This game is best experienced completely blind, I'd recommend not reading spoiler tagged sections until you've completed the game. This game also contains copyrighted music, be careful when streaming it.
3/10/23: This game contains quite a few actually awful segments. There are some highlights, like the purple area with the city background or greyscale area, but the majority of this game demonstrates a complete lack of understanding with how needle works. At the time, I had absolutely zero clue what I was doing. Don't play this, it might start out promising but it's actually really unfun and not worth your time. I want to follow this up with a sequel that actually has the atmosphere I was going for + some good gameplay. But for now until that comes out, play Lap Around instead.
UPDATE 1.1: Fixed a ceiling block blocking access from completing a room.
not recommended unless you really enjoy this kind of 32px "ftfa-like" needle, and are fine with the occasional
(very minor spoiler)Reveal Spoilermulti-screen save
real spoilers below Reveal Spoilerso from what I can tell the game has multiple routes through it, and i managed to skip a few areas on the route I took, which thankfully included a stage that seems to be more "ftfa-like" needle but with oldschool ice block physics. I think i may have missed some areas entirely, since I didn't check every path, and most of the areas i found were very clearly meant to be entered from multiple areas since i often found screens that I physically couldn't backtrack through, and there was a song I heard that was not listed in the readme's ost. there's a few areas that deviate a bit from the norm, with some water3 and vines and jump refreshers and what not, but it more or less all plays like clunky precise 32px needle.
I was hoping by the fact that the game seemed very secretive, insisting you play as blind as possible, and being compiled with YYC to prevent easily decompiling it that there would be more here. I was hoping for something that would be hiding beneath the facade of a 32px needle game, hiding just out of sight of those who might give the game a cursory glance and move on without playing, but as far as I can tell there is nothing of the sort. I will commend the idea of making a needle game like that that has multiple paths to the end, rather than making a hub and forcing you to do everything like a checklist, and its fun seeing how some of the paths connect, but the experience ultimately fell flat for me.
Besides not really liking this style of needle at all anymore, the game seems a bit poorly put together at times. invisible blocks are placed over screen borders you arent meant to cross, but sometimes they arent, leaving you to fall in the infinite void without dying forever, visuals will sometimes make obscure the needle (particularly bad in the area with a sewerslvt song), blocks are randomly rendered above or below the player inconsistently, and occasionally blocks wont have collision. The visuals also strangely range from "really bad" to "alright, but also has a fancy shader". The aforementioned sewerslvt area has it the worst, its a static, noisy, bright image of a cyberpunk city with neon signs everywhere with a foreground of pure black spikes/blocks/everything, which looks pretty bad beyond making it hard to see whats happening. Some of the nicer looking areas include shaders or particles, although they dont look particularly great imo.
There is one thing I noticed which I thought was interesting, as I was finishing an area (dont remember which), I heard a the default yoyoyo item pickup sound, so I thought maybe I needed to collect a bunch of invisible items, but I never heard the sound again. I only mention this here in case someone more dedicated than I am might be able to find something further hidden in this game, although currently I doubt whether there is more to find, as even by the time I've reached the clear screen, there's been nothing else indicating that this game isn't just what it seems on the surface
before I close out this review, I do want to reiterate that I do appreciate the conceptual format of this game. I think this creator can go on to make some really incredible things, however the low production value coupled with unappealing needle design made this a real turnoff for me
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