Typos:
- "unlock trohpies" -> "Unlock trophies"
- Plus some papers in the trophy room, and some settings, don't begin with capitalized letters.
MondSemmel
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A member registered Jul 24, 2016 · View creator page →
Creator of
You are a Cleric. Today, you will once again put an unfortunate soul to rest. At least that's what should have happened.
Interactive Fiction
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I figured there was some reason why the Discord link wasn't shared in plaintext on this page (maybe to protect against bots?), so I obscured it with rot13. rot13 = copy the string from my comment into the site rot13.com to convert it into the actual discord URL. I just checked and that does still work.
Game Review:
What a fantastic concept this game has - it's a fast-paced platformer with no running, wonderful controls, tight levels, etc. In general I'm not enamored with timed levels, but fortunately here the timers mostly felt fair.
I can't over-emphasize how much I enjoyed the game feel - the limited moveset has lots of tiny nuances (e.g. when you bump into a wall, you get pushed back a few pixels, which is crucial for traversal), and the overall game feel is as enjoyable as that of the best platformers out there. The game's absurd degree of polish and juiciness was just delightful.
Levels are well-designed, too. And for those who care about such things, the game seems well-suited for speedrunners.
However, there are a few designs I didn't love. The game is needlessly difficult, but that's part and parcel for the genre, and I did accept the challenge for the most part, so that's fine. Falling accelerates you, which made for some annoyingly precise timing challenges and lots of frustrating deaths, but again, fine.
But there were two aspects that infuriated me. First of all, the main environmental hazard consists of triangular spikes. And their collision detection is *terrible*, as becomes particularly apparent in the water levels. Maybe the spike art or the player sprite are significantly smaller than their respective colliders, or maybe the colliders are squares but the art is triangles (= the spikes) and circles (= the player mid-jump)... whatever the reason, the challenging levels naturally force you to jump close to spikes, and there were *tons* of situations where I died to those spikes without clearly understanding how exactly I collided with them, or how I would have to jump to prevent that. I'm amazed that this issue wasn't caught and fixed during development.
And my second misgiving concerns the final levels, beginning at world 4-2, which introduces "Gauntlets", levels which have a checkpoint halfway through. What's the point of checkpoints in a level-based game, you ask? There's none. Increasing the number of rooms in a level, rather than splitting it into multiple levels, artificially increases its difficulty. Once you add a checkpoint, you undo this, so the checkpoint is pointless. Except, to add insult to injury for us completionists out there, you can't get the timed star on a level if you die and respawn from its checkpoint. So the checkpoint doesn't even serve as a proper checkpoint, since you get punished for using it (?!?). The whole design is utterly flabbergasting. There's no excuse for not just splitting the levels at the midway point, instead of implementing those checkpoints. Not to mention that not all room transitions are entirely fair, and the game expects you to die at the checkpoints... only to, again, punish you for using them.
For this reason, while I loved the game in worlds 1 to 3, I consider the second half of world 4, 4-2, badly designed. And in level 4-2-9 and the boss fight in 4-3, all gloves come off, and these levels are just tons of rooms crammed in a single level to artificially increase difficulty. So there are no checkpoints, but the levels are still idiotic.
Despite its shortcomings, I loved the game. To get the most out of it, I recommend playing it and simply stopping after world 4-1.
Review:
This was a great minimalist lo-fi puzzle platformer that is somewhat held back by a few issues with UI and design.
I liked the great mix of platforming and puzzling. A great example of this was the ability to use the speer to climb walls. It was consistently delightful, and felt entirely satisfying throughout the run. I also liked that the speer had a small throwing arc, and this was even relevant in a few levels. Finally, levels are plentiful and varied, while still being rather quick to complete.
I did have a few issues with the UI in particular, though I feel like these could easily be fixed. First of all, both speer-throwing (which pushes stuff away) and grabbing, i.e. two opposing actions, are on the same context-sensitive button. This led to a lot of feelsbad moments for me. I had to restart so many levels because I accidentally shot something I'd intended to grab. This either destroyed it, or pushed it away - often into spikes.
