Delicious FruitCrimson Needle 2.5
Creators: Kale, Thenadertwo, Anuj071, kadykunde, egg, Patrickgh3, Thenewgeezer, Zero-G, Gwiz609
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by NightShark115
42 Reviews:
lamron
The largest thing in fangame history
TOP 1
[3] Likes
TOP 1
Rating: 8.9 89
Difficulty: 94 94
Jul 29, 2024
cousinoer5
So Crimson Needle 2.5 eh? I remember way back when I tried CN1 and 2 and didn't get too far in them. A couple years ago CN3 spurred me on with its clever gimmicks and it's huge open map on floor 31 and I ended up completing it against all odds. After doing that, I knew I had to jump right into this game on release and not watch a single moment of anyone else playing it. I could feel something special was in this game, and boy I was right!
(big spoilers within the rest of this review, I highly encourage anyone able to play this game to do so as blind as possible, it is peak as they say nowadays)
You first boot up the game, you see a little cutscene, and then you're off, starting in a very familiar room. This is the game you expect when you boot up CN2.5. Classic 100 floors of ever more intense needle, with some smatterings of gimmicks. Nice looking tilesets, bumping music, the works. Not having played CN2, I appreciated looking at old vids of CN2 and comparing the floors, looks like some rough edges got smoothed off, some floors were swapped around, and some floors changed entirely. The aesthetics were changed a lot too. I can't really write too many words about this part of the game, it was solid. I will say 85-87 is my favorite tileset gameplay wise (save for the first save of 87), and 88-90 had my favorite track of the 100 floors. It was a fun trick putting OG CN2 floor 100 as floor 99 in this game (I'm just glad there was a save on screen 3, in exchange there's also a completely unique 4th screen). With that you know this game's floor 100 is going to be unique and boy was it! The graphics and unique fog of war and warping boundries between sections look so good! After a little bit of time in here you can definitely guess what the scale of the save is, each tileset is represented here, and each one has one or more jumps in it, so there's a lot to get through here. The one boon you get is The Holy Cross which you get halfway through, it's an extra life that will put you back at the beginning of a section if you die. The music is a lot more introspective than the awesome buckethead shredding that accompanied CN3's 100, it fits well with the vibe.
Floor 100 was a rough grind for me, 14 hours long. Definitely not as long as CN3's 60 hours, but somehow more frustrating for me due to mindset issues. At this point I knew this game was more than meets the eye, and I knew this was the only challenge between me and the next chapter. I was mostly annoyed with my lack of consistency, even at the end of the grind it felt like a "good run" if I got just halfway in, there weren't any sheer walls like there were in CN3's 100, but there's just so many decently difficult jumps you're bound to get wrecked by something or other. But after all that I managed to beat it. It took about 80 hours total for this chapter (with a couple dips into the next chapter)
So what's next? Well after doing 100 floors, you've seen maybe the tip of the iceberg. You now get an item that lets you go back to previous floors. Why would you want to do that? Well it turns out each of the 33 tilesets before floor 100 have a very well hidden secret, that when performed unlocks a unique guest stage. I was looking forward to puzzling all of these out, but was informed that a lot of these were brutal for just one pair of eyes, and there was a lot of community effort to solve these, and I can see why having done them now, lots of real big brain stuff, and very minute details you have to notice. I'm talking stuff on the level of one spike in the corner of a room animates in a different way until you fail the condition for the secret, which you must then glean by figuring out why it stops animating in that way. I'm proud of solving a few of em on my own at least. The stages you unlock from these secrets are very diverse and interesting, some veer way off from standard fangame mechanics, and some present exciting twists to the platforming. I won't review all of them here, but I'll call out some choice ones.
