qwerty741's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Epic Boss Battle]

honestly, i think this is fun.
my only complaint is that i'm having trouble understanding what's killing me half the time.

specifically, aside from the "blasters" lasers which instantly kill you, everything else seems to deal damage at random.
sometime i'd take 3 and some other time i'd take 20 from the same attack.

the exact pointer hitbox is also somewhat unclear, as sometimes i get hit even though it feels like i shouldn't. though that must be a visual problem and not the game's fault.

another minor issue i have is the "green floor" at the bottom of the screen.
it's a perfectly serviceable play area, so you can move there normally, but due to the color of the bullets being yellow it's difficult to use, and it also adds nothing to the gameplay.
personally, i'd be fine with it not being there at all and only having a solid blue background

tbh i think most of the "difficulty" comes from the fact that you can basically hit the boss only during its blasters attacks (when it's completely still), while every other attack pattern either doesn't have a hitbox to attack, or the movement tracking makes it so it's impossible to stay in line with the boss without getting hit in the process.
considering the patterns are picked randomly, it all comes down to how many blasters attacks in a row you can get before all the other patterns kill you

my most hated pattern is the bullet circle because it triggers instantly regardless of the previous pattern and each bullet deals about 20 damage, so if you're locked in the middle from the previous pattern for whatever reason, you're pretty much dead.
the bullets themselves are really big, and staying near the border also kills you, so it's really difficult to dodge as well (for me)

edit: i hate bullet circle so much it does so much damage and when i die to it i'm told i died "due to touching the screen" regardless. it's like it's mocking me

[The Munchers]

a few notes for anyone playing this game:

each mode has 4 main stages: breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert
each level has 3 bonus items; if you collect all items in a stage, you'll play a bonus stage.
the bonus stages are, respectively: brunch, quick snack 1, quick snack 2, after midnight.
each bonus stage also has bonus items, but they're only relevant for your score.
this means each game has 4 stages, with potentially up to 4 additional bonus stages, for a total of 8 stages overall

you can press spacebar to attack, and have a limited number of attacks.
you can easily play a full game without ever using the attack button, but while rare it is possible to encounter a set where all 4 lanes are blocked by jawbreakers/mooncheese.
however, the attack only works on mooncheese and nothing else, so keep that in mind.

the "iron fist" and "vanishing" achievements are possible, but only on your first ever attempt:
for some reason, once you've eaten a jawbreaker or mooncheese, the game permanently saves as "having eaten one", so the only way to get the achievements if you can't do it in your first sitting is to entirely erase all your save-data before attempting it.
this is easily accessible if you're playing the game using newgrounds player, which saves your data locally on your pc.

for iron fist, either hard or expert mode probably work, but i can confirm it works on hard mode.
for vanishing, the order in which the 3 modes are played seems irrelevant (i've played hard, then easy, then expert); you also only need to clear the main 4 stages, so aside from dodging mooncheese (and additionally jawbreakers), it's also recommended to avoid bonus items if possible so you need to play as few total stages as possible.

in regards to bonus items:
every level has 3 unique bonus items. they're different between levels, but each specific level has its own fixed items;
for example, breakfast's bonus items are always apple, grape, bacon.
they will appear during the level in a random order (so having an empty space while collecting them doesn't necessarily mean one was missed yet)

however, there's a few bugs in regards to these:
- brunch's bonus items are apple, grape, bag. however, in level you'll get apple, pinapple, box. this is the only level with different bonus items than the ones listed.

- the brunch and after midnight bonus levels are unavailable in easy mode; even if you collect all bonus items, those levels will be skipped.

- on expert mode, the second bonus item (pineapple) during bonus 2 (quick snack 1) will never appear in-game. thus, the "bonus muncher" achievement (and consequently its respective medal) is impossible to obtain.

since it requires to get "every bonus item in-game", i'm not sure if it's only because of the missing item in expert mode, or also because of the two unavailable stages in easy mode. either way, it's unachievable

[Rolling Lee 2.0]

while there's certainly an element of randomness which would normally make the game "unfair", it's balanced out by infinite continues, very generous checkpoints and more than one hitpoint per stage.

if you ignore how the bosses movements basically make or break a run (and how they can clip through walls lol) the difficulty is challenging without requiring pixel perfect movement or similar gimmicks.
(basing this on hard mode, which is the only difficulty i played, under the assumptions that easier difficulties are easier)

if i had to bring up a few complaints, one would be how "close" the player character is to the bosses attacks.
while this works fine for endless mode and the dodging sections, it becomes a problem against the very first boss' attacks, which have a spread that makes it impossible to avoid damage unless you're at opposite sides of the screen, making the first boss one of the "hardest" ones to get past due to rng.

there's also some kind of glitch with the 3rd boss (stage 2 phase 2), which seems to freeze/crash the game randomly.
have yet to figure out the actual trigger, but it seems to be unrelated to time elapsed, browser used, or remaining boss hp.
i'd say i managed to get past the frozen screen only about 1 every 7 attempts, assuming it's entirely random;
my only other guess is that it happens when you "miss your attack window", as in, when there's a gap in the planets that fall mid-screen, but you can't hit the boss even once before they start falling again.
this is purely conjecture and i don't really see how that would be possible, but that's about when it felt like the game froze up, imo.

