Reviews List - Delicious Fruit

kinokomati
For: I wanna be the YumeKawaii
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Rating: 6.7 67 Difficulty: 43 43

Oct 25, 2021

moogy
For: Amaranth Needle

A 100f game with a continual increase in difficulty from the very beginning to the very end. There are never any real spikes, but by the time you reach the 70s and 80s every save is brutal, and the difficulty continues to climb from there; you can expect to take as long on floors 91-100 as you did on the entire rest of the game.

Honestly, I respect Amaranth's commitment to its continually escalating difficulty level, especially since it's accomplished entirely via engine standard kill objects, all of which are static. No traps, triggers, or gimmicks; you can make every screen in jtool if you want. (There are a few exceptions, like collecting keys for secrets, but they're not really worth mentioning.)

Unfortunately, I think the resulting game is simply not very much fun to play most of the time. You're just going through screen after screen of bland needle with uninspired pathing and absolutely nothing to provide a change in pace. Later in the game, almost every save feels like it's "harder" (more frustrating and grindy) than it should be due to a handful of needlessly precise jumps. Apples are used constantly in annoying ways to complicate otherwise simple jump sequences, and at times the design devolves into just placing corners and planes in the middle of saves that are already hard. To the game's credit, there are a number of interesting jump sequences that feel satisfying to learn, but as a whole the design is dragged down by an obsession with making every save as hard as possible no matter what.

But hey, maybe I'm just not the target audience; there are clearly people who really enjoyed Amaranth. Maybe the parts I found tiresome were fascinating challenges to them. Maybe difficulty for its own sake isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as you have the right mindset. I did keep coming back to the game myself, after all -- if nothing else, I clearly found the idea of overcoming it compelling, and it forced me to push past my limits.

But, uh, I think I'm good just playing through it once.

Delicious Fruit

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