qwerty741's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Diced Up!]

ok i have to make an updated review because finding out there's twice as many upgrades is like playing an entirely different game. that's how much of a difference it makes.
DISCLAIMER: i've only played easy mode (it's the easiest to grind for money and achievements), so it may not be entirely accurate on higher difficulties.

i honestly believe i wasn't the only one who didn't realize the other upgrades existed (except the one person who bought them all), and all the game needed was a couple UI arrows to show you can scroll the upgrade menu vertically.

---------------------------------
the biggest game-changer is the luck stat, which makes grinding for money sooo much less of a chore.
before, i needed to reach about floor 50 just to get a couple thousands coins;
i had to grind the game for hours to "max out" all stats that way (which turned out to be only half of them), which was an excruciatingly boring process.
with maxed out luck, i'm pretty convinced enemies drop coins 100% of the time (even if it's not stated anywhere), sometimes even 2, which means you can potentially earn anywhere between 5 and 100 times the amount of enemies you defeat in a run.

they also drop a lot more hearts (which are counted separately from coins; a single enemy will always drop a coin and ALSO have a chance to drop a heart at the same time).
not only does this make grinding upgrades more user friendly, but it also helps with reaching higher floors.
i basically had to force myself to die to end the run, so i'm sure if anyone cared for it they could reach a much higher floor than the current top score no problem.
haven't played any difficulty higher than easy, but i hope the heart drop rate is much lower on those, otherwise the entire difficulty curve goes out of the window because it's virtually impossible to die with max luck (at least on easy mode, up to floor 50).

i legit do not believe anyone has found the luck stat before, because with no other upgrade outside of luck (on easy mode), i got the invincible achievement by floor 25, and when i reached floor 50 (having defeated almost exactly 1000 enemies, just enough for the achievement), i easily had 200+ hearts and 10000+ money, in a single run.
the crazy thing here is that this was always possible (it's not like the latest update added the second layer of upgrades), as the only thing added was an easier way to show those upgrades existed in the first place.

---------------------------------
the sword is arguably the best weapon in the game when used correctly, especially on higher floors.
it doesn't attack far compared to actual "ranged" weapons, but it's AOE is big enough where you can hit multiple enemies at a time, even around wall corners.
to make up for its lack of range, it has the unique trait of being able to repel enemy projectiles.
this only happens when a bullet physically comes into contact with the actual slash animation, so it gets better with improved attack rate (which happens to be one of its upgrades).
its damage output is ok but it's irrelevant since you can also attack with reflected projectiles.

what's really notable about the sword is that when you get a high enough attack rate bonus, it effectively becomes an impenetrable barrier which makes you completely impervious to "direct" damage. any and all projectile will be reflected back, so you can just stand with your back to a wall and watch as the enemies helplessly shoot themselves to death.
its weakness is that it only reflects projectiles in front of you (your back is completely exposed), and rocket explosions will damage you all the same, so if one hits a wall close to you, or you reflect a rocket towards a close enemy, you'll still be caught in the explosion and take damage.

maxed out rifle is just a solid weapon overall; probably the best ranged weapon in the game, especially on easier difficulties.
it shoots a constant and fast stream of bullets, which is useful when you're trying to hide near a corner and you need to quickly dispatch a row of enemies on one of the sides.
it feels like it has the longest range of all weapons, so as long as you can clear out the area around you at the start of a floor, you can probably clear it without even seeing a single enemy.
its only drawback is that it has "weak" damage output, but with high enough fire rate it goes almost unnoticed (especially past floor 15 when you're guaranteed to get some kind of bonus to both damage and fire rate).

don't have much to say about the shotgun, which is unfortunate because i kind of liked it starting out.
on easy it already kills with no upgrades, and the upgrades simply increase its spread and number of bullets, so all it really improves on is the amount of enemies it can hit at once.
it pretty much fills the same niche as the rifle but with a lower fire rate, so it feels like a "worse" version of it.
after trying both the rifle and the shotgun on hard mode, to test whether the increased base damage of this one makes it better overall (due to facing tankier enemies), i can say that neither can oneshot them without at least some floor bonuses, so imo the rifle is still better (though i suppose it's down to personal preference).
only case where i prefer the shotgun over the rifle is on the early floors of insane (since there's no upgrades), where killing enemies earlier does make a difference.