First off, of course I gotta give it up for Cherry Treehouse, who put an entire ninja adventure game inside of this game, and it was amazing. Solid mechanics, great progression of rooms, insane boss fights, amazing graphics. I actually did this secret first before I was done with needle, I was alerted to its presence by someone who knows what I love in video games and knew this would be my jam, and it was. This was the moment I realized this game is special, and it helped inspire me to push through the tough moments throughout the 100 floors. Next up is Patrick, who made a fun speedrun sort of deal, you have 16 unique tools, and using each one you must clear 16 floors from CN2.5 within a time limit. Chatran really hit it out of the park with Echus Chasma, a very fun secret focused around very unique key and lock gimmicks. Kale himself made a guest stage, is that even legal? Probably, it's a really fun one based around Snake mechanics. kady made a stage that spoke to me as a Celeste lover, all about bunny hopping to gain speed and make it over wide chasms. LAWatson made a cool minigame where you have to shoot cherries to cause chain reaction explosions to get enough points to win, I somehow did this first try! Wolfie hits us with some fun tower climbing shenanigans with some cool gimmicks along the way. EchoMask treats us to some very flow based and satisfying platforming. There's a lot of other good ones in here I didn't mention so don't think if your name isn't here I didn't like it, you all really cooked with these stages, and it's such a cool concept just letting 32 different people loose to make whatever they see fit for a secret stage for your game.
So how do you cap off a section of the game with a bunch of guest stages? Well, with a devas fight of course! There's 2 phases to it, the first one I loved a lot! It was fun strategizing and experimenting and learning all about the various mechanics and interactions at play to find the way I wanted to tackle this fight. Executing the plan afterwards wasn't too bad at all, a very enjoyable experience. Phase 2 annoyed me sadly, it's a more linear style of boss fight where you fight each deva 1 on 1 in a set order and too many chokes at the end eroded my patience. It is very well made though, and if you have the mindset for it you'll love it. Overall though, really cool stuff. Both phases combined took 11 hours. The ending was really nice too, I liked the song, and I'm glad both credits sequences so far have shown me time/death stats.
So that's it right, GG? Haha wrong! You get an item that lets you warp to any guest stage, it pulls up a menu with 33 names, but technically there's only 32 guest stages because the chapel is its own thing... John 10:9? "I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture.". Select that option and off you go, welcome to chapter 3, this is a doozy! After a small intro, you find yourself in a very familiar place if you played CN3, floor 100! With a different buckethead track too boot. Thankfully you'll find a couple saves within this time, and there's an opening at the end of purple? Keep going along this path, and you'll find The Moment. That's right, a warp statue appears in front of you, and back in green room of CN3 100. You go back and see 3 lasers leading you down new paths that opened up. Welcome to the floor 31 experience, hard mode!
This part of the game is absolutely bonkers, I don't even know how I can encapsulate it into a review like this. I'll just give a broad overview of the setup here: On the 3 different paths off 100, there's many branches and some dead ends you'll run into until you've done a certain thing on another path. The platforming content at this point is incredibly varied, you don't know what you're going to get next, and that is an exciting feeling. Very often you find a gimmick that's very unique and it's used for just a couple saves then you're off to a completely new thing. That's the essence of this chapter, you never settle into a comfortable groove for the most part, by time you're getting used to the challenge in front of you, the next challenge flips the script. It's a blessing and a curse, because sometimes I'm like "oh man this gimmick is so cool you could make a whole game around this" and it's gone in 2 screens. By that same token, if there's a gimmick you're not vibing with, you can take solace that the next switch up is likely right around the corner.
I'll list some notable areas for me personally: The tower coming out of the sea hub with the shoot walls that give you your jump and later lock your y position for a moment is my favorite. The way the mechanic works and keeps building with new twists was amazing, and thankfully it was a rather chunky section comparatively, I thoroughly enjoyed that area. Close behind is the area with the purple zones that accelerate you upward, I like that sort of gimmick and the level design works perfectly with it. Within these paths lie some screens that I call "expert remixes" of past CN3 screens. Of those, 97's remix was really fun for me, I liked the original screen, and this built upon it in a cool way. 91 Expert Remix was really fun too. The area where your double jump is replaced with a horizontal dash and a high jump is an amazing area, very Celeste-pilled, I loved the gimmick and the twists on it that are introduced later on. The save right after it really appealed to me too, apple rings like this always make me think of the Distorted Travesty games, as that's an infamous obstacle type in those games, so seeing stuff like that here tickled my fancy. The area where you can only rejump in air had some creative setups and a funny ending that I somehow sight read. The fields that make you blink in a certain direction after a couple seconds in them were a really creative gimmick and I loved most of the platforming revolving around them.
