is about feeling lost, in short, and the end sees you falling into nothingness and becoming so totally overwhelmed that everything turns to static.
How funny that one of the biggest successes in the game would be followed up by what is probably the most filler-esque stage in the game. Truthfully, this whole game came together merely a few weeks before it released, if that. The production cycle of the game was 90% me just making stages without too much knowledge of how they were all going to come together in the end. This stage was one of the later ones made and it was originally made with the intention of using Moja Si by Idoli, a song from one of my favorite albums ever, Odbrana i Poslednji Dana (so much a favorite that I have that mess of letters memorized). Because I felt the end visuals did not support the song well/I did not think I would be capable of making gameplay that fit the song, I switched it to Sve Ove Godine made by a prog rock band called Indexi. In the end, what I tried to get with this stage emotionally was a sense of "pretty static," a stage that sounded far more pleasant than the previous, but was just a mess of sound and colors that ultimately meant nothing and just filled the brain with nonsense. Of course, the song is not ACTUALLY nonsense, it's just in a language I do not speak nor understand, and the gameplay itself is something I do to a much better degree in a later stage. As such, I find this stage has little purpose in the game other than to pad out content and help the flow of the overall game. Thanks to the difficulty of the stage in its original form, however, it ended up actually HURTING the flow. All the same, I let it stay in the game because I enjoyed the stage in its own right and didn't feel comfortable cutting out an entire stage something like a week before I would actually release the game, a game that I already worried was a bit too short. The ending was created some time after the stage was finished and is a result of a comment made by very cool in the IWC as he commented on the moving bars in the background and I felt that I would need to meet the expectation brought up by him of the bars being apart of a gimmick. I could not change the entire stage, but I could at least make a screen which delivers on those expectations. This screen I wanted to be a departure from the sort of positive and happy-go-lucky nature of the screens before, being silent except for an industrial hum and a somewhat confusing visual mess of spikes and triggers. I like the screen, but it does not completely redeem the stage for me.
California, as I've taken to calling it, is another stage that is more a part one than anything else. This and the next stage, Night Life, come from Memories Inmazes also, but they are fairly different from what they were in that game. In any case, what the stage is in this context is somewhat like the third stage with As Good As New, being more a stage focused on enjoyable gameplay. Whereas that stage was the positive end of my focusing on music, however, this is the negative end, being a representation of me sort of throwing myself into music to ignore all my issues. In the end, it does not work out for me as at the end you fall into a massive body of water and eventually drown away into the next stage. Otherwise, I find the stage to be great fun with a lot of reasonably clever design. I enjoy the gimmick utilized and I find it is one that can be used to a far greater degree than it has been. As you can see, I don't have too much to say about this stage, but I don't think of it as filler like I do the previous stage. What I do really enjoy about this stage is that while it does have that sense of running away, you end up falling right into the problems you're avoiding, or rather I do, I suppose.
Night Life, on the other hand, is another wild success for me. With that said, it is fundamentally removed from the overall meaning of the game, or at the very least its emotional meaning is focused much more on a supremely negative experience of mine from my High School years, and it is an experience shared by many high schoolers that was just like me, lovesick over someone that didn't feel the same way. In short, I was (and am) desperately in love with that closer friend of mine that I spoke of way back in the first stage, but she simply did not reciprocate those feelings, at least not in a way that was anything more than platonic. This lead to a lot of pain for me in high school that sort of came to a head with my 11th grade prom experience in which I spent the entire night feeling shitty watching her dance with someone else. That night ended up positively, but the experience was nonetheless permanently ingrained in my head as one of the most embarrassing, shameful, overall awful moments of my entire life, bar none. Thus, I created Night Life to try and recapture those feelings to some degree. This is why the design is somewhat abrasive and mean compared to the rest of the game, why I decided to use the more generic and precise jumps in tandem with longer saves as well as scummy transition deaths because while I did want an overall positive game experience, I wanted the stage to exude negativity despite featuring those colorful tiles set beautifully on the black background with that hazy fog, all set to the wondrous Run Away With Me, one of the best pop songs released in the past two decades. Whether you think I succeeded with this stage or not, what needs to be made known is that I did NOT design with the intent to create unfun saves, nor did I want to just piss the player off by putting in precise jumps for the sake of it. While I did want a reaction from the player, I made absolutely certain that the save was immensely fun to play and that it would not just end up irritating. At the end of the day, I could only make sure that was true for myself, but I could not do so for others. The stage ends with a pitched down scream from me, somewhat mimicking the static of the maze stage and more accurately being a release for me.