i'm quite happy with the new and improved rocket launcher, since it's not only a liability anymore, and it actually has its own niche.
i always hated rolling it in the weapon rotation before the most recent change, because i had to constantly worry about not killing myself while using it, and increasing its explosion range only made that more likely.
it has a slow fire rate, it's hard to actually hit the bullet, and when it did the explosion didn't even deal enough damage to kill an enemy.

i still think it's likely the worst weapon out of the 4, but at max level the explosion range covers like half the screen (for reference, if you're behind a square barricade, you can shoot into it and the explosion will hit all the way to the opposite side of the wall), and it actually kills stuff too thanks to the damage upgrade.
moreover, i don't have to worry about dying from shooting myself anymore, if i suddenly switch to it while near a wall or enemy (thank you for that btw).
it's great at crowd control, provided you actually land the shot (you can now also aim at a nearby wall to make it easier, without being damaged for it).

i would also like to add that the enemy rocket launcher seems affected by the explosion range upgrade as well, unless it was just that large in the first place.
i'm saying this because i've seen entire clusters of enemies being hit by an enemy stray explosion in the crowd (or when they were nowhere close to the explosion), and i'm not sure if this is intended behavior or not.

[Gacha Panic]

not sure how that happened considering the changes don't mention anything about enemies, but something messed with the balancing somehow.
i think it has something to do with enemies not being able to be attacked off-screen.

the game tends to slowdown a lot whenever you're engaging in battle. previously it would be almost constantly in slowdown because gacha units would target an enemy and relentlessly attack it until it died (even offscreen), so it seems the idea of not allowing this was some kind of soft-fix for the lag issue.

however, most of your money intake ended up being from offscreen battles, because either enemies attacked less frequently when offscreen, or units would not get damaged, as you'd get streams of coins coming in from offscreen consistently, while your army stayed alive.
meanwhile now you can only battle on-screen, so you can only collect money if you're actively in battle (where you can see it).

the way coins get collected also seems to have been nerfed, as the ones that spawn on the opposite side of where you're standing won't get magneted towards you unless you walk towards them (effectively halving money gain from battles).
they also don't seem to be collected even if you're close, if they don't have "sight" on you (if they're around a corner and there's a building in the way).

blue lobsters also severely need nerfing, as they can decimate your entire army in seconds (even if your units bar goes offscreen) and more often than not even survive the whole assault before your entire army is destroyed. couple that with only half the money gained, and you pretty much can't even see the 100k rent anymore, much less overcome it.
just some food for thought

squidly responds:

I’m considering undoing the change. Yes it makes the game more stable but it also messes with the high scores. The other option is re-balancing and making a new high score table, but it might be too late for that?

[Bird Tapper vs the Krampus Fellowship Clan]

i'm just going to wait for someone else to solve these.
i liked the original one because, despite enemies being all over the place, you could instinctively understand the intended path to perfectly solve a level.
they were spread out just enough to lead you in a pre-determined direction.

meanwhile, you can tell these were user-generated as enemies and bombs seem to be spread out pretty much everywhere.
you know there's SOME path to clear almost everything, but there's no clear direction of where you should go in the first place, to the point it's a hunt to even find the goal to clear the level.

i'm sure they're still good and well thought-out (to an extent), but randomly bashing my head against the wall until something sticks isn't quite my cup of tea.

EDIT: decided to give it a proper try, so here's all i managed to get:
- 1: 1400/1400
- 2: 7800/7800
- 3: 30900/24900
- 4: 9100/6000
- 5: 6300/3900
- 6: 10600/10600
- 7: 14600/14600
- 8: 9500/9500
- 9: 5800/5800
- 10: 17400/17400
- 11: 8600/7900 (apparently skipping the whole level IS the intended way to get gold on this. smh)
- 12: 13600/13500 (turns out there's a gimmick with one of the gun guys; they're supposed to shoot you on sight, except one of them doesn't trigger when you get close to it, which i'm not exactly a fan of. the intended solution also doesn't combo every enemy, which is extra weird)
- 13: 21000/21000 (the only way to clear this without a guide is to cheese the level tbh. jump+uppercut right at the start to get on the wall above you, then jump and mash dive so you bounce off the first enemy and then don't go out of bound. should end up right behind the goal, then punch forward)
- 14: 21100/21100 (this level is just insane even with a guide. every jump is way too precise with little time to process what's going on)
- p1: 2200/1800
- p2: 3000/2500
- p3: 19200/19200
- g1: 9600/9600
- g2: 11300/11300
. g3: 7000/6500
- k1: 2100/1500 (not as bad as it looks, if you know what to do; which you normally don't)
- k2: 4800/800 (there's a pixel perfect jump for extra points. besides the one to reach the goal)
- k3: 800/800 (the nerf made this so much better. i actually had fun finding completely unintended ways to go through, and there's lots of them)

