Delicious FruitLatest Reviews
YaBoiMarcAntony
For: untitled needle game
For: untitled needle game
What I am about to admit is itself a bit of a spoiler for the game, but nonetheless I was given permission by the creator (who shall not be named directly in this review) to write this review, so here I am! I tested this game, which is more or less made evident by the fact that I am reviewing this game seeing as there's no way I would have cleared it the day of (strictly speaking, I could have, based on the time it took me to clear the game, but nonetheless it would not have been feasible, take my word for it), but all the same I wish to get that out of the way now. Obviously, this means I am going into this with a bit of bias, so to counteract that I've chosen to leave out a rating for the time being. At any rate, anything I say is not affected by my want for this game to succeed but instead is what I felt and thought when I played through the game. I'll refrain from describing much of the gameplay except for what is immediately accessible, but I don't think I have to rely on much more than that to begin with for this game.
(Also, I wasn't gonna give ratings, but Cthaere did and called me a bitch for not doing it so he forced my hand. Suffice it to say, I would have rated it a ten regardless of whether I tested it or not.)
untitled needle game is not so much a revelation as it is a continuation of what LAWatson set down in stone with I Wanna Vibe With the Gods. That, however, is not to say it is in any way derivative, merely that the game wears its inspirations on its sleeves - something I consider to be neither a positive nor a negative, merely a fact in and of itself. Vibe With the Gods was such an incredible game thanks to its ingenuity and intuitive gameplay which remains to this day one of the greatest forays into gimmick needle that this community has seen. untitled needle game, on the other hand, seeks to take a similar concept and push it to eleven. The gimmicks aren't as brain-melting, no, but instead they lose the intuition that Vibe was rife with, making this a much harder-to-penetrate game. Whereas Vibe saw you more or less immediately coming to grips with any given screen, untitled needle game asks that you give each stage the time it deserves and nothing less. There will certainly be moments of frustration, moments where you just wish everything was a bit easier or more kind to the player, but the game never relents. I experienced a lot of pain in my time throughout untitled needle game, a lot of strife and difficulty that really pushed me to my limits at points, but I could never really give up - not only because I was testing, of course, but because I just didn't want to do the game that disservice. Despite how difficult and inaccessible this game may be at times, it's never really pushing you away - it wants to make a relationship with you, at the end of the day, it's just that how it chooses to do so can lead to some tiring moments.
Yes, the biggest thing to know about untitled needle game is that it's hard, quite damn hard. Even the easiest stages took me a decent chunk of time and though I'm not exactly a legendary needle player, I'm no slouch by any means. For sure, some will likely have an easier time, but we do not dictate a game's difficulty by the outliers whom play it. At any rate, a lot of the game's difficulty comes not necessarily from execution (though that certainly plays a large factor in places), but instead through the learning phase of each stage. What I truly love about untitled needle game is that each stage is so vastly different from each other that they're all a cohesive experience in their own right, though all fitting neatly under the umbrella that is untitled needle game, but anyways the point of this being that anything you learn from one stage is applicable to that stage only, and the learning process for each stage will differ vastly depending on the person playing.
As an example, sleep dealer (the spring stage) is one that will be sure to raise some eyebrows and cause great irritation for some as it's a gimmick that sort of works against the way you want or expect it to work. Some may think of this as an inherent flaw, but I think it's a great example of the sheer genius of the game overall. Sure, it goes against what you expect, but if you let go of your expectations and just try to work with the gimmick, you'll find that it makes a lot more sense than you'd first think. Nonetheless, it took me a lot of time to let go of those expectations and so I spent a lot of my attempts in that stage simply dying left and right because I'd forget how the gimmick actually work or not be used to it - but eventually, I did get used to it, and I did come to really enjoy it. This stage was also the first one where I really came to understand part of what the game was going for.
Kale speaks on this in his Save My Boy review and it's a concept that was tossed around too with the release of Morning Dew, but there is certainly an argument to be made for struggle and memorability being more important than quality of gameplay. Personally, I will always come down on gameplay being more important, but at the end of the day, truly brilliant games are able to take both concepts and meld them together to make something truly genius. Morning Dew does so with the red hell stage, a stage which by all accounts should not work but it does, remaining fun to the end and being highly memorable, and of course the entire game was a case of struggling up the mountain for me. Crimson Needle 3 attempts this with 92 and the double diamond secret, although in the case of those games, it was also more a focus on what Kale could make players do to reach the end and while I think the experiment was more or less successful, I end up falling more negatively on it than others (all the same, the game overall works brilliantly with this concept of climbing the mountain as my true end clear remains one of my proudest achievements).