Fly Away, so the stage is called in-game, originally came from a now-defunct collab. All the same, I find it fits quite well into the game in basically every way it can. On the one hand, it acts as a very nice palate cleanser after what is a rather dark and tough stage, and it also adds gimmick variety as it utilizes the ever-wonderful sideways gravity! I absolutely adore my design for this stage, if I am allowed to be so bold about myself, but I have to admit the stage is emotionally redundant to some degree as it sort of rehashes the same ideas that California does, though this one more obviously captures the idea of running away seeing as the chorus is literally about flying like an eagle. Nonetheless, I am not dissatisfied with the stage being in the game because I find it helps the overall flow and is just great in the first place. ABBA is also a band my mother loved, and so being able to bring that into this game also is very nice.
Kyrie Eleison is the title of this stage, named for a moment in the song wherein that phrase is said four times over. It translates to "Lord, have mercy," though if I am being honest, I originally thought it translated to "Lord, forgive me." In either case, it fits the stage well. This is my other favorite stage alongside the Feather stage, which works out seeing as the both use two of my favorite songs ever, for similar reasons. The gameplay, visuals, meaning, EVERYTHING is just perfect for me. As for the actual meaning of the stage, it is one that can only really be evident to me as I really only give one suggestion as to what it is that I am inevitably asking God to have mercy on me for, that being with the title of the outro stage, "Murderer." Truthfully, I imagine this is a feeling that most feel after someone passes away, but for my own part I felt and do still feel to some degree strong guilt over my mother's death. Whether it's because I didn't try to make her live more healthily or because I didn't get her to go to the hospital the night before she passed, I felt as if her death was on me and that is not a feeling I would wish on ANYONE. To have lost someone you love dearly is beyond any real comprehension, but to feel responsible for that loss is like Hell. Of course, I am not actually responsible for her death, but I imagine even if her death had nothing to do with her state of health and instead occurred entirely by chance thanks to nothing at all, such as in a car crash or something, I imagine I'd feel guilt all the same because I sort of get the feeling that guilt over the loss of someone you know is a common feeling. All that is to say, this stage represents that guilt and acts sort of as a prayer to God to relieve me of it. The climb at the end can be seen sort of as a reference to the Tower of Babel, though in this case the reasons I climb to God would not be for the same reasons. In the end, I do not reach Him.
Instead, I arrive at the final stage, a stage which more or less represents an endgame headspace, one where I am all but fragmented and drifting in nothingness. The song was chosen for its personal meaning, obviously, and the gameplay itself was meant to be entirely stripped of everything but raw needle. This is meant to be a no frills journey through a mess of a stage, one that is totally nonsensical, hence the non-Euclidean design combined with the invisible blocks. The game overall utilized invisible blocks as a sort of guiding hand, hence why their largest use is in the stage with the song Feather, but here whether the blocks are a guiding hand or a twisted representation of that hand is itself not really meant to be confirmed or denied by me, mostly because I am not even entirely sure of it and I like it that way. In any case, the stage itself asks this one simple question: do you recognize me? Something I've felt about myself for a long time now since my mom died is that I've lost parts of myself become someone new, someone ravaged by grief and sadness and overall lesser, so much so that I would wonder if my mom would even really recognize me in this stage. The stage itself is rather simple, having a basic meaning and basic design, but I am also quite proud of it, as this is the best pure needle I have ever designed by far. I made it halfway through development, I'd say, and it came out of nowhere for me, being designed mostly within the span of a day or two. The final save was an addendum later down the line after I felt that what originally was the last save was a bit disappointing, so I added in what is now the last save, one that is hopefully memorable for positive and not negative reasons.
The outro used to be the intro, actually, and it was the first thing I made for Nebulous Thoughts. Overall, there is nothing different about it from then to now, but I find its recontextualization to be particularly moving. While I wrote the dialogue at the end, I actually came up with the title of the game, actually. As for its overall meaning, it essentially comments on the depressive episode I feel like I've been in for so long now. I've had moments like this before, and I've always forced myself to view them as temporary, so this is no different. All the same, I can't help but worry that this moment in time is not something that will go away easily, that it is simply a nightmare from which I am trying to awake and yet can never do so. The outro ends with a drop into the credits, a drop I originally intended as a way to force the player to take a plunge that they won't know they'll survive, but now it is a much darker ending.