All that said, these areas are just a small sample of things you'll find in this giant labyrinth. I'd run out of characters if I were to list all of the unique gimmicks that you'll find here. It truly tests every aspect of platforming ability and then some.
So how does this chapter conclude? Once you get the 3 ghosts, you can open the church and come face to face with The Goliath, a huge towering save with many challenging and interesting jumps. Long endurance saves are my weakness, but just like EchoMask's stage, the flow is immaculate, and that really helps smooth over the grind, it got pretty consistent too, only a couple pain spots and even those fell away once I properly found a strategy. I loved it
Doing this opens up the ceiling over The Ankh, the thing that started this whole journey. After a story sequence, you're at the final save of the game, and boy is it a doozy. The screens in this save contain wild combos of gimmicks you've seen thus far, with familiar but still different jump setups. There's 9 screens in all, and if this was in a linear order, it'd be a mean save due to how learny each screen is. Instead, in a genius move, they randomized the order of the screens after the first intro screen, this means you can slowly build up your skill on each screen as it comes up until eventually you become good enough to complete each screen, then you have to grind the consistency to make sure you can do whatever screen comes up last with the nerves that will follow. It's brilliant! The music in this area is suitably chaotic, never resolving to one melody for longer than a minute, a true encapsulation of this chapter as a whole, an amazing capstone to an amazing journey. The surprise final screen that waits for you after you complete the first 9 screens tilted me with how much I died to it, but in the end it only took 7.5 hours, a little over half of what floor 100 did.
The ending sequence is brilliant, that's all I say about that. There's a big chain of secrets in chapter 3 that unlock an extra part of the ending but that requires redoing a bunch of platforming I've already done and at this point I've had my fill. There's also New Game+ which adds some more stuff for truly hardcore players, Celeste style golden berries for each tileset of the main 100 floors, a unique challenge for each guest stage, and a buffed version of floor 100 that looks absolutely bonkers.
With 290 hours of game time and 129009 deaths, I've been absolutely obsessed with this game since it released, and for good reason, it's awesome! I don't think we'll see another fangame on this scale for a long time. Kale and everyone else involved in this gigantic project should be very proud of what they've made.
[2] Likes
(big spoilers within the rest of this review, I highly encourage anyone able to play this game to do so as blind as possible, it is peak as they say nowadays)
You first boot up the game, you see a little cutscene, and then you're off, starting in a very familiar room. This is the game you expect when you boot up CN2.5. Classic 100 floors of ever more intense needle, with some smatterings of gimmicks. Nice looking tilesets, bumping music, the works. Not having played CN2, I appreciated looking at old vids of CN2 and comparing the floors, looks like some rough edges got smoothed off, some floors were swapped around, and some floors changed entirely. The aesthetics were changed a lot too. I can't really write too many words about this part of the game, it was solid. I will say 85-87 is my favorite tileset gameplay wise (save for the first save of 87), and 88-90 had my favorite track of the 100 floors. It was a fun trick putting OG CN2 floor 100 as floor 99 in this game (I'm just glad there was a save on screen 3, in exchange there's also a completely unique 4th screen). With that you know this game's floor 100 is going to be unique and boy was it! The graphics and unique fog of war and warping boundries between sections look so good! After a little bit of time in here you can definitely guess what the scale of the save is, each tileset is represented here, and each one has one or more jumps in it, so there's a lot to get through here. The one boon you get is The Holy Cross which you get halfway through, it's an extra life that will put you back at the beginning of a section if you die. The music is a lot more introspective than the awesome buckethead shredding that accompanied CN3's 100, it fits well with the vibe.