untitled needle game is more in the vein of Morning Dew, not necessarily surpassing it in terms of emotional value (certainly not for me, I have to admit), but I think surpassing it in terms of the quality of gameplay. What is just so immensely wonderful about this game is how damn angry it made me while still keeping me firmly on the side of "play the damn game!" I would give up at points, but I would never be able to let go forever because despite how emotional I got at times, I felt like it was on me and not on the game, like it was a failing of my own and that I needed to give it more time than I had - and in all cases, I was correct. No matter what, I would always in the end push through and feel such spectacular amounts of satisfaction. What untitled needle game seeks to do is to be memorable, at the end of the day it wants you thinking back on every bit, not forgetting a second of it; the game seeks to continually recreate these moments of climbing the mountain. The Witness attempted to recreate that eureka feeling with every puzzle, and so untitled needle game attempts to recreate that same feeling of outrageous happiness and pride at what you've accomplished with every stage. Sometimes it may feel completely insurmountable, but it's never impossible.
A phrase thrown around by the creator goes as such: "everyone will struggle, but everyone can clear," a phrase lambasted by some and simply dismissed by others, but I think it more or less exactly describes the relationship most will develop with this game if they give it the time of day. Thanks to how the game is designed at its core, there is not going to be anyone that will just sail through the game smoothly, everyone is going to have at least one or two stages that really give them a run for their money. Even the very best players are going to be stopped by at least one thing because execution is not the difficulty, coming to grips with a given gimmick is, and that is an innately impossible thing to be intrinsically great at when it comes to any sort of gimmick; yet, it's not like this game will be an impossible task for anyone to beat, either. Sure, you can't come in as a complete novice at this sort of game (a great test to know if you're ready in a mechanical sense for the game is if you can beat the first stage because that level of needle is more or less equal to what most of the game asks of you in respect to execution), but a majority of the community can come into this game expecting to clear it - it's just a matter of time, patience, and mental fortitude (this also means you can safely ignore any given difficulty rating because it really is impossible to say just how hard the game is seeing as it's never been so subjective as it is with this game).
What I wondered most during the course of playing this game was the relationship between media and the emotions it can make you feel. For a long time, I sort of scoffed at the idea that designing something with the sole intent of creating struggle and thus memorability was a silly concept essentially because I felt that if you were making something truly brilliant, you would still retain memorability and struggle alongside well-made gameplay. In the end, however, I think that is one of the limiting factors of video games as an artform, the expectation that it needs to be fun or enjoyable on a moment-to-moment basis. For some people, that is a hard-and-fast rule that can never be broken and, for the most part, I am in that same boat. All the same, untitled needle game was what it took for me to really understand and appreciate the fact that struggling with a game in what seems to be a negative way in the moment is not something that should in the end represent what you feel about the game; instead, what is far more important is what you feel by the end, and what did I feel by the end of untitled needle game?
Sheer, unbridled joy.
[25] Likes
(Also, I wasn't gonna give ratings, but Cthaere did and called me a bitch for not doing it so he forced my hand. Suffice it to say, I would have rated it a ten regardless of whether I tested it or not.)
untitled needle game is not so much a revelation as it is a continuation of what LAWatson set down in stone with I Wanna Vibe With the Gods. That, however, is not to say it is in any way derivative, merely that the game wears its inspirations on its sleeves - something I consider to be neither a positive nor a negative, merely a fact in and of itself. Vibe With the Gods was such an incredible game thanks to its ingenuity and intuitive gameplay which remains to this day one of the greatest forays into gimmick needle that this community has seen. untitled needle game, on the other hand, seeks to take a similar concept and push it to eleven. The gimmicks aren't as brain-melting, no, but instead they lose the intuition that Vibe was rife with, making this a much harder-to-penetrate game. Whereas Vibe saw you more or less immediately coming to grips with any given screen, untitled needle game asks that you give each stage the time it deserves and nothing less. There will certainly be moments of frustration, moments where you just wish everything was a bit easier or more kind to the player, but the game never relents. I experienced a lot of pain in my time throughout untitled needle game, a lot of strife and difficulty that really pushed me to my limits at points, but I could never really give up - not only because I was testing, of course, but because I just didn't want to do the game that disservice. Despite how difficult and inaccessible this game may be at times, it's never really pushing you away - it wants to make a relationship with you, at the end of the day, it's just that how it chooses to do so can lead to some tiring moments.