EDIT 2: i would like to formally apologize to the creator of the levels i was missing.
while at first simply watching the intended solutions felt daunting, after attempting them (for a long time) i can say i did have fun clearing them (in hindsight), although i'm not sure if it's because some of them got nerfed.
for future reference, knowing the intended path makes all the difference, because i can't imagine anyone ever figuring out how to solve most of them (14 in particular) without knowing beforehand.

behold! my magnum opus:
https://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/212ca5050a1ede2fe3851471e0060547
(someone pls make a proper video walkthrough, the filedump really wasn't made to host all these video files, they take so much space)

ProsciuttoMan responds:

I'm glad you appreciate the K3 edit: I agree, the original was far too brutal. With K2, I think its kinda fair to keep the balloon ninja, since it forces the player to learn about The Kid's short hop, but I think the beginning of K3 was way too restrictive originally.
The original level's strange design left room for a lot of unintended shortcuts, and I thought it'd be cool to kinda lean into that aspect more: I feel like it fit pretty well especially with I Wanna Be The Guy being sort of a Metroidvania game lol.
I believe there were at least 3 routes that I assume were unintentional in the original level. I took note of that, and decided to make it more apparent and feasible for the player: so at least 3 of the routes are very much intended haha.

[DARK SWORD: The Light of Ainn]

updating my review because all the bugs i encountered have been fixed, so i need something new to type. just putting down a couple things i found while playing the game for future reference.
in order of priority:

all the medals seem to have been fixed; at the very least, i haven't encountered any issue with them so far. however, it's weird that there's no medal for defeating Elderoth. (it was probably the second scorched groove medal that got removed)

in regards to the save system, it seems to work properly between sessions.
once you beat the game, continuing locks you into the ending cut-scene;
this likely happens because the game is coded to auto-save whenever you approach the altar in the middle of the main hub, which is where the ending cutscene takes place (you can tell because, when continuing, it doesn't start from the beginning of the cutscene, but from the second half of it).
basically, once you beat the game once, you can't continue from where you left off, which is pretty upsetting if you want to do something else in the current save without having to play from scratch.
(for the record, the game also auto-saves after releasing the seal of kalasdrine, once you've already been teleported in the cervus boss fight arena. so solving the cutscene save alone won't help with continuing from the previous save)

you can't re-enter rooms with bosses (main bosses) after defeating them (probably to prevent being stuck in the boss room, or having to re-fight them).
because of this, the hirunga lore book is missable (the one in the top boss room).
another funny this is, because the corridor to the boss in the pits is not blocked off, you can just walk past it and go out of bounds, though there's not much going on there since it's all void.
EDIT: you CAN re-enter bosses rooms after defeating them, but you need to defeat all 7 of them.
(before the final boss, when the lightning effect is active in the main hub area).

the goroth book respawns, even if collected properly (the one on the bridge on the left side with all the enemies)
the (third?) key in the main hub area also respawns after being collected properly.
EDIT: the book stops respawning. not sure of what causes it (collecting the cinnder book, or any other book afterwards may stop it from respawning once collected).

weird interaction with the hammer: you can't dodge while you hold the hammer (which also means you can't run).
if you switch to your gun, hold space to run, then switch to the hammer while holding space, you can run with the hammer out.
while i understand not being able to dodge because the hammer is broken, i wish i could at least run while holding it without having to do it via gimmick, if nothing else because it is still possible.

beating the game WITHOUT purifying the sword seems to lower the wall to the holy tower of ainn. it also doesn't trigger the seal in the previous room.
that means you fight providence in the regular ending, and cervus in the purified ending.
providence seems to have been completely reworked since the time i fought it by walking through walls.
there's a lot more bullets and the boss has enough health where you can't just cheese it by tanking its attacks. it's actually a really difficult fight, good job with it.
however, you CAN cheese the cervus fight; the boss has so little hp, i can basically 2-shot each of its phases with the shotgun alone (with no upgrades), without even seeing any of its attack patterns (you can defeat it faster than most of the regular bosses, because of end-game scaling probably)
i reckon a little (a lot) hp boost may be in order there, especially considering it's supposed to be the harder ending to achieve.