Floor 100 was a rough grind for me, 14 hours long. Definitely not as long as CN3's 60 hours, but somehow more frustrating for me due to mindset issues. At this point I knew this game was more than meets the eye, and I knew this was the only challenge between me and the next chapter. I was mostly annoyed with my lack of consistency, even at the end of the grind it felt like a "good run" if I got just halfway in, there weren't any sheer walls like there were in CN3's 100, but there's just so many decently difficult jumps you're bound to get wrecked by something or other. But after all that I managed to beat it. It took about 80 hours total for this chapter (with a couple dips into the next chapter)
So what's next? Well after doing 100 floors, you've seen maybe the tip of the iceberg. You now get an item that lets you go back to previous floors. Why would you want to do that? Well it turns out each of the 33 tilesets before floor 100 have a very well hidden secret, that when performed unlocks a unique guest stage. I was looking forward to puzzling all of these out, but was informed that a lot of these were brutal for just one pair of eyes, and there was a lot of community effort to solve these, and I can see why having done them now, lots of real big brain stuff, and very minute details you have to notice. I'm talking stuff on the level of one spike in the corner of a room animates in a different way until you fail the condition for the secret, which you must then glean by figuring out why it stops animating in that way. I'm proud of solving a few of em on my own at least. The stages you unlock from these secrets are very diverse and interesting, some veer way off from standard fangame mechanics, and some present exciting twists to the platforming. I won't review all of them here, but I'll call out some choice ones.
First off, of course I gotta give it up for Cherry Treehouse, who put an entire ninja adventure game inside of this game, and it was amazing. Solid mechanics, great progression of rooms, insane boss fights, amazing graphics. I actually did this secret first before I was done with needle, I was alerted to its presence by someone who knows what I love in video games and knew this would be my jam, and it was. This was the moment I realized this game is special, and it helped inspire me to push through the tough moments throughout the 100 floors. Next up is Patrick, who made a fun speedrun sort of deal, you have 16 unique tools, and using each one you must clear 16 floors from CN2.5 within a time limit. Chatran really hit it out of the park with Echus Chasma, a very fun secret focused around very unique key and lock gimmicks. Kale himself made a guest stage, is that even legal? Probably, it's a really fun one based around Snake mechanics. kady made a stage that spoke to me as a Celeste lover, all about bunny hopping to gain speed and make it over wide chasms. LAWatson made a cool minigame where you have to shoot cherries to cause chain reaction explosions to get enough points to win, I somehow did this first try! Wolfie hits us with some fun tower climbing shenanigans with some cool gimmicks along the way. EchoMask treats us to some very flow based and satisfying platforming. There's a lot of other good ones in here I didn't mention so don't think if your name isn't here I didn't like it, you all really cooked with these stages, and it's such a cool concept just letting 32 different people loose to make whatever they see fit for a secret stage for your game.
So how do you cap off a section of the game with a bunch of guest stages? Well, with a devas fight of course! There's 2 phases to it, the first one I loved a lot! It was fun strategizing and experimenting and learning all about the various mechanics and interactions at play to find the way I wanted to tackle this fight. Executing the plan afterwards wasn't too bad at all, a very enjoyable experience. Phase 2 annoyed me sadly, it's a more linear style of boss fight where you fight each deva 1 on 1 in a set order and too many chokes at the end eroded my patience. It is very well made though, and if you have the mindset for it you'll love it. Overall though, really cool stuff. Both phases combined took 11 hours. The ending was really nice too, I liked the song, and I'm glad both credits sequences so far have shown me time/death stats.
So that's it right, GG? Haha wrong! You get an item that lets you warp to any guest stage, it pulls up a menu with 33 names, but technically there's only 32 guest stages because the chapel is its own thing... John 10:9? "I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture.". Select that option and off you go, welcome to chapter 3, this is a doozy! After a small intro, you find yourself in a very familiar place if you played CN3, floor 100! With a different buckethead track too boot. Thankfully you'll find a couple saves within this time, and there's an opening at the end of purple? Keep going along this path, and you'll find The Moment. That's right, a warp statue appears in front of you, and back in green room of CN3 100. You go back and see 3 lasers leading you down new paths that opened up. Welcome to the floor 31 experience, hard mode!
This part of the game is absolutely bonkers, I don't even know how I can encapsulate it into a review like this. I'll just give a broad overview of the setup here: On the 3 different paths off 100, there's many branches and some dead ends you'll run into until you've done a certain thing on another path. The platforming content at this point is incredibly varied, you don't know what you're going to get next, and that is an exciting feeling. Very often you find a gimmick that's very unique and it's used for just a couple saves then you're off to a completely new thing. That's the essence of this chapter, you never settle into a comfortable groove for the most part, by time you're getting used to the challenge in front of you, the next challenge flips the script. It's a blessing and a curse, because sometimes I'm like "oh man this gimmick is so cool you could make a whole game around this" and it's gone in 2 screens. By that same token, if there's a gimmick you're not vibing with, you can take solace that the next switch up is likely right around the corner.