4th (and last) boss is extremely difficult. unlike the first boss you can somewhat predict its movement, and there's a few safe spots that allow to get past its first phase without much effort if you know what you're doing.
at about half hp, you're thrown into another dodging section, and then the real aggravating part begins.
when it ends, you're immediately thrown back into the action. sometimes, you'll be overlapping the boss attack and die immediately, which is mildly upsetting.
the second phase is almost identical to the first one, except for the addition of an extra set of bullets that spawn diagonally from the bottom of the screen.
while these don't overlap with the "safe spots" from phase one, they make it nigh impossible to move OUT of the safe spots and get an attack in without dying.
there's still some random aspects to the boss' attacks timing, so it took a significant amount of attempts to clear even though i had an idea of how to hit the boss without immediately dying, somewhat.

tl;dr challenging game, fairly decent execution, somewhat reliant on rng which is detrimental for skill-based games such as bullet hells.
can't really say how difficult it is overall, because it's more lenient than expected for its genre when it comes to dying, but this is also necessary due to its randomized nature.
i suppose it balances out

hopefully the third boss crash is just an isolated issue on my side, otherwise it should probably be addressed at some point

[Disguise and Conquer]

nothing particularly elaborate, but i had fun mixing and matching.
the end screen dialogue is pretty funny.

been trying to figure out the values and i gotta say some of the items i thought were "obvious" for each disguise ended up actually giving less points than others.
either they were really well thought out specifically to make it difficult to get S rank, or the exact opposite of that lol.

also for some reason i can't see the buttons for story mode and free play on the main menu; it's just 2 black boxes.
it's at worst a visual glitch so it doesn't really affect gameplay, but i wanted to mention it in case it's only a problem on my side

currently making a guide but there's a lot of trial and error involved so it may take a while

EDIT: fixed
https://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/1614bc47bb5aa5fa6703ab78254cd824

AhWham responds:

Thanks for the review! On the topic of the scores and getting S rank, they were specifically thought out but I should've done more to help players understand that better. I tested a bit with the main menu and I haven't encountered the black boxes glitch you mention, could be a issue with the file path to the texture sprites.

Also, if you need help with the guide: I can provide the specific numbers for each costume if you'd like!

[Madness: The Battering]

making an updated review because 1.0.2 plays much different than 1.0.0

for starters, having 3 energy instead of 2 per turn makes the game much more bearable, since you're pretty much guaranteed to be able to play something at least once per turn.
it also makes the game faster overall so that's nice. the timeout timer being reduced also helps with that.

i think rebalancing the characters to be much weaker than before was a good choice.
having x2 attack on legendaries specifically was straight up broken, which was exacerbated by other uncommon characters having lower defense as a trade-off for higher attack.

the only issue with the rebalancing is that now pretty much every character has 1 defense, with a few outliers having slightly better defense. this pretty much defeats the purpose of defense cards, which although not completely useless don't add much to the table in terms of survivability i reckon.
still, it's probably not a good idea to address characters stats for a while, if not at all at this current stage, because that would open a whole bunch of other problems with the balancing imo.

cards overall feel ok due to the increase to the energy base.
cards that were previously a waste of energy don't feel completely useless anymore, since you're likely to be able to still use something afterwards and it's still 1 damage versus none at all.
cards that previously felt overly expensive like the hook (3 cost, 8 damage), now feel ok to use since you don't need to skip an entire turn just to be able to play them, and dealing 8 in a turn is still respectable damage.
grav apple is still broken, especially in comparison to the aforementioned hook; 1 cost for 10 damage is insane. though i'm guessing the reason it doesn't feel as polarizing as before is likely due to the change in the number of cards within the deck mentioned in the patch notes.
although i have no idea how many of those were there before, i can definitely tell it changed for the better.

i have one gripe with the gacha because i've been constantly rolling the 500 one and somehow still got most of the commons even though they're supposedly 1%. not really an issue with that per-se, but since i'm trying for all the characters and still missing a fair number of legendaries, i figured my luck is surprisingly good, in the worst way possible lol.
i think i'm missing about 10 characters overall but i keep rolling dupes orz.
ok rant over

so yeah, probably not a good idea to change the balancing for a while as long as it's still somewhat fair.
i reckon if both cards effects and character stats were to be addressed properly, it would take a lot of time and testing, meaning it's not something that can be patched in a matter of a few days

the minigames are fun, and also award extra money which helps in the long run.
you have no idea how many hot dogs i've eaten lol.
turns out the head hunting minigame is the best way to farm money; if you know what you're doing, you can easily make a thousand coins in a matter of minutes.

if there's one change that can probably be done in a reasonable amount of time, it would be improving the tutorial.
i've been matched with a few people already who either keep using multiple defense cards on the same character, hoping to increase their defense further, or straight up on a character with already good defense, to no effect

i understand it's part of the theme, but red text on dark background is also quite difficult to see.

edit: minor report
there's a mismatch for some of the unlocked medals. unfortunately i don't recall exactly which one is which, but i think at least the requirements for mermad had been swapped with another character.
the medkit card (3 cost, 10 group heal) displays 15 heal to all. the current effect is already strong enough imo so if it gets corrected it should probably be the picture and not the effect.

