Delicious FruitLatest Reviews
MikuStar263
For: I wanna be the Elpis
For: I wanna be the Elpis
Tagged as: Needle
Hades-like
[0] Likes
Rating: 7.6 76
Difficulty: 69 69
Nov 11, 2021
Cosmoing
For: I wanna Outline
For: I wanna Outline
As I was writing this review, I found it difficult to put into words exactly why I didn't enjoy this game. So I'm gonna try to list out positive and negative things I can think about instead.
On the positive side:
The game looks great! Every stage stands out from the rest and looks cohesive, there's even nice little details such as snow piling up on the correct side of spikes. The widescreen effect with the top and bottom black bars is something I also quite like seeing. And I like how you go between stages. It's not super unique but it looks interesting and feels cohesive in a weird way.
One of the later stages had really great traps and progression. It nearly always felt like the traps were there to change your route and make you perform fun platforming maneuvers which is a great way to use traps if you ask me. And the way the stage changed as you advanced was also great!
On the negative side:
Most of the other traps in the game ranged from either boring to very unpleasant. It didn't feel like there was any sort of thought put into these traps, just that the maker needed to hit a per-save trap counter and decided to make some spikes move. Where they are in the save feels completely random, ranging from all at the start to all over the place to all at the end. As the game goes on, it does change from just spikes to other things, but the concept remains the same and my thoughts too.
Although the game looks great visually with lots of detail, the audio side leaves a lot to desire. I know this isn't something a lot of people consider with most fangames and that's because you don't need to most of the time! 90% of fangames have very little in terms of audio requirements outside of the BGM. But when you have a fangame this reliant on traps, you really need to think about sound effects for these traps, otherwise your simple flying spike will remain a simple flying spike. In fact, I would argue good sounds is more important than good visuals in a trap game. A brown block or default spike visual is probably something most people don't even get bothered by nowadays, but I'm sure hearing sndSpikeTrap over and over again is probably a lot more grating to the average player. Even the simple addition of a custom sound on a trap is a lot more likely to make your players not feel annoyed but instead amused. All that to say this game uses very little in terms of non-standard sound effects which I think played a major part in why a lot of these traps felt frustrating.
A more minor complaint is the amount of backtracking through screens. And I know this is gonna sound like a weird thing to point out, but there's genuinely just so many screens where you get to the end and you have to go back through a large part of the screen again at least once for no good reason. Even in the first stage it stood out, and it didn't really get much better at the game went on.
There's also a couple small gameplay nitpicks I could make, such as the gravity flipping in the V6 stage being different if you're upside down or not, or saves not working while you're standing on them, or the gravity flippers in stage 2 obviously changing the room and not saving your position. These may seem like very small details, but in a game as visually good looking as this, these blemishes stand out like a sore thumb and started to wear on me as I discovered them.
I think I'm out of things to say. It's often difficult to peer inside your own mind and find out why you think what you think, so I apologize for the poor structure of this review. But I wanted to try to elaborate as much as possible on why this game left a poor taste in my mouth, especially since I was surprised myself by it.
[0] Likes
On the positive side:
The game looks great! Every stage stands out from the rest and looks cohesive, there's even nice little details such as snow piling up on the correct side of spikes. The widescreen effect with the top and bottom black bars is something I also quite like seeing. And I like how you go between stages. It's not super unique but it looks interesting and feels cohesive in a weird way.
One of the later stages had really great traps and progression. It nearly always felt like the traps were there to change your route and make you perform fun platforming maneuvers which is a great way to use traps if you ask me. And the way the stage changed as you advanced was also great!
On the negative side:
Most of the other traps in the game ranged from either boring to very unpleasant. It didn't feel like there was any sort of thought put into these traps, just that the maker needed to hit a per-save trap counter and decided to make some spikes move. Where they are in the save feels completely random, ranging from all at the start to all over the place to all at the end. As the game goes on, it does change from just spikes to other things, but the concept remains the same and my thoughts too.