Secondly, it's too easy to drop items on a controller. You're supposed to drop them with Down on the D-Pad, but they also often got dropped when I used the analog stick and dipped slightly below the horizontal line, i.e. when the analog stick sent a Down signal (maybe this was a bug?). I found a workaround by always keeping the stick in the upper half, but it was pretty irritating.
Thirdly, there's an "Annoyed?" level skip prompt. I very much appreciate the intent behind this feature, but the implementation had an unfortunate UI: upon death, it pops up without delay, and the button prompt defaults to "yes". I frequently died while pressing X to throw speers, at some point the Annoyed prompt popped up, and so I accidentally skipped to the next level. So the "Annoyed?" prompt became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In terms of the design, I wasn't a fan of the power gems. I often had to reset levels because I accidentally broke such a gem at the wrong time, or because I shot a power speer a few pixels too low or too high. I wish the dev had found a design that allowed these gems to respawn (without trivialising the puzzles).
The timed speer obstacle was another cause of frustration. And finally, it was weird that you couldn't drop down, then move sideways into a niche 1 tile high. I don't mind that as a standalone design, but it runs counter to most platformers, and in this game there was no visual indication that anything would be different.
Finally, a design I was ambivalent about: A few of the levels in the later stages aren't tightly designed, i.e. you can collect the emblem (= 100% the level) without using all the gems and items. I didn't exactly mind, since I'd gotten somewhat exhausted by that point. But I expect this wasn't intentional.
Ultimately, I liked Speer, and without these few UI issues, I think I might have loved it. It's polished and enjoyable enough that I'm surprised it wasn't released on Steam.
Game Review:
Reky is a fully-fledged and very polished puzzle game. I liked the puzzle mechanic and the atmosphere, but had several issues with the minimalist art style.
First and foremost, there are *significant* issues with the puzzle perspective. Blocks are flat without shading or outlines, which often makes it nigh-impossible to tell whether any two blocks line up horizontally or vertically. And this is not a small issue! It makes the already challenging puzzles even more difficult, and for no reason at all. I had a similar problem with the game Induction.
In a related issue, many levels involve multiple doors (= teleporters), and some are just mazes. And yet the art style is so obstinately minimalist that there's only the barest visual difference between normal doors vs. the level exit (wtf), and absolutely no indication for which doors are connected (wtf wtf).
Finally, the core puzzle mechanic involves blocks of different colors which can be moved by clicking on them. There's nothing to indicate the length of the movement. I think the same applies to the movement direction, too, though I think there's at least a consistent color coding in each specific puzzle level - not that I could ever remember which color corresponded to which direction. More opacity that necessitates annoying trial & error, when the game could be entirely clear by just putting an arrow and a number on each colored block.
To summarize, in all these issues gameplay quality was sacrificed on the altar of aesthetics and minimalism. It didn't have to be this way. For instance, I just finished Path of Giants, a puzzle game with a similar isometric perspective, and that game manages to clearly communicate how tiles line up and which puzzle elements are connected.
There's also a highscore system with a par move count for each level. It's a pointless mechanic that doesn't suit the genre, and yet you're forced to interact with it to some extent because you get stars for beating that par move count, and these stars are required to unlock later stages; just beating a level is not enough. This weird mechanic subtly discourages exploration, and exacerbates the opacity problems which force you to use trial & error to find out how blocks or doors are connected. At least there's a robust undo... Plus some of the later levels are *huge*. What exactly are you supposed to do when you miss the par of **164** moves by 2 moves, as happened to me once?
Ultimately, I liked the puzzle mechanic, and some of the levels were genuinely great. But due to the significant opacity issues, my overall experience of the game was rather mixed.
After you deactivate MAL, Ground Control says in an aside that he forgot to record your (i.e. the detective's) mic, so from what I understand, you're tried for murder.
The exact quote is:
"Thus ends this reconstruction of the record... as we forgot to record your mic feed. We'll erm... we'll see you in court, detective."
I was enjoying the game so much, and then two design decisions seriously hampered the experience for me right before the end.