Yes, the biggest thing to know about untitled needle game is that it's hard, quite damn hard. Even the easiest stages took me a decent chunk of time and though I'm not exactly a legendary needle player, I'm no slouch by any means. For sure, some will likely have an easier time, but we do not dictate a game's difficulty by the outliers whom play it. At any rate, a lot of the game's difficulty comes not necessarily from execution (though that certainly plays a large factor in places), but instead through the learning phase of each stage. What I truly love about untitled needle game is that each stage is so vastly different from each other that they're all a cohesive experience in their own right, though all fitting neatly under the umbrella that is untitled needle game, but anyways the point of this being that anything you learn from one stage is applicable to that stage only, and the learning process for each stage will differ vastly depending on the person playing.
As an example, sleep dealer (the spring stage) is one that will be sure to raise some eyebrows and cause great irritation for some as it's a gimmick that sort of works against the way you want or expect it to work. Some may think of this as an inherent flaw, but I think it's a great example of the sheer genius of the game overall. Sure, it goes against what you expect, but if you let go of your expectations and just try to work with the gimmick, you'll find that it makes a lot more sense than you'd first think. Nonetheless, it took me a lot of time to let go of those expectations and so I spent a lot of my attempts in that stage simply dying left and right because I'd forget how the gimmick actually work or not be used to it - but eventually, I did get used to it, and I did come to really enjoy it. This stage was also the first one where I really came to understand part of what the game was going for.
Kale speaks on this in his Save My Boy review and it's a concept that was tossed around too with the release of Morning Dew, but there is certainly an argument to be made for struggle and memorability being more important than quality of gameplay. Personally, I will always come down on gameplay being more important, but at the end of the day, truly brilliant games are able to take both concepts and meld them together to make something truly genius. Morning Dew does so with the red hell stage, a stage which by all accounts should not work but it does, remaining fun to the end and being highly memorable, and of course the entire game was a case of struggling up the mountain for me. Crimson Needle 3 attempts this with 92 and the double diamond secret, although in the case of those games, it was also more a focus on what Kale could make players do to reach the end and while I think the experiment was more or less successful, I end up falling more negatively on it than others (all the same, the game overall works brilliantly with this concept of climbing the mountain as my true end clear remains one of my proudest achievements).
untitled needle game is more in the vein of Morning Dew, not necessarily surpassing it in terms of emotional value (certainly not for me, I have to admit), but I think surpassing it in terms of the quality of gameplay. What is just so immensely wonderful about this game is how damn angry it made me while still keeping me firmly on the side of "play the damn game!" I would give up at points, but I would never be able to let go forever because despite how emotional I got at times, I felt like it was on me and not on the game, like it was a failing of my own and that I needed to give it more time than I had - and in all cases, I was correct. No matter what, I would always in the end push through and feel such spectacular amounts of satisfaction. What untitled needle game seeks to do is to be memorable, at the end of the day it wants you thinking back on every bit, not forgetting a second of it; the game seeks to continually recreate these moments of climbing the mountain. The Witness attempted to recreate that eureka feeling with every puzzle, and so untitled needle game attempts to recreate that same feeling of outrageous happiness and pride at what you've accomplished with every stage. Sometimes it may feel completely insurmountable, but it's never impossible.
A phrase thrown around by the creator goes as such: "everyone will struggle, but everyone can clear," a phrase lambasted by some and simply dismissed by others, but I think it more or less exactly describes the relationship most will develop with this game if they give it the time of day. Thanks to how the game is designed at its core, there is not going to be anyone that will just sail through the game smoothly, everyone is going to have at least one or two stages that really give them a run for their money. Even the very best players are going to be stopped by at least one thing because execution is not the difficulty, coming to grips with a given gimmick is, and that is an innately impossible thing to be intrinsically great at when it comes to any sort of gimmick; yet, it's not like this game will be an impossible task for anyone to beat, either. Sure, you can't come in as a complete novice at this sort of game (a great test to know if you're ready in a mechanical sense for the game is if you can beat the first stage because that level of needle is more or less equal to what most of the game asks of you in respect to execution), but a majority of the community can come into this game expecting to clear it - it's just a matter of time, patience, and mental fortitude (this also means you can safely ignore any given difficulty rating because it really is impossible to say just how hard the game is seeing as it's never been so subjective as it is with this game).
What I wondered most during the course of playing this game was the relationship between media and the emotions it can make you feel. For a long time, I sort of scoffed at the idea that designing something with the sole intent of creating struggle and thus memorability was a silly concept essentially because I felt that if you were making something truly brilliant, you would still retain memorability and struggle alongside well-made gameplay. In the end, however, I think that is one of the limiting factors of video games as an artform, the expectation that it needs to be fun or enjoyable on a moment-to-moment basis. For some people, that is a hard-and-fast rule that can never be broken and, for the most part, I am in that same boat. All the same, untitled needle game was what it took for me to really understand and appreciate the fact that struggling with a game in what seems to be a negative way in the moment is not something that should in the end represent what you feel about the game; instead, what is far more important is what you feel by the end, and what did I feel by the end of untitled needle game?