Although the game looks great visually with lots of detail, the audio side leaves a lot to desire. I know this isn't something a lot of people consider with most fangames and that's because you don't need to most of the time! 90% of fangames have very little in terms of audio requirements outside of the BGM. But when you have a fangame this reliant on traps, you really need to think about sound effects for these traps, otherwise your simple flying spike will remain a simple flying spike. In fact, I would argue good sounds is more important than good visuals in a trap game. A brown block or default spike visual is probably something most people don't even get bothered by nowadays, but I'm sure hearing sndSpikeTrap over and over again is probably a lot more grating to the average player. Even the simple addition of a custom sound on a trap is a lot more likely to make your players not feel annoyed but instead amused. All that to say this game uses very little in terms of non-standard sound effects which I think played a major part in why a lot of these traps felt frustrating.
A more minor complaint is the amount of backtracking through screens. And I know this is gonna sound like a weird thing to point out, but there's genuinely just so many screens where you get to the end and you have to go back through a large part of the screen again at least once for no good reason. Even in the first stage it stood out, and it didn't really get much better at the game went on.
There's also a couple small gameplay nitpicks I could make, such as the gravity flipping in the V6 stage being different if you're upside down or not, or saves not working while you're standing on them, or the gravity flippers in stage 2 obviously changing the room and not saving your position. These may seem like very small details, but in a game as visually good looking as this, these blemishes stand out like a sore thumb and started to wear on me as I discovered them.
I think I'm out of things to say. It's often difficult to peer inside your own mind and find out why you think what you think, so I apologize for the poor structure of this review. But I wanted to try to elaborate as much as possible on why this game left a poor taste in my mouth, especially since I was surprised myself by it.
Rating: 4.0 40
Difficulty: 60 60
Nov 10, 2021
NightShark115
For: I wanna be the Elpis
For: I wanna be the Elpis
Tagged as: Needle
Hades-like
[0] Likes
Rating: N/A
Difficulty: N/A
Nov 10, 2021
shign
For: Birthday Wish
For: Birthday Wish
One of the hardest needle game I have cleared.
As fart said it's mostly inspired by crimson needle but also a few other games like uhuhu and phonotaxis. Overall I would say it's a fun but very VERY unbalanced game, the SSR2 screen was way harder (and honestly not fun) than the rest especially the last save which is the reason of this high diff. A few saves near the end were also pretty hard and not very fun as there was only one very hard jump in.
Could recommend if you're confident in your skills but expect some rough parts.
[0] Likes
As fart said it's mostly inspired by crimson needle but also a few other games like uhuhu and phonotaxis. Overall I would say it's a fun but very VERY unbalanced game, the SSR2 screen was way harder (and honestly not fun) than the rest especially the last save which is the reason of this high diff. A few saves near the end were also pretty hard and not very fun as there was only one very hard jump in.
Could recommend if you're confident in your skills but expect some rough parts.
Rating: 6.9 69
Difficulty: 82 82
Nov 10, 2021
wndfl_heaven
For: Random(20);
For: Random(20);
Tagged as: Needle
[0] Likes
Rating: 4.7 47
Difficulty: 75 75
Nov 10, 2021
wndfl_heaven
For: I wanna be the Sagittarius 2 Remake
[0] Likes
For: I wanna be the Sagittarius 2 Remake
[0] Likes
Rating: 6.3 63
Difficulty: 70 70
Nov 10, 2021
Anuj
For: Poor Mind
For: Poor Mind
I had this game bookmarked and I'm not sure why. However I'm glad I played it, a very simplistic needle game with interesting albeit not obvious pathing in the 2nd and 3rd stage.
The visuals are nice but once again quite simplistic. Just generally a fun needle game, would recommend.
The final stage has quite a few skips though due to lack of save blockers.
[0] Likes
The visuals are nice but once again quite simplistic. Just generally a fun needle game, would recommend.
The final stage has quite a few skips though due to lack of save blockers.
Rating: 7.5 75
Difficulty: 48 48
Nov 10, 2021