First of all, the game's difficulty is determined entirely by your starting fight. I apparently did too well there. The hallway fights were no problem, but the two final boss fights (behind the secret door on floor 9, and at the top of the tower) were impossibly tough. There are too many long sentences that I can't possibly complete in time with my wpm, so I'm pretty much guaranteed to take too much damage and lose these fights every time. (Though see my Edit below.)
And secondly, the auto save mechanic is atrocious. I explored to the final boss, couldn't beat him, backtracked, got to the secret boss, got a save point there, couldn't beat him either, then tried to backtrack further and explore more of the tower to gain more health for the fights. So I explored the remaining incomplete floors to 100%, went back to the boss battle, died, and... all progress since the last auto save was reset. Terrible, terrible design. Maybe there's a good reason for not allowing manual saving, though I doubt it. Even then, there can't be one for not auto-saving any time you cross the corresponding boss checkpoints, or whenever you change floors.
The typing aspect of this game is truly original and (except for the inflexible difficulty scaling) enjoyable, but the dungeon master part of the game, and the save system, are designs that have become history for a reason.
I'm upset =(.
EDIT: I did eventually recall a game mechanic to prevent boss damage and hence beat the game, but my second point in particular still stands.
Hey there, I tried the game again (on itch.io, if these are different versions), and from what I can tell, there are still tons of special characters in the last two recipes. In "Pan-Asian Lunch", the Friturier "wipes away a single tear" once, which consists of pure special characters, and the patissier says "yum?" once, with a question mark. I haven't been able to progress much in the last recipe, but from what I can tell, it's similarly filled to the brim with special characters.
Also, I no longer get the music in Chrome, but that problem may be on my end (or due to a browser extension or something).
Anyway, I've had my fill of the game, and I understand if you want to move on to other projects. Just wanted to let you know.
Hey there, thanks for the reply. I've only recently begun programming (in Python; no experience with Javascript), so looking for solutions on Stack Overflow was the best I could do.
If my suggestion re: keypress vs. keycode didn't work, all I can think of is a clumsy workaround: Allow players to map their controls, i.e. instead of asking players which button they want to press for up/down/left/right/jump/shoot, here ask them which button to press for question mark, period, dash, full stop, etc.
Hey there, thanks for the quick reply!
I tried the keycode site, but it doesn't seem to recognize special characters if they're part of a two-button combination (e.g. "A" = shift + 'a', ":" = shift + ".", etc). Pressing capslock doesn't help, either; I only get the keycode for e.g. "a" or ".", never for "A" or ":".) Maybe that's (part of) the problem, not (just) the language-specific keyboard layout? (Though see my remarks at the very bottom - maybe checking via keycode instead of sth else is the problem.)
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Anyway, here are some key codes:
188 = comma
189 = dash
190 = period = '.'; holding shift plus period does nothing, it's still just period
When I press the button for "'" / "#", I get key code 191 (forward slash) instead.
The button for '*' / '+' / '~' yields key code 187 (equal sign) instead.
The button for "ä" yields key code 222 (single quote / "ä") instead.
The button für "ü" yields key code 186 (semi-colon) instead.
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I couldn't find *any* button which yields "?", which leads me to believe this line of inquiry maybe isn't fruitful? Rather than try to map whatever I press to whatever key code javascript turns it into, maybe there's instead a way to have Javascript correctly recognize my inputs as coming from a German language schema / keyboard?
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I quickly googled the topic, and I think that what you actually want might be the keypress method, instead of keycode? See the answers here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7831494/how-to-get-the-correct-language-and-... and here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11030532/keypress-and-keyup-why-is-the-keyco...
Hey there, thanks a lot for making this game! I played the version at http://www.toomanychefs.party/ and absolutely loved it.
But I couldn't complete recipe 5/6 (pan-asian lunch) because the game never recognized any special characters I typed (e.g. there's a "single tear" you have to type, a ":'(" smilie or something; I couldn't get the ":", let alone the rest; and another line says "yum?", and I couldn't type the question mark). I use a normal German keyboard layout, so I suppose the problem somehow resulted from that; but in-game, I don't really have a way to check which character I have to type to get it recognized as e.g. a "?".