i also found the skull ring. funny easter egg, although not yet implemented.
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gameplay tips: the shotgun has AMAZING burst damage; it entirely depletes your energy bar on use, and deals damage proportional to the energy consumed. for that reason, it's better to think of your melee weapon as a way to refill your energy for the gun, rather than using it to deal damage when there's an opening in the boss pattern. it's just THAT good.

you can dodge in place (press spacebar without moving).
this is useful if you want to just mash attack against an enemy that is going to do a single attack against you, that would force you to move away then dodge back in. (examples being secarta's gun attack).

because of "later update syndrome", defeating Heart of Corruption grants you double energy bar, while defeating Sheregon grants you the ability to "bomb" (screen-wipe bullets).
because of how significant both of these upgrades are, it's recommended to defeat either of these bosses as soon as possible (if able to) to make the game significantly easier.
defeating Kraol also gives 2 more max hp, which isn't as significant but always helpful.
defeating Cinnder gives an upgrade to the sword block ability. it's only relevant if you're using the sword as a melee weapon, but it's there if you want it.

if you defeat a non-main boss, but you don't collect their dropped item, it will be auto-collected when you leave the area, so you don't need to worry about missing any of them.
you can press ESC to pause the game and check your inventory; you can't see how many items you've collected, but as long as you're holding at least one, you can read their description.

once you're on your way to the corrupted ending, you can still pivot to the purified ending if you purify your sword before fighting the final boss.
however, once you've purified your sword, you can't go back to the corrupted ending unless you start from scratch.
for that reason, the corrupted ending is potentially more difficult to achieve than the secret ending (on top of the corrupted ending boss being much harder imo)
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keys locations:
- room to the right of the moving platforms section in the underground dungeon;
- top area (dead valley), to the left of the bonfire before entering the mid-boss room, on the left side of the castle walls there's an opening that leads to an area with the key;
- on the top right side of the ramparts in the main hub there's a watery area with a destructible pile of something; destroy it to reveal the key underneath.
(the pile may be unbreakable, and i believe you need to use specifically the hammer to break it)

evil core locations: 5 total (of potentially 12)
- right above the stairs that lead to the ramparts on the right side of the main hub area;
- room above the moving platforms section in the underground dungeon;
- bottom room in the pits, after defeating Ill'Maggoth;
- bottom room in the sanctum, after defeating Goroth (before the room with the statue);
- in the middle of the blood dungeon, right below the main entrance (from the graveyard).

cursed ingots locations: 10 total (only 9 necessary)
- defeat Cathralon.
- defeat Crucible of Shadows (Dark Crucible).
- defeat Ill'Maggoth.
- defeat Goroth.
- defeat Elderoth.
- on the ramparts on the right side of the main hub area. bottom side of the stairs.
- below the entrance to the left side area (bottom left of the main hub), in the middle of a circular alcove.
- above the lake to the top right of the main hub area, on the right side of the stairs that lead to the top area (dead valley).
- bottom right corner of dead valley (top area), near the campfire after the bullet trap.
- on the right ledge outside the entrance to the blood dungeon.

lore books locations: all 14
SECARTA - rightmost room in the blacksmith area.
CATHRALON - on the right side of the castle wall in the top area. there's an entrance in the bottom right corner (of the wall) that can only be accessed when approaching from the right side of the area.
HIRUNGA - bottom right corner of the old temple of ainn, above dead valley (after defeating cathralon).
DARK CRUCIBLE - (top) left area (kingdom ruins), below the spinning blades trap.
RAKUL - bottom area of kingdom ruins (after the spinning blades, before dark crucible), in the bottom left between 4 rock pillars.
CURSED GROWTH - top right side of dead valley (top area), in the top left corner of the ruins with a lamppost in the middle.
SHEREGON - top right corner of the main hub area, right before the entrance to the boss room.
KRAOL - right before the entrance to the blood dungeon, at the very end of the blood pool on the right side (bottom right of the graveyard).
CINNDER - left side of the sanctum, in front of the large statue.
ILL'MAGGOTH - above the entrance to the left side area (top left of the main hub), near the campfire.
ELDEROTH - top right corner of the (bottom) right area (graveyard).
HEART OF CORRUPTION - left corridor in the pits, after defeating ill'maggoth.
THRAXXAN V - on the ramparts on the right side of the main hub area. top side of the stairs.
GOROTH - (bottom) left area (bridge of the horned one), between the statues with laser eyesight.