The credits is simply the intro remade, though I did so not out of laziness and instead to suggest a sort of cyclical feeling to the game. The overall struggle of the game is one that I have gone through time and time again, and will do so again and again even after the game's release. What is by far the most important part of the credits, however, and also the most important part of the game for me, is its ending. This is, as I explain somewhat in the readme, a voicemail left to me by my mother, one I didn't hear until a week or two after her death. She called me on the first day of college back in August of 2019, but I never answered the call as I was busy and thanks to my phone's idiocy, I didn't even know she had left a voicemail until after she had passed in the beginning of January 2020. As for what I'm actually apologizing for, while I'm sure you can guess what, I think this is one thing I can leave private.
Overall, I am immensely proud of Nebulous Thoughts. For all its faults and missteps, it is an artistic expression the likes of which I have never accomplished before and that alone makes it infinitely important to me. Not every stage is a complete success, the overall flow of the game is messy, the meaning muddled by four different strands, but it all comes together to represent something more than the sum of its parts. As such, I think the title of the game fits perfectly even though I didn't design the game with the intention of that being the case. Every stage feels nebulous in nature, like it is a moment in time that will flitter away only to be replaced by the next. Every moment is a thought which passes through my head, some far more tortuous than others, and as such I can't see this game as anything less than an extension of myself. Whether or not this game touches you in any meaningful way, it is nonetheless a game that will forever mean the world to me.
Thank you for reading, and thank you for playing.
Rating: N/A
Difficulty: N/A
Jan 6, 2022
30 Reviews:
Kilgour22
I didn't start this game with the intention of finishing it. Instead, my goal was simply to improve as player on something harder than anything I'd done before.
Yet here I am, having cleared this game, ready to review it.
What happened?
Well, this happened: https://imgur.com/a/677btNt
Now, you might be wondering why I kept track of all of this. Like I said, I came in with the expectation of improving, and I wanted a way to visualize my progress. And this ended up being effective; every save felt like a battle, to the point where I began my journey by clearing only one or two saves a day.
I'm going to give my thoughts on each stage.
Stage 1: An absolute masterpiece. The water gimmick is something I haven't seen before, and each save introduced a new quirk for me to master. Not only were the saves fun, but I could feel myself progressing through each save, getting increasingly consistent as I learned the subtle intricacies of each jump. This stage is gimmick needle done to literal perfection, and I have not even a whisper of a complaint, aside from one save being slightly too easy to feel much progress from completing it. A well deserved 10/10.
Stage 2: Probably the weakest stage overall. It's both short, being only three saves, and feels a little disjointed. The song choice kind of sucks, and like Bob, I muted it. The moving spikes gimmick is fine, and the cycles work out nicely, but I would have appreciated fewer pauses between the cycles, albeit with reduced difficulty of the individual jumps. This, I feel, would have enhanced the flow. Finally, the second gimmick—shoot refreshers—only appeared in one screen, which is a missed opportunity. I would have preferred if this gimmick were not used at all compared to such little usage, as things would have felt more cohesive for me. 5/10.
Stage 3: This stage felt very similar in quality and difficulty to stage 1 (which is a good thing!). Autojump blocks are hard to use properly, but Marc managed to integrate them successfully with platform jumps to create a fairly seamless experience. Like stage 1, one save stood out as too easy compared to the others, but the difference in difficulty was exacerbated here. 9.5/10.
Stage 4: Here we have the jump refresher stage mixed with low gravity. This platforming is incredibly fun and flowy; one stage later on has maybe more fun platforming, but make no mistake, everything here is super enjoyable to play. The low gravity makes tight jump refresher segments mash-fests no longer, which is greatly appreciated and adds to the aesthetic, alongside the symmetrical design. However, the creativity of the platforming here definitely takes a step back. It's not hard to figure out how to do each jump, even if it's not always clear where your destination is. 8/10.
Stage 5: A pure needle stage is an interesting choice. The game also gets a lot easier in this stage—probably 60–65 difficulty—which made things feel more fun, though it created a different tone to the game. The saves were still satisfying to complete, but the sense of progression I'd had from the previous stages wasn't present, replaced instead by some pretty fun pure needle. I'm a big fan of the visuals, even if they make the platforming slightly harder than it ought to be, because things stay easy enough that anyone who has reached this point in the game won't get walled here. 7.5/10.