I'll list some notable areas for me personally: The tower coming out of the sea hub with the shoot walls that give you your jump and later lock your y position for a moment is my favorite. The way the mechanic works and keeps building with new twists was amazing, and thankfully it was a rather chunky section comparatively, I thoroughly enjoyed that area. Close behind is the area with the purple zones that accelerate you upward, I like that sort of gimmick and the level design works perfectly with it. Within these paths lie some screens that I call "expert remixes" of past CN3 screens. Of those, 97's remix was really fun for me, I liked the original screen, and this built upon it in a cool way. 91 Expert Remix was really fun too. The area where your double jump is replaced with a horizontal dash and a high jump is an amazing area, very Celeste-pilled, I loved the gimmick and the twists on it that are introduced later on. The save right after it really appealed to me too, apple rings like this always make me think of the Distorted Travesty games, as that's an infamous obstacle type in those games, so seeing stuff like that here tickled my fancy. The area where you can only rejump in air had some creative setups and a funny ending that I somehow sight read. The fields that make you blink in a certain direction after a couple seconds in them were a really creative gimmick and I loved most of the platforming revolving around them.
All that said, these areas are just a small sample of things you'll find in this giant labyrinth. I'd run out of characters if I were to list all of the unique gimmicks that you'll find here. It truly tests every aspect of platforming ability and then some.
So how does this chapter conclude? Once you get the 3 ghosts, you can open the church and come face to face with The Goliath, a huge towering save with many challenging and interesting jumps. Long endurance saves are my weakness, but just like EchoMask's stage, the flow is immaculate, and that really helps smooth over the grind, it got pretty consistent too, only a couple pain spots and even those fell away once I properly found a strategy. I loved it
Doing this opens up the ceiling over The Ankh, the thing that started this whole journey. After a story sequence, you're at the final save of the game, and boy is it a doozy. The screens in this save contain wild combos of gimmicks you've seen thus far, with familiar but still different jump setups. There's 9 screens in all, and if this was in a linear order, it'd be a mean save due to how learny each screen is. Instead, in a genius move, they randomized the order of the screens after the first intro screen, this means you can slowly build up your skill on each screen as it comes up until eventually you become good enough to complete each screen, then you have to grind the consistency to make sure you can do whatever screen comes up last with the nerves that will follow. It's brilliant! The music in this area is suitably chaotic, never resolving to one melody for longer than a minute, a true encapsulation of this chapter as a whole, an amazing capstone to an amazing journey. The surprise final screen that waits for you after you complete the first 9 screens tilted me with how much I died to it, but in the end it only took 7.5 hours, a little over half of what floor 100 did.
The ending sequence is brilliant, that's all I say about that. There's a big chain of secrets in chapter 3 that unlock an extra part of the ending but that requires redoing a bunch of platforming I've already done and at this point I've had my fill. There's also New Game+ which adds some more stuff for truly hardcore players, Celeste style golden berries for each tileset of the main 100 floors, a unique challenge for each guest stage, and a buffed version of floor 100 that looks absolutely bonkers.
With 290 hours of game time and 129009 deaths, I've been absolutely obsessed with this game since it released, and for good reason, it's awesome! I don't think we'll see another fangame on this scale for a long time. Kale and everyone else involved in this gigantic project should be very proud of what they've made.
Rating: 9.8 98
Difficulty: 90 90
Jan 3, 2025
Dterer
Rating based on third true ending.
This game is truly an incredible experience from start to finish and, in my opinion, the pinnacle of what fangames can be. Every single moment in this game is beautifully designed and executed despite such a large variety of what it has to offer. The amount of work and heart put into this masterpiece put in by everyone involved can be seen in every aspect of the game and is deserving of every ounce of praise given.
In a nutshell, Chapter 1 is an excellent needle game worthy of a play by anyone interested in good, high quality needle with interesting jumps and saves.