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very easy cheese strat to beat bosses if you're really bad at the game:

- equip the hammer and the shotgun (friendly reminder you can't dash while the hammer is equipped; you need to switch to the shotgun if you really want to dodge/run)
- hold left click;
start with the shotgun (entirely depletes your dark energy), then press E to switch to the hammer. after 3 hits (up to 5 with double length energy bar), your energy is fully replenished. switch to the shotgun. rinse and repeat.

you can move if you feel like dodging but it's mostly unnecessary.
just tank everything and hold left click, while staying as close as possible to the boss when using the gun.
switch to the gun when you have enough energy for extra burst damage.
might get one heal in if you feel like it since you can heal while attacking.

this easily melts most of the bosses (on normal mode) with little effort, even with no upgrades
(i have no idea what the upgrades do lol)

[GOMBI-ACTION: BOOZE TIME]

the game is fun, although most of the in-depth mechanics don't really see much use.
the controls mention momentum, punch juggling and downward shooting, but at the end of the day you're using your bullets mostly to deal damage, and your jump only when in need of dodging (without giving much thought about its height or momentum).
one thing that i don't see mentioned anywhere which i believe is far more useful, is the fact that you can double jump, which helps a lot with repositioning mid-air.

i'm also not a fan of the way difficulty was increased for spicy:
on top of adding more bullets between attack patterns, the tells for each boss action are way shorter (at least, short enough where you can't react the same way as you can on easier difficulties).
individually they're fine, but put them together and you're constantly being bullied from one side of the screen to the other with barely room to breathe.

since you get infinite checkpoints between the two levels (if you die on the boss level, you can restart from the boss level without having to go through the previous gauntlet), it doesn't make much sense to be forced to play "basic survival" every time before the boss level.
would have been interesting if there was a hub where you could fight each level individually, and maybe that could give the option to implement more boss levels?

no-hit run (on chill difficulty, where you can actually react to boss attacks):
https://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/4d689c8111beae29b72452efd158fc81

[SUPERSLAP2444]

game's fair, though it takes a bit to get used to the mechanics:
the "slap" attack, which is this game's quirk (reflects orange projectiles and deal damage on contact), and your bombs being tied to each stage instead of your life (you don't get 3 bombs per life, but each boss stage starts you with 3 bombs).
this is relevant for 1-hit mode, where you're free to use all 3 bombs whenever since they'll be "refilled" on the next stage; but it also means any additional unused bomb won't carry over.

there are some things that did somewhat take away from the experience that i'd like to see addressed:
- X and C should be reversed. i'd like my panic button next to my regular shoot button, and i don't see a reason why the button to skip dialogue should be between them.

- the boss hp bar doesn't actually tell you how much health the bosses have: sometimes i'd deplete it completely, but the boss would still not die until it got hit some more.
i can't tell what causes this, as it's not related to "keeping your combo going", nor the time left. the amount of time it gets extended also differs between each boss, so i can only assume it's related to each of them having more (different amounts of) health that isn't properly shown.

EDIT: it seems the last hit HAS to be a reflected bullet. if you're dealing damage with your slap as the boss is being hit by a reflected bullet, it may also cancel the death animation. basically you need to make sure you aren't directly hitting the boss yourself for it to go down, which is a weird gameplay choice regardless.

- the color of the bullets you can and can't reflect: while it's noticeably different for most attack patterns, some of them where both types are mixed in (2nd boss specifically) make it really difficult to tell them apart. it's hard to tell what's to dodge and what you can mash through.

- invincibility on death (if it exists) needs to be slightly extended, for the purpose of repositioning. while the area around you does get cleared of bullets when you respawn, some patterns require you to be in specific positions to dodge the remaining pattern (relevant patterns are the last one for the third boss, and the second time-out spell for the final boss that forces you to strafe from opposite sides of the screen); however moving out of that circle gets you killed again almost immediately.