Stage 6: Hard water needle. I absolutely love the visuals of this stage; they feel so clean to look at, and my view of the kid has such clarity that I felt like I could perform at my absolute best. As it turns out, performing at my best was necessary for this stage as it features some of the toughest platforming in the game, particularly the second-last save. This save introduces an element that becomes a more pronounced problem in some of the later stages; I'll discuss it then in more detail. But yeah, the visuals are some of the best I've seen, and I really liked the little gimmick at the end of the stage. It felt like a similar concept to stage 2's single-screen gimmick, but done a hundred times better. 8/10.
Stage 7: This is the most fun and flowy stage to play, beating out even stage 4. The triple jump blocks masquerading as platforms are incredibly fun to play around with; I enjoyed the healthy mixture of small and large jumps, as well as the freedom to pause at my discretion or forge onwards. Some of these saves are also the easiest in the game, clocking in at maybe 55–60 difficulty, but that in no way detracts from the experience here. I do wish the saves were slightly longer at this difficulty, as I feel this would have added a bit more tension, but as is it serves as a nice break after the challenge that is stage 6. 9/10.
Stage 8: This stage brings back the dark (i.e., obscuring) visuals of stage 2, except this time with water as the gimmick. The platforming also gets more precise, with manoeuvres that are tighter than ever before. However, since the saves are reasonable length, the only one that poses a significant challenge is the final one—a three-screen save with one particularly tight jump in each screen. Those jumps are, in order: a squished diagonal; an awkward two-block corner; and a full vspeed drop gate. The other jumps in each screen are easier, but still have some teeth to them. This stage is where the problem I mentioned in stage 6 blossoms fully, that being the inclusion of jumps that players have already done thousands of times, so they can't really improve much at them from the time they start the save to when they beat the save. As such, that crucial sense of progression doesn't materialize, and the player is instead just hoping for what is essentially a dice roll. The dark visuals don't help with this, but instead exacerbate the issue by making it harder to be more precise with the kid since his feet aren't visible. 6/10, though if the other saves were like the final one, it'd be 4/10.
Stage 9: Mixed emotions on this one. There's an overwhelming sense of confusion with four types of gravity at play, which I like and appreciate on a thematic level, but at the same time, I really disliked the platforming. The first three saves are fine, gradually increasing in difficulty, but the penultimate save felt designed to kill the player if one were to attempt a semblance of flow. For example, holding left to hit the next flipper would have to be followed by releasing left thanks to the spike/flipper placement. It would have been a lot more satisfying to rely less on awkward, confusing movement and instead replace that with a natural continuation. The final save felt out of place as well, though again it made sense thematically, so I'm torn. 7/10.
Stage 10: This stage contains some of the hardest platforming in the game, slightly exceeding stage 6. Despite that, I really liked what was on offer, even though it used stage 6's gimmick (water). Every time I arrived at a new screen, things looked so overwhelmingly impossible that I was rather filled with a sense of despair; but, as I started making progress and gaining consistency on the earlier, harder parts of each save, the despair was replaced by a bit of unadulterated joy, and immense relief when I beat the save. 9/10 because the plane jump at the start of the last save really sucks.
Stage 11: The final stage, with no gimmicks to be found. The stage really exists in two parts: everything before the final save, and the final save itself. The first part is fairly easy, with 65–70 difficulty platforming, again made worse by an obscuring black background. The second part, however, is a clear step above the rest of the game, and it's not even close. The final save is four screens of tough needle, with the second screen being the hardest, and constitutes just over a minute of platforming if you're playing quickly. I can absolutely see a player struggling to get to this point, only to get absolutely walled by the finale, and to that poor soul my heart goes out. I got pretty lucky—I only died to screen 4 three times—but the final save still took me nearly an hour to beat, almost double what the hardest saves took me in the rest of the game (about 5 or 6 saves took around half an hour each). There are at least two jumps I would nerf to help bridge the difficulty gap, but on the whole, if you reach this point, you're so invested that you'll have to soldier through it regardless. Still, I wouldn't say I enjoyed the final save, despite feeling a sense of catharsis upon completion. 6.5/10.
