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HippoNoir

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A member registered 57 days ago · View creator page →

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I find it amusing that someone made an aggy daggy meme into an arcade game. Especially one THIS good.

This game is like if you crossed the Mario Bros arcade game with a beat 'em up. In the best way possible. There's a good amount of strategy here. The player must decide if they want to try to flip enemies over to use as projectiles or punch them. You have to decide whether you want to use the screen wrap and what order to take enemies out in. And the player only has a split second to make these decisions. It's very frantic.

I liked the way moving the player felt. They have quite a bit of weight to them and I liked sliding around as I punched.

This game is addicting like any good arcade game should be. I played it for some hours longer than I planned to. I made it to wave 14.

The art, while simple, has a lot of charm. Seeing a crab with drill claws or a muscular crab brought a smile to my face. The graphics also do a good job at telegraphing what will happen next.

I have a couple small gripes with this game. First, is that you cannot do a charged punch unless you do a regular punch first. This is problematic because the regular punch wakes up the dazed enemies which ends up making charge punching dazed enemies an unviable strategy. Second, you cannot pick up dazed enemies when they are near enemies you can't pick up which is frustrating. Third, I wish it said what wave you made it to on the Game Over screen and saved what your furthest wave was.

An idea I think would make this game better is if when you threw the exploding crab it exploded when it hit the other crabs. I think that would be cool.

This game is awesome. Hats off to the developer! This game in uncrabable! 

I completed all three stages.

This game is a Touhou-esque shoot 'em up and has many of the joys (and  pains) one expects from such a game. There is joy to slowly learning the game and overcoming once seemingly unpassable obstacles. There is a rush to dodging a large number of projectiles.  Unfortunately, this is where my praise ends.

The level design is a mess. Enemies appear on screen at seemingly random positions and there is no sense of cohesion. Levels do not have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Enemies use the same overly-simplistic patterns of firing directly at the player and bullet rings. This makes the levels unfun and all feel the same. At the end of level 1 there's this part where there are scarecrows at the bottom of the screen and I found it's far easier to ignore them and stay at the top of the screen. This does not come off as good level design. The difficulty curve is also strange. I swear level 1 is more difficult than levels 2 and 3. I also wish your bombs reset after taking a hit or at least there were more of them.

There's only two shot types to choose from and I would have liked more. The game claims Rosemary is the easier shot type but I found that she makes the game much harder. Her homing pumpkins do basically no damage. I'm not sure if her bomb does any damage to bosses. Lucy is so much better. At full power she kicks so much ass. Neither shot type feels inspired though.

The patterns the bosses fire are overly simple and lack the puzzle-like thrill I expect from these games. If you're at full power as Lucy the stage 2 and 3 bosses have too little health such that their patterns end way too soon. The first boss has this attack where the boss spawns scarecrows near the player and it's dumb and should be removed from the game. The end of the stage 3 boss didn't communicate that I first had to kill enemies before I could damage the boss. It also would have been nice to see some dialogue between the player and the bosses before the fight.

The graphics harken back to early doujin games where the artwork was cute and dare I say "soulful" but far from professional. I like that the backgrounds are layered and use parallax scrolling. However there's some weird things like the debug text is on screen and the end level text is misaligned. 

This demo is super buggy. After you restart after losing all of your continues the enemies don't spawn in anymore. After using a bomb as Rosemary she was stuck on her glowing sprite after the bomb ended. There's also an explosion sound effect in the game that's super distracting. I kept thinking I was getting hit.

This game needs to be overhauled to become a great shoot 'em up.

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This game is like if Super Mario 64 and Sonic Adventure had a baby.

In its current state Ellie and Osh isn't really a game. It's a test level with all sorts of assets strewn about. Moving around as Osh feels satisfying and I liked just how many ways he can move around the level when the various obstacles are involved. I really liked going up slopes like it was Sonic. I liked how Osh slowed down and sped up. Though when going in the loop de loops I had to awkwardly move Osh around to keep him on the loop. The camera also obscures the player. But I'm sure this is an artifact of this game being so early in development. 