Sheer, unbridled joy.
Rating: 9.3 93
Difficulty: 82 82
Dec 11, 2021
MauricioJuegaIWBT
For: I wanna kill the Needle Games 2
For: I wanna kill the Needle Games 2
Welcome to cornerland
[1] Like
Rating: 6.0 60
Difficulty: 75 75
Dec 11, 2021
CacoPholey
For: I wanna challenge 100 trials!!
For: I wanna challenge 100 trials!!
This was the first fangame I ever played, and as such it's going to always have a special place in my heart. Definitely one of the best fangames out there for absolute beginners... until 79 that is. Once you get there, the game has a pretty big difficulty spike which can make things annoying for new players (I myself put the game down for a bit once I got to 84 and went on to beat other things before finishing this out). The 80s and 90s themselves are pretty fun beginner stages, but the tedium of the final boss's first phase knocks the game down a peg or two. A pretty good introduction to fangames, but definitely not my first recommendation, that honor goes to Octophobia.
[1] Like
Rating: 7.0 70
Difficulty: 30 30
Dec 11, 2021
Cutiefruity
For: I don't wanna download this game
For: I don't wanna download this game
This videogame is relevant to the current state of rising clear-list tensions in the Iwanna community. I won't comment much more in-depth on that because I live in relative comfort in Italy but what I can grasp is that the world as a whole is moving closer to monke. With that being said, I gave this game a perfect rating because it caused me to think. It had a strong impression on me, causing me to think about the meaning of the current state of what's happening in the world. Sure, I still have to get up & live my life but the truth is that we ALL have hurt someone or done worse but at the end of the day, it's realizing our mistakes & thinking about the effect it has on other people. I'm very aware that things arent that cut & dry but at the same time they really are. I enjoy a cheap piece of entertainment once in awhile to take my mind off things but this kind of clear is getting harder to come across & deserves recognition. I've seen others comments about this game being confusing or meaningless but....that's life. It welcomes you in & then spanks you. Last but not least, the gameplay in this game is pretty damn good so in a nutshell, if your into games that provoke emotion layered with a historically based plot & players performing with skill then this one is worth all of its 0 hours. Enjoy.
[3] Likes
Rating: 10.0 100
Difficulty: 1 1
Dec 10, 2021
phgQED
For: I wanna be the Lucien Needle
For: I wanna be the Lucien Needle
Straightforward and enjoyable old-fashioned needle. 25 screens with decently lengthy saves and a mix of named and non-named jumps. There were a few things I liked (such as repeating the same jump a few times in a row with slightly different contexts) and things I didn't like (walk-off setups and full jumps felt repetitive at times), but this was overall still a pleasant gimmickless needle with a slightly askew difficulty curve but mostly consistent level design throughout.
Time: 1hr27min
Deaths: 1371
[0] Likes
Time: 1hr27min
Deaths: 1371
Rating: 7.5 75
Difficulty: 29 29
Dec 10, 2021
phgQED
For: Iwanna Skyvoice
For: Iwanna Skyvoice
Semi-forgettable needle that might be noteworthy only for its haphazard difficulty balance. It also has a lot of 'fake' jumps, by which I mean a jump that looks slightly challenging or interesting until you learn the intended setup is two full jumps or full hold left or something like that. There's a drop area in screen 2 that is like this which particularly got on my nerves. Tileset and music are fine, but overall far more frustrating than satisfying.
Time: ~17min
Deaths: 455
[0] Likes
Time: ~17min
Deaths: 455
Rating: 3.1 31
Difficulty: 24 24
Dec 10, 2021
Trener
For: I wanna reach Heaven
For: I wanna reach Heaven
It is hardly possible now to give an adequate assessment of this game, since it is clear that it is outdated, in many places it is simple in form, nevertheless it is played well. I note as a big minus that the extra level is secret, although it is not difficult to get to it in general, the ways of finding objects are simple, hidden in secret stages, nevertheless, this final stage, in my opinion, is the best in the game and looks very fresh even now, he had to be aware of this game in order not to miss it
[0] Likes
Rating: 8.0 80
Difficulty: 61 61
Dec 10, 2021
TehDude
For: I Wanna Dodge The DVD Screensaver For Seven Hours
For: I Wanna Dodge The DVD Screensaver For Seven Hours
Completing this was an experience i must say
[1] Like
Rating: 10.0 100
Difficulty: 21 21
Dec 10, 2021