The mathematically inclined among you might notice that on average, my stage rating works out to 7.8/10, yet I gave the game a 9! What gives? The reality is that the game is more than the sum of its parts, and this nonlinearity affords me the opportunity to weigh things unequally. So, warts and all, Nebulous Thoughts clocks in at a 9/10 for telling a cohesive narrative imbibed with emotion, all of which comes out at the very end of the game in one of the most touching moments I've seen in any game because of how real and raw it is. This game, despite its flaws, offers a special experience for those willing and able to see it through to completion. It's not easy, but it's absolutely worth your time and effort if there is even the most remote chance of success—or even if you, like me, merely started on a quest to improve.
[2] Likes
Yet here I am, having cleared this game, ready to review it.
What happened?
Well, this happened: https://imgur.com/a/677btNt
Now, you might be wondering why I kept track of all of this. Like I said, I came in with the expectation of improving, and I wanted a way to visualize my progress. And this ended up being effective; every save felt like a battle, to the point where I began my journey by clearing only one or two saves a day.
I'm going to give my thoughts on each stage.
Stage 1: An absolute masterpiece. The water gimmick is something I haven't seen before, and each save introduced a new quirk for me to master. Not only were the saves fun, but I could feel myself progressing through each save, getting increasingly consistent as I learned the subtle intricacies of each jump. This stage is gimmick needle done to literal perfection, and I have not even a whisper of a complaint, aside from one save being slightly too easy to feel much progress from completing it. A well deserved 10/10.
Stage 2: Probably the weakest stage overall. It's both short, being only three saves, and feels a little disjointed. The song choice kind of sucks, and like Bob, I muted it. The moving spikes gimmick is fine, and the cycles work out nicely, but I would have appreciated fewer pauses between the cycles, albeit with reduced difficulty of the individual jumps. This, I feel, would have enhanced the flow. Finally, the second gimmick—shoot refreshers—only appeared in one screen, which is a missed opportunity. I would have preferred if this gimmick were not used at all compared to such little usage, as things would have felt more cohesive for me. 5/10.
Stage 3: This stage felt very similar in quality and difficulty to stage 1 (which is a good thing!). Autojump blocks are hard to use properly, but Marc managed to integrate them successfully with platform jumps to create a fairly seamless experience. Like stage 1, one save stood out as too easy compared to the others, but the difference in difficulty was exacerbated here. 9.5/10.
Stage 4: Here we have the jump refresher stage mixed with low gravity. This platforming is incredibly fun and flowy; one stage later on has maybe more fun platforming, but make no mistake, everything here is super enjoyable to play. The low gravity makes tight jump refresher segments mash-fests no longer, which is greatly appreciated and adds to the aesthetic, alongside the symmetrical design. However, the creativity of the platforming here definitely takes a step back. It's not hard to figure out how to do each jump, even if it's not always clear where your destination is. 8/10.
Stage 5: A pure needle stage is an interesting choice. The game also gets a lot easier in this stage—probably 60–65 difficulty—which made things feel more fun, though it created a different tone to the game. The saves were still satisfying to complete, but the sense of progression I'd had from the previous stages wasn't present, replaced instead by some pretty fun pure needle. I'm a big fan of the visuals, even if they make the platforming slightly harder than it ought to be, because things stay easy enough that anyone who has reached this point in the game won't get walled here. 7.5/10.
Stage 6: Hard water needle. I absolutely love the visuals of this stage; they feel so clean to look at, and my view of the kid has such clarity that I felt like I could perform at my absolute best. As it turns out, performing at my best was necessary for this stage as it features some of the toughest platforming in the game, particularly the second-last save. This save introduces an element that becomes a more pronounced problem in some of the later stages; I'll discuss it then in more detail. But yeah, the visuals are some of the best I've seen, and I really liked the little gimmick at the end of the stage. It felt like a similar concept to stage 2's single-screen gimmick, but done a hundred times better. 8/10.
Stage 7: This is the most fun and flowy stage to play, beating out even stage 4. The triple jump blocks masquerading as platforms are incredibly fun to play around with; I enjoyed the healthy mixture of small and large jumps, as well as the freedom to pause at my discretion or forge onwards. Some of these saves are also the easiest in the game, clocking in at maybe 55–60 difficulty, but that in no way detracts from the experience here. I do wish the saves were slightly longer at this difficulty, as I feel this would have added a bit more tension, but as is it serves as a nice break after the challenge that is stage 6. 9/10.