I didn't like him main bat attack. The small hitbox of the bat makes me end up  getting hit instead of hitting the enemies (not that the enemies are much a threat anyways). Luckily the homing attack is effective (does the homing attack home in on springs and other obstacles? If not it should). Also when swimming Osh feels like he's going too slow or too fast.

I enjoyed this little playground and plan on collecting more goals. I'm excited to see an adventure form from this. This is a solid start.

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I always liked it when a game had a gun that made you move backwards when you shot it. I'd always shoot in the opposite direction to go fast. So I'm overjoyed there's a game based entirely around this concept.

The sense of speed in this game in incredible. It's like Sonic the Hedgehog but I feel fully in control. I love how much weight the player has. The Super Meat Boy wall jump is always welcome. I like that the levels are less about completing them but instead completing them quickly.  The levels all have a defined beginning, middle, and end. The game introduces new obstacles and gimmicks at just the right rate to keep things fresh. And they were all lots of fun.

The graphics, while simple, do a great job in giving the player the feedback necessary to make movement feel satisfying. It made me smile how just how many filters there are. I love how the letters in the title screen move and the graphic design for the menus and end level screens.

A gripe of mine is that I wish you could reset the level in a single button press. Having to pause the game and select reset level takes too long. I also think the game could have benefitted by having some collectables scattered across the levels. Another gripe with this game is that there isn't more of it.

I also encountered a weird glitch where when I played gauntlet mode the pause menu was in French for some reason.

I loved this game and plan to buy the full release. Hats off to the developer!

This is a neat little puzzle game with a fairly unique concept. And it's quite difficult. This game was made for high IQ individuals. When I solved the puzzles I had this great "eureka" moment. And the game introduces enough new obstacles and gimmicks to make things feel fresh. And some of them are quite creative.

My biggest issue with this game is the lack of reward and feeling of progression. In this game you solve puzzles to progress through rooms and your reward is... more rooms. There's no story to progress, no set-piece moments, no upgrades. There is a sense of accomplishment to solving the puzzles but I feel like there needed to be something more. Furthermore, I never had a sense of how close I was to a stopping point (if there even are any) and especially the end of the game. I think there isn't nearly enough checkpoints too. Having to go through several rooms that you've already mastered just to get to the one you die on is boring. I think when you die you should respawn at the start of the room you died in and the flagpoles are there to warp to.

The art is really simple and does a good job at communicating the gameplay. It doesn't do much more than that though.

I have mixed feelings on this game. I played up to around the point you see those eyeballs (?) (seen in the third screenshot). 

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When I read in the description that this was a "mystery dungeon game" I became excited. I played the Pokemon mystery dungeon games to death back in the day and I was hoping on reliving that nostalgia. And thankfully this game delivered.

When playing this game the player has a lot of balls they have to juggle. There's three meters to keep track of, cooldowns, and decisions about what to equip and what encounters to get yourself into. And the game is just difficult enough that I felt that my choices mattered. I was fully engaged. And the game gave me a constant stream of new equips and items to keep me wanting more.

Decisions like if I should get myself into an encounter was something I didn't have a blanket solution for. I had to weigh the risk reward of whether the resources I was going to consume was going to give me an adequate payout. Though I wish there were more shops to spend your money on. There was quite a bit of strategy to taking down the first boss. But I think the boss should have been easier considering it was the first one. I had to save all my resources for it and even then it was a close fight and I'm sure I got lucky.

I think a missed opportunity was destructible objects. In the first dungeon my fire spell would hit the cans and I was hoping they would explode causing damage to all nearby entities. I think something like this would add to the strategy of the game and make dungeons feel more unique. I also wish that there where more objects you could interact with during the hub world portions and even goodies to find if you went out exploring.