- the screen white-out at the end of the last pattern. you can still die while the screen's fading, meaning you need to keep dodging bullets you may not be able to see properly.
this is a minor thing, since it doesn't last long and you can bomb through that last part, but it's still somewhat unfair to the player because it assumes they either have that extra bomb for it, or maybe they think they're safe when they're not. might be annoying for anyone trying for higher dififculties.

there's the usual API timeout issue with medals, but otherwise they all seem to work.
just a heads up for whoever plans to play this later down the line

EDIT: my scuffed no-hit run after like a hundred of retries
(i panicked a lot on the last boss and kept getting myself in the worst position every time, so i ended up having to use every single bomb i had. could have been much cleaner but i really didn't want to die)
https://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/9ba487a5082a90cf72dac86f510ed7ce

[Super 3D Island]

i see this game is the "speedrun" kind of game so i'm definitely not the target audience for it, but i gotta say the wall jump mechanic is super aggravating.

i'm not sure if it's because the camera moves as you're performing jumps, or adding directional influence mid-jump changes your trajectory, or because it takes a while for the wall slide to register, but i can't count how many times i had to climb the mountain in the middle of the map over and over again, because either i didn't climb on the right surface, or i landed on the wall to the side instead of the one opposite of where i'm jumping from, or i simply didn't stick to the wall and just slid off.
eventually i simply stopped inputting anything else and just kept mashing spacebar between walls, hoping the auto-camera was designed to make those jumps as easy as possible to land, and somehow made it to the top.

minor annoyance is also how diving from mid-air has immense endlag and covers extra distance as you land, with seemingly no control until the entire dive animation ends.
i kept trying to dive after accidentally missing a jump to hopefully recover, and instead ended up throwing myself off cliffs, resulting in a worse position than i would have been in, had i done nothing at all.
though i suppose this part is intended.

tl;dr sticky wall jump is rough. everything else seems fine? to an extent;
though i'm not sure if it works for speedrunning purposes.

EDIT: i don't know what you changed specifically but it feels so much better to play already.
i definitely noticed the change with the dive end animation because i could actually use it to platform instead of a hailmerry.

i didn't realize how much i needed mouse controls for the camera until i had it; it makes walking around so much better because turning the camera as i'm walking now feels seamless, instead of doing hard turns which would mess around with my character orientation.
as i keep holding the same key while moving, turning around the camera at a sharp angle with keys tends to make the character spin around in place instead of going in the same direction, so it's definitely a welcome change.

i don't think there's necessarily been a change with the wall climbing/jumping (which was my personal bane) but for some reason it doesn't feel as unwieldy as before, so it must have been a combination of the camera control change, plus being able to dive with purpose.
even manage to get past the mountain in less than 10 minutes this time, so that's a result.
i wouldn't say it's "good", but it's definitely better than before.
i mean the wall-jump, specifically. the game is good

also, idk if this is just me being bad, but sometimes the jump height feels just a bit too low compared to the platforms?
basically, you can do a full hop to get on top of a platform, but more often than not i end up barely sliding onto its surface just below the top rim of the platform, so i end up stuck in a wall-jumping loop trying to simply jump and land on top of a platform more times than i would like to admit

FCPXAV responds:

I tried to make the slide similar to Mario 64 but i guess that just ended up frustrating people more than being helpful, I'll make it easier to control in the next update thanks! For now you can still jump out of a dive early!

Edit: update pushed!

[Dream Punk]

adding a review for this while i'm here because it's downright criminal how this went completely under the radar.
figured i'd leave a few tips for people that want to play this later using what i discovered on my own so far:

the game has a lot of interesting mechanics and movement options; it's also fairly challenging.
i can think of at least two challenges that require extreme knowledge of how the "ness" ability works, and both of them reward a chime so they're pretty much mandatory for completion.
(the balloon challenge in the top left of the map, where the timing is very strict, and the entire room in the middle of the map, which is already quite difficult to find and is basically a ness skill check, since you can't traverse it in any other way).

for starters, i recommend going to the right of the starting screen where you'll be able to unlock the hookshot ability. this will help immensely with getting some tapes to upgrade yourself early on.
i made the mistake of going to the left first on my first playthrough and that made it much more difficult to make significant progress. once you get the hookshot, you can start going left where you'll be able to get glide.

between bounce and glide, it's possible to adjust yourself indefinitely while bouncing on balloons, and the hookshot will allow for quick recovery and air mobility, which would otherwise result in constantly falling in water and being stuck in the same restricted area for a while.

my one gripe with the game is how the various abilities (besides how to perform them) are mostly left unexplained, along with their upgrades. there's also some controls that aren't explicitly started, and knowing about them makes a massive difference.