Stage 8: This stage brings back the dark (i.e., obscuring) visuals of stage 2, except this time with water as the gimmick. The platforming also gets more precise, with manoeuvres that are tighter than ever before. However, since the saves are reasonable length, the only one that poses a significant challenge is the final one—a three-screen save with one particularly tight jump in each screen. Those jumps are, in order: a squished diagonal; an awkward two-block corner; and a full vspeed drop gate. The other jumps in each screen are easier, but still have some teeth to them. This stage is where the problem I mentioned in stage 6 blossoms fully, that being the inclusion of jumps that players have already done thousands of times, so they can't really improve much at them from the time they start the save to when they beat the save. As such, that crucial sense of progression doesn't materialize, and the player is instead just hoping for what is essentially a dice roll. The dark visuals don't help with this, but instead exacerbate the issue by making it harder to be more precise with the kid since his feet aren't visible. 6/10, though if the other saves were like the final one, it'd be 4/10.
Stage 9: Mixed emotions on this one. There's an overwhelming sense of confusion with four types of gravity at play, which I like and appreciate on a thematic level, but at the same time, I really disliked the platforming. The first three saves are fine, gradually increasing in difficulty, but the penultimate save felt designed to kill the player if one were to attempt a semblance of flow. For example, holding left to hit the next flipper would have to be followed by releasing left thanks to the spike/flipper placement. It would have been a lot more satisfying to rely less on awkward, confusing movement and instead replace that with a natural continuation. The final save felt out of place as well, though again it made sense thematically, so I'm torn. 7/10.
Stage 10: This stage contains some of the hardest platforming in the game, slightly exceeding stage 6. Despite that, I really liked what was on offer, even though it used stage 6's gimmick (water). Every time I arrived at a new screen, things looked so overwhelmingly impossible that I was rather filled with a sense of despair; but, as I started making progress and gaining consistency on the earlier, harder parts of each save, the despair was replaced by a bit of unadulterated joy, and immense relief when I beat the save. 9/10 because the plane jump at the start of the last save really sucks.
Stage 11: The final stage, with no gimmicks to be found. The stage really exists in two parts: everything before the final save, and the final save itself. The first part is fairly easy, with 65–70 difficulty platforming, again made worse by an obscuring black background. The second part, however, is a clear step above the rest of the game, and it's not even close. The final save is four screens of tough needle, with the second screen being the hardest, and constitutes just over a minute of platforming if you're playing quickly. I can absolutely see a player struggling to get to this point, only to get absolutely walled by the finale, and to that poor soul my heart goes out. I got pretty lucky—I only died to screen 4 three times—but the final save still took me nearly an hour to beat, almost double what the hardest saves took me in the rest of the game (about 5 or 6 saves took around half an hour each). There are at least two jumps I would nerf to help bridge the difficulty gap, but on the whole, if you reach this point, you're so invested that you'll have to soldier through it regardless. Still, I wouldn't say I enjoyed the final save, despite feeling a sense of catharsis upon completion. 6.5/10.
The mathematically inclined among you might notice that on average, my stage rating works out to 7.8/10, yet I gave the game a 9! What gives? The reality is that the game is more than the sum of its parts, and this nonlinearity affords me the opportunity to weigh things unequally. So, warts and all, Nebulous Thoughts clocks in at a 9/10 for telling a cohesive narrative imbibed with emotion, all of which comes out at the very end of the game in one of the most touching moments I've seen in any game because of how real and raw it is. This game, despite its flaws, offers a special experience for those willing and able to see it through to completion. It's not easy, but it's absolutely worth your time and effort if there is even the most remote chance of success—or even if you, like me, merely started on a quest to improve.
Rating: 9.0 90
Difficulty: 82 82
May 20, 2022
Cutiefruity
Nebulous Thoughts is a needle masterpiece by YaBoiMarcAntony, and, in my opinion, the greatest fangame- nay, game, I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing. Usually when someone says this they are referring to how they find a game they played especially fun and rewarding to get through, varied in gameplay, and occasionally thought provoking, and while that's true of this game and those are some of it's greatest qualities- and would, in my eyes, be worth a 10 alone- this game has a great variety of needle that really astounded me, not just in gameplay and feel, but in emotional caliber.