The art is cute and nice to look at. The UI is intuitive and made my play feel smooth. Albeit I think it could have benefitted from being higher res. I take issue in that the enemy and dungeon art look pretty uninspired. I think it would have helped if the terrorist group had a logo and the base had some decorations. The enemies look like enemies you've seen plenty of times. They didn't make the world feel distinct. I wish there were character portraits during the dialog scenes. I also wish the equips change Lottie's appearance but perhaps I'm asking for too much here. I like the magical girl theming and want to see the game lean more into the imagery and archetypes of magical girls.

I really enjoyed myself with this game. So far I've only played through the first dungeon. I plan on playing through the second but I got others demos to play and give feedback on.

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This is a nice bite-sized metroidvania adventure. There is just enough breadcrumbs here to keep you always wanting more. Possibly my favorite thing about this game is the atmosphere. The melancholy of the music, the whimsical character interactions, the squeaky sound effects - it all makes for a vibe that just jives with me. Exploring the cave is just fun. 

A gripe I have with this game is that it doesn't do anything particularly unique. The main run and gun combat is something you've seen many times before and I found that it wasn't particularly engaging. You just hold down the shoot button and face the direction of the enemy. The platforming is also pretty basic. It's the atmosphere and level design that holds me over here.

And about that boss... It's 100 times harder than anything else in the game.  it's a gargantuan difficulty spike which is definitely bad game design. I managed to get through it and even no hit the boss without cheesing. I feel that the only way to get through the boss is to figure out what the game developer wanted you to do through trial and error. Furthermore, the boss just simply isn't particularly interesting. It's just a simple projectile to jump over and a projectile from above to side-step. I don't like that you die in just three hits. The boss also regenerates its health a couple times throughout the fight which confuses the player as to their progress. Also it's dumb that you can leave the boss room after the fight has begun.  Most of my criticism of this game comes from this one encounter. Luckily, once you make it past the ending is pretty sweet.

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Fans of the Touhou Project will feel at home with this one. Many of the core concepts are here. You have a variety of shot types to unleash carnage. Some of the shot types are gimmicky which might be able to be taken advantage of by a skilled player. There's a variety of fun puzzle-like patterns to dodge and there's a satisfying  feeling to learning the patterns and progressively getting better.

However I find that the patterns are a little too simple. I didn't see any that had the intricacy or beauty of some of the Touhou patterns. There's a lot of patterns that are just bullets fired at a straight projectory with a changing starting angle, or just a ring of bullets, or just bullets fired straight at the player. I'm not sure if there was a single pattern I was like "Wow, how was that generated!?". There's also some gimmicky patterns like the square of bullets that breaks down when it hits the floor that you see in the example gif. I can't decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Also you can get through the second half of stage 2 on normal difficulty by standing still which is not good game design.

The bosses need to have health bars. Without health bars you cannot gauge  your progress or get a feel of how more damage higher damaging shot types do. There should be a level select option too.

The graphics harken back to early doujin games where the artwork was cute and dare I say "soulful" but far from professional. One of my gripes with the graphics is that the bullets don't really pop out from the background which makes them hard to see when dodging them. Furthermore, there's this one pattern with the stage 2 boss where snow is used to indicate the direction of the wind but I thought they were bullets at first and tried to dodge the snow. Also many of the enemies are just circles which is just uninspired. I do enjoy looking at this game nevertheless.

As for glitches the game crashed on me a couple of times and I think it was always at the stage 2 boss. I don't know if this is a problem with my PC or the game though. I also fiddled around with the options menu and somehow I had it where the graphics were all shifted to the left making the right side of my screen a black void.

At the time of writting this I made it part of the way through the stage 3 boss on normal difficulty.  If I progress further I might edit this comment. I have many more demos to play through and give feedback on.

Overall, I enjoyed myself with this game. If you're looking to scratch your bullet hell or Touhou itch - this will do it.

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You can change the key bindings in the options menu.