for example, you can perform ness using C instead of Ctrl. this will prevent you from accidentally closing the game window with Ctrl+W if you accidentally press them in combination while messing around with the ability.
incidentally, you can only direct the ness ability using left or right, so ctrl up is not even a proper combination, but it's still easy to accidentally input by mistake if you're controlling the character at the same time.
while you can use A and D to control the ability, you can also use the left and right arrow keys (while the playable character itself can only move with WASD)

in regards to upgrades, bounce and glide are the most useful to upgrade, since they increase how high you can bounce and your maximum air time.
investing a bit into hookshot may be useful for increased range, although i never figured out if that's what it actually does once upgraded.
movement speed is self-explanatory, but i personally never upgraded it more than once because i was worried it may mess with my control over precise platforming.

upgrading ness increases distance covered when launched, and at max level it also increases your speed (reduces time necessary to cover that distance).
however, sometimes covering more distance is detrimental (specifically for the dedicated room in the middle of the map, which is designed with a specific distance covered by the ability in mind).

in regards to the grind ability, it may be because it's unlocked way later when you've already gotten used to your other abilities, but i never found any real use for it.
it was also difficult to figure out where you can use it or not; you need to be holding shift while overlapping "wires", which are specifically the ones that usually lead to buttons. (one example is freefalling on the starting screen while holding shift. you'll automatically grab onto the wire that passes through the whole screen).

above all, fully upgrading recall is a boon. aside from allowing you to teleport back to the starting area, when maxed out it allows to freely fast-travel between any area.
you need to hold E until only the map is shown, and while holding E you can use arrow keys to change the highlighted area on the map where you want to fast travel to, then release E.

back when i played to completion, i managed to amass a total of 22 upgrade points, so there should be at least 22 tapes you can collect, for those interested in upgrading their abilities.
in any case, you can always re-spec if you talk to the npc in the starting area (you can view your current upgrades at any point by pressing TAB, but you can only re-allocate them by talking to said npc).

additionally, the last time i played there was a bug which unlocked chime medals even without collecting all of them.
i never figured out how it works specifically, but my guess is that chimes collected over multiple playthroughs count towards the "overall amount" in regards to medals.
that is to say (unless it's been patched since), it's likely possible to get the medal for "collecting all 9 chimes" by collecting the first one repeatedly over multiple new games.
it's still possible to collect all 9 chimes legitimately in a single playthrough (as i've done it before), but as mentioned the last 2 or 3 are extremely difficult to get

bokononyossarian responds:

Thank you! We are happy that some folks have enjoyed it!!!

[BETON]

is ascend timer-related? the best i can do is barely above 2 minutes so if it's sub 2 that's real rough.

i was thinking it may be related to the platform at the top, but the problem with that is the platform already starts at "ground level", and it begins rising as soon as you collect the last collectible.
even if you were already near the platform it would be difficult to make up the height difference considering the jump height, so there's no way to make it up there in time even if you leave the highest collectible for last.

additionally, the game could really use a proper reset button. something that doesn't force to refresh the page if you want to restart from scratch

EDIT: i've circled the border of the entire map way more times than necessary, and moved the camera to look through walls hoping to find something hidden.
after throwing myself off the map an innumerable amount of times, i've concluded there's absolutely no hint whatsoever in-game anywhere.
aside from the itch.io page for the game itself and soundtrack, there's also no other resource related to this game anywhere on the internet. so i got nothing

EDIT 2: ended up having to get help to "figure it out" (and by that i mean they pretty much spelled out how to) and now that i see it, i kind of hate it?

for one, it feels very gimmicky: there is absolutely no indication anywhere if you're looking for it "normally".
in fact, the only way to see it feels completely unintended, rather than part of the game.
moreover, once you do get it, it completely invalidates the entire core of the game, which is platforming.
i'm not sure how that affects timed runs, but i reckon it must be very frustrating for someone playing the game normally, then realizing the best way to approach the game is basically cheating

Fe26 responds:

I can tell you it is not timer related. And it has something to do with the platform at the top but there is something you are missing. Perhaps you could start looking "outside of the game itself".

But if is it speed what you want, there is a speedrun.com page that might help you.

[TrashKitty]

found the pole on level 4 of 6 (ignoring the tutorial), the one where timers are first introduced.

might help someone else, considering i spent an ungodly amount of time trying to climb the left edge of level 2 only to be met with a solid wall.
in hindsight i'm glad it wasn't there because of how difficult it was to get up there in the first place