Reviews List - Delicious Fruit

DerpyHoovesIWBTG
For: Scribble Notes

Rating based on medium mode.

Carnival's big collectathon game. The game has a very strong start, with a big emphasis on exploration and figuring out what to find in order to progress and unlock new worlds. On your way you'll find treasure chests containing gems or items which give you new mechanics to play with. The one thing what this game does that few adventure games do is the ability to travel through various worlds which you can unlock by finding enough notes throughout the game. Think of this game as a simplified Mario Galaxy meets Cave Story. This game also contains a bunch of bosses that you'll randomly encounter along the way.

While everything I've mentioned before makes this game a big contender for one of my favorite adventure games, unfortunely this was not the case for me at all. Around 3 hours in it became extremely repetitive for me. This game just becomes a tedious grind of having to beat the same setpieces in every screen opening and closing the inventory menu over and over to choose the right item of choice. You start off using your default gun and once you unlock the fire and ice guns you never go back to using the gun you used at the start of the game. I wish the maker just kept the default gun and added a quick switch button to select a different gun so you end up wasting way less time navigating the inventory multiple times per save.

It is very common to die to a spike trap around 2/3rds into the save or even right before the next save, and this feeling of dread becomes worse the further you get into the game as the saves become longer and longer. There is also this mechanic with the fire gun where if you shoot a breakable block or object it spawns ricochet bullets which can kill you if you touch it. I really did not like this gimmick as there are various moments where you have to shoot a block in a small corridor and hope that the bullet doesn't travel far enough to kill you while you are progressing through the screen.

Next up are the bosses. These are the type of bosses that you don't learn right away but only after you die a couple of times. The first three bosses while creative take a very long time to beat (especially the second boss in the factory area, that one takes almost 3 minutes to beat), once you beat them for whatever reason the next bosses take much shorter to beat than before. The first three bosses have a big emphasis on waiting for attack cycles and you are able to damage the boss, while nearly everything after it you can tear down half of its health in 15 seconds and after you learned all of the attacks it doesn't take longer than a minute before the boss is dead. It's very disorienting and to me it felt like they were rushed just so that the maker could focus more on creating the same type of platforming that you see throughout the game. One of the bosses requires you to use your default gun for whatever reason while all of the bosses before it could be killed with the current gun you have equipped (usually the fire gun).

My biggest gripe about this game is that you only unlock the jetpack after you've beaten the final boss and ONLY if you have 45 notes, and if you haven't found enough notes yet you must go through every stage again and find the ones you've missed or skipped if you didn't know what a solution to it was. It would have been nice if you unlocked it right before or right after beating the final boss since then you have a big incentive of collecting the remaining notes and gems instead of painstakingly having to do what I just said.

The jetpack itself is also very clunky, as it only activates after using your double jump and even then you must hold shift the entire time as if you don't you will lose your fuel instantly and drop down. I died a bunch of times to long saves because of that. It's meant to copy the Booster from Cave Story, but at least implement the fuel mechanic from that game instead of losing it right away the moment you release the shift key.

While I found this game to be pretty flawed, there were some things which I still liked. I appreciate the signs having an X after you collect all of the notes on the route the sign is pointing towards, although sometimes you'll end up going through multiple screens to end up at a screen with a note that you can't even collect because you don't have the desired item unlocked yet. This happens a few times in the later stages. The crayon storybook aesthetic is a very creative and original idea, and the song choices while not very memorable are also well chosen. Ultimately it's just only just the less important things which I liked, as part of a bigger package of content I got bored or frustrated from.

I'm not really sure what I think of this game. While it has a very original idea for an adventure game it has a bunch of flaws which hold me back from rating it any higher. Personally I wouldn't go back to this game as it lacks the replayability factor that most of Carnival's games have where you never get tired of playing it even after beating it multiple times. I was very exhausted when this game was over and I don't have the desire to go back to it again due to the game's length. I can see why people love this game, but for me this ain't it.

Delicious Fruit

Latest Reviews