I have never played a game- and this comes from a through and through morning dew enjoyer- that made me feel quite the way the last save did, and as it stands, that save is my current favorite save of all time, despite there being no gimmick, wacky idea (mostly), or anything of the sort. It must be noted that you need to be skilled to enjoy this game fully, but when you can play the needle, its sheer design and consistency is unrivaled in style and execution to me, when it comes to fangames I've personally played. Marc is exceptional at making you feel like a god, and like what you're playing is a thought, put directly into the screen, with extremely minimal blemishes, if any.
I could write a lot more, go into detail about which stages I loved and which held me captive but I overcame through effort- besides the last one- but I, quite honestly, think if you're reading this, and feel even moderately confident in your ability to get through some great needle, and have the hustle to keep at a grind occasionally, you should play this game. It's a 1 of a kind experience that I can't allow myself to spoil you, not even through a spoiler tag you would mindlessly click.
To me this game means a lot, as I'm sure it means to the creator, and to me this game is about feeling, and while I'm being unsure what it is I'm exactly feeling- I just know it's strong, meaningful, and genuine. I'm not sure how wrong or correct the interpretation is, but I'm sure Marc wouldn't slaughter me for it since it's in the readme to give the game my own meaning as a player, and he is right- it's vague, but greatly appreciable nonetheless.
I hope sincerely that you continue making games and projects, keep the motivation to push forward, and that you know your mother smiles warmly upon you from heaven for the passion you have in what you make. <3
[2] Likes
I have never played a game- and this comes from a through and through morning dew enjoyer- that made me feel quite the way the last save did, and as it stands, that save is my current favorite save of all time, despite there being no gimmick, wacky idea (mostly), or anything of the sort. It must be noted that you need to be skilled to enjoy this game fully, but when you can play the needle, its sheer design and consistency is unrivaled in style and execution to me, when it comes to fangames I've personally played. Marc is exceptional at making you feel like a god, and like what you're playing is a thought, put directly into the screen, with extremely minimal blemishes, if any.
I could write a lot more, go into detail about which stages I loved and which held me captive but I overcame through effort- besides the last one- but I, quite honestly, think if you're reading this, and feel even moderately confident in your ability to get through some great needle, and have the hustle to keep at a grind occasionally, you should play this game. It's a 1 of a kind experience that I can't allow myself to spoil you, not even through a spoiler tag you would mindlessly click.
To me this game means a lot, as I'm sure it means to the creator, and to me this game is about feeling, and while I'm being unsure what it is I'm exactly feeling- I just know it's strong, meaningful, and genuine. I'm not sure how wrong or correct the interpretation is, but I'm sure Marc wouldn't slaughter me for it since it's in the readme to give the game my own meaning as a player, and he is right- it's vague, but greatly appreciable nonetheless.
I hope sincerely that you continue making games and projects, keep the motivation to push forward, and that you know your mother smiles warmly upon you from heaven for the passion you have in what you make. <3
Rating: 10.0 100
Difficulty: 83 83
May 10, 2022
williamthewishing
I cried a lot. Very impressive work of art and needle game. The game really has its own identity and while hard everything manages to be really fun and immersive. I do wish the occasional pixel perfect jumps weren't there but I suppose there aren't too many of them and surprisingly they didn't really ruin my enjoyment of the game as a whole. Highly highly recommended game but you should be pretty skilled and have a good mindset before taking it on.
[1] Like
Rating: 10.0 100
Difficulty: 80 80
Nov 11, 2023
PlutoTheThing
It's sort of hard to pinpoint exactly what makes needle feel smooth, good, or fun, but I can with confidence say this game is all three, not to mention the atmosphere which is absolutely heightened with the very unique visuals which have a surprising amount of care and detail, and the great music which fits in with the game perfect. The needle is nothing mind-blowing, but there's still some memorable sections and I can pretty confidently say I think this game has zero bad saves. It feels great from start to finish and I really love just how creative it can be when it comes to just making jumps and movements that feel good. The stages all kind of have their own style too which helps things be fresh. The game is just really good, and I haven't even talked about the story, which is touching but I really don't feel qualified to give an opinion on it. This game is one of the easiest recommendations of my life.
[1] Like
Rating: 9.5 95
Difficulty: 72 72
Oct 6, 2023