Chapter 2 elevates this to an all time incredible fangame in general with such a wide variety of aspects and areas that every fangame player can find something (if not everything) enjoyable.
Chapter 3 is where this game ascends into another plane of existence as a work of art that is so full of care and emotion put into it that it will forever live in my mind as an unforgettable experience that will unlikely be ever recreated.
[2] Likes
This game is truly an incredible experience from start to finish and, in my opinion, the pinnacle of what fangames can be. Every single moment in this game is beautifully designed and executed despite such a large variety of what it has to offer. The amount of work and heart put into this masterpiece put in by everyone involved can be seen in every aspect of the game and is deserving of every ounce of praise given.
In a nutshell, Chapter 1 is an excellent needle game worthy of a play by anyone interested in good, high quality needle with interesting jumps and saves.
Chapter 2 elevates this to an all time incredible fangame in general with such a wide variety of aspects and areas that every fangame player can find something (if not everything) enjoyable.
Chapter 3 is where this game ascends into another plane of existence as a work of art that is so full of care and emotion put into it that it will forever live in my mind as an unforgettable experience that will unlikely be ever recreated.
Rating: 10.0 100
Difficulty: 90 90
Dec 1, 2024
mushcat
Rating based on ending 2. Maybe I’ll update this after clearing ending 3.
1. The main 100 floors
This is the most needle-y part of the game. Vanilla needle has evolved for so many years and many excellent needle makers have emerged, so Kale isn’t as dominative in this field as years before. But that doesn’t mean Kale has fallen behind the era, the main 100 floors are still mostly enjoyable and can be a good representation of modern vanilla needle imo. Needle players will probably enjoy most of this chapter.
My only complaint on this chapter is the 100f. It’s a super long save and some of the jumps are really inconsistent in this context. It does have something to mitigate this problem (the holy mantle) but the problem is still there. Putting fast moving cherries and water in the latter parts of long saves (floor 85~87) is a bit questionable but I personally think it’s designed well so it’s not a problem.
2. Guest stages
There is a guest stage hidden in every 3 floors in the main 100 floors. First of all I think the entrances are mostly designed well. There isn’t any trival wall-hugging entrance. Most of the entrances requires you to observe or think carefully, and hints are sprinkled everywhere. It might be too hard for someone to collect them all without any help, but I think it’s originally designed for community collaboration. It’s really fun to watch the community working together looking for these entrances, tho I personally isn’t into this but I can see many people enjoying it.
Despite the high quality of the entrances, the guest stages themselves are a very huge mixbag that fluctuate heavily both in terms of quality and difficulty. tbf I think it’s completely normal for them to be unbalanced in difficulty. There are just too many makers so it’s impossible to balance the stages. However, this game doesn’t allow you to flee from any area after the first save. So if you accidentally entered a secret that’s initially easy but gradually grow beyond your skill level (and maybe last an eternity), then you are trapped there and deprived of the opportunity to try other secret areas. This makes the unbalanced difficulties a problem.
So, I STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT if you don’t plan to clear all secrets, you should make a save file backup or watch the spoilers on difficulty before entering any secret.
I’m too lazy to write a detailed review on every single secret, but I’ll list the difficult (not necessarily bad) areas and their genres here in case it’s needed (might be inaccurate because I rated them by myself):
75~80 areas:
f3(gimmick/rng), f36(adventure/sudoku?), f51(needle/trigger), f55(gimmick/path-finding), f60(adventure), f77(gimmick), f86(needle), f89(needle)
80+ areas:
f39(adventure), f68(gimmick), f74(gimmick/path-finding)
On the quality side, I PERSONALLY dislike brainless learny things where it forces you to die a lot to learn something instead of figuring out the solution with brain. Unfortunately, such designs are very commonly seen in many secret areas. Some areas are so confusing that you can’t even know your strat is wrong before a long grind. It’s so frustrating to know that you’ve wasted so much time into a wrong strat, especially when this is evitable if the area could have been designed better just with a minor change. Also, in some areas you may have no idea what you are supposed to do because there are many possible paths with almost no meaningful guides.
I don’t mean to represent everyone’s taste. But if you agree that these designs are bad, then you may find about 1/4 time of your grind is unenjoyable especially if your skill isn’t high enough, because areas with such designs tend to be more difficult and last longer.
Now let’s look at the good sides. Some of the makers really did a great job and made something wonderful, or even good enough to be scored high as a standalone fangame. I’ll list the excellent areas and their genres here (still rated by myself):
My favourite areas:
f8(special), f11(needle), f24(adventure/rpg?), f41(gimmick), f70(needle), f99(special/gimmick)
Another excellent areas:
f3(gimmick/rng), f14(gimmick), f30(gimmick), f32(gimmick), f61(needle), f92(gimmick/visual challenge?)
[2] Likes
1. The main 100 floors
This is the most needle-y part of the game. Vanilla needle has evolved for so many years and many excellent needle makers have emerged, so Kale isn’t as dominative in this field as years before. But that doesn’t mean Kale has fallen behind the era, the main 100 floors are still mostly enjoyable and can be a good representation of modern vanilla needle imo. Needle players will probably enjoy most of this chapter.
My only complaint on this chapter is the 100f. It’s a super long save and some of the jumps are really inconsistent in this context. It does have something to mitigate this problem (the holy mantle) but the problem is still there. Putting fast moving cherries and water in the latter parts of long saves (floor 85~87) is a bit questionable but I personally think it’s designed well so it’s not a problem.
2. Guest stages
There is a guest stage hidden in every 3 floors in the main 100 floors. First of all I think the entrances are mostly designed well. There isn’t any trival wall-hugging entrance. Most of the entrances requires you to observe or think carefully, and hints are sprinkled everywhere. It might be too hard for someone to collect them all without any help, but I think it’s originally designed for community collaboration. It’s really fun to watch the community working together looking for these entrances, tho I personally isn’t into this but I can see many people enjoying it.
Despite the high quality of the entrances, the guest stages themselves are a very huge mixbag that fluctuate heavily both in terms of quality and difficulty. tbf I think it’s completely normal for them to be unbalanced in difficulty. There are just too many makers so it’s impossible to balance the stages. However, this game doesn’t allow you to flee from any area after the first save. So if you accidentally entered a secret that’s initially easy but gradually grow beyond your skill level (and maybe last an eternity), then you are trapped there and deprived of the opportunity to try other secret areas. This makes the unbalanced difficulties a problem.
So, I STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT if you don’t plan to clear all secrets, you should make a save file backup or watch the spoilers on difficulty before entering any secret.
I’m too lazy to write a detailed review on every single secret, but I’ll list the difficult (not necessarily bad) areas and their genres here in case it’s needed (might be inaccurate because I rated them by myself):
75~80 areas:
f3(gimmick/rng), f36(adventure/sudoku?), f51(needle/trigger), f55(gimmick/path-finding), f60(adventure), f77(gimmick), f86(needle), f89(needle)
80+ areas:
f39(adventure), f68(gimmick), f74(gimmick/path-finding)
On the quality side, I PERSONALLY dislike brainless learny things where it forces you to die a lot to learn something instead of figuring out the solution with brain. Unfortunately, such designs are very commonly seen in many secret areas. Some areas are so confusing that you can’t even know your strat is wrong before a long grind. It’s so frustrating to know that you’ve wasted so much time into a wrong strat, especially when this is evitable if the area could have been designed better just with a minor change. Also, in some areas you may have no idea what you are supposed to do because there are many possible paths with almost no meaningful guides.
I don’t mean to represent everyone’s taste. But if you agree that these designs are bad, then you may find about 1/4 time of your grind is unenjoyable especially if your skill isn’t high enough, because areas with such designs tend to be more difficult and last longer.
Now let’s look at the good sides. Some of the makers really did a great job and made something wonderful, or even good enough to be scored high as a standalone fangame. I’ll list the excellent areas and their genres here (still rated by myself):
My favourite areas:
f8(special), f11(needle), f24(adventure/rpg?), f41(gimmick), f70(needle), f99(special/gimmick)
Another excellent areas:
f3(gimmick/rng), f14(gimmick), f30(gimmick), f32(gimmick), f61(needle), f92(gimmick/visual challenge?)
Rating: 8.2 82
Difficulty: 86 86
Aug 8, 2024