[Hell Runner Part 4]

1. HOTEL ROOM 666 - pick up the camera. get invitation
2. FLESH PITS - dialogue. get matchbox
3. DEMON HUNTER - use matchbox. get photo
4. DAILY DEMON - dialogue. get money
5. URIEL'S WARES - dialogue. get card
6. MYSTERY ROOM - dialogue. get donut
7. HOTEL ROOM 666 - dialogue. get Jikininki
8. DEMON HUNTER - dialogue. get blood coin
9. BLOOD OF BLASPHEMY - use blood coin. dialogue to get key
10. LABORATORY - use key. get energy rune
11. TIME PORTAL - use rune. get smoking pipe
12. STRAWBERRY FIELDS - dialogue. get strawberry
13. FELIX'S HIDEOUT - dialogue. get harp
14. WEED SHOP - dialogue. get card
15. MYSTERY ROOM - dialogue. get frozen treat
16. HEAVEN'S GATE - dialogue. get song
17. FELIX'S HIDEOUT - dialogue. get Enko
(Purple Haze) STRAWBERRY FIELDS - dialogue
18. DEMON HUNTER - dialogue. get blood coin
19. BLOOD OF BLASPHEMY - use blood coin
20. WEED SHOP - dialogue. get photo
21. DAILY DEMON - dialogue. get money
22. URIEL'S WARES - dialogue. get horus coin
23. TIME PORTAL - enter portal, then dialogue. get stone of anubis
(Archangels) FELIX'S HIDEOUT - dialogue
24. LABORATORY - dialogue. get beer
25. FLESH PITS - dialogue. get George
(Cruel Fortune) HOTEL ROOM 666 - interact with the crystal ball
26. BLOOD OF BLASPHEMY - dialogue. get photo
(Spank Bank) LABORATORY - dialogue
27. DAILY DEMON - dialogue. get money
(Bravo) MYSTERY ROOM - dialogue. win the quiz
28. URIEL'S WARES - dialogue. get control chip
(Skin Face) DEMON HUNTER - dialogue
(Hell's King of Metal) HOTEL ROOM 666 - dialogue
29. TIME PORTAL - dialogue. get Excalibur
(Eternal Damnation) chose to spare god

i'm biased because i played all the other ones, though if i were to pick one thing that's mildly annoying, it's the one minigame where you just need to click the same spot until the bar fills up, which you need to do like 4 different times with no change whatsoever

[A Light Maze: Beezlebulbs Gambit]

the game is ok but it desperately needs a better explanation for all of its mechanics.
i'm making a review for this specifically to add what i managed to find while playing, for future reference.

game starts with a (seemingly) unskippable cutscene and a whole pseudo-minigame that is wholly unnecessary imo. you need to interact with the e-mail you get and confirm to get started with the actual game.

you're the small lightbulb, and you move with arrow keys or wasd. it takes a while for the character to start moving, like there's some sort of friction on start-up.
spacebar is used to toggle the light on/off, which is the main mechanic of the game.
you have 2 separate bars to keep track of: you energy bar, which depletes overtime while the light is on, and your actual hp.
there are lightbulb boxes scattered around the map: these are checkpoints; when you die, you respawn to the last checkpoint you touched.
if you die due to your hp depleting, you should respawn with 3 hearts.
if you die due to your energy depleting, you respawn to the last checkpoint with the same amount of hearts you had.

the main objective of the game (i think) is to roam the map and collect lightbulbs.
while the light is on, your energy is constantly depleting so you need to turn off the light otherwise you'll "die".
while the light is off, you can walk freely but you won't be able to see any walls. it's also difficult to see in general so you'll want to walk around with the light on most of the time anyway.
while the light is off, you can press X to drop a "night light". these are supposed to be markers but they don't do much besides telling you that there "isn't a wall where you dropped one". they don't really illuminate your path in the dark in any way, and dropping one also consumes energy, so you're better off just walking with the light on. basically, they're mostly useless.

you can recharge your energy while standing on a battery. batteries can be found around the map, and are likely limited in number.
while the light is on, you can press B while standing on a battery to collect said battery; collecting a battery costs one heart. if you have only 1 heart left, you cannot collect a battery. you can hold up to 3 batteries at once.
while the light is off, you can drop a battery on the ground. this costs nothing, and you can drop a battery anywhere as long as you hold one. this means you can walk around with the light on while holding batteries, drop one when you need to recharge your energy, then trade one heart to pick back up the battery until you reach the next checkpoint.
while highly annoying, it's still the preferred way to move around the map rather than doing it blind imo, which invalidates the whole on/off mechanic;
not because you can do it, but because having the light off is so annoying and not worth it, it's still better to juggle your energy and hp with the lights on than to deal with that.

now to the main issue, and the whole reason i made this. to get out of the first room at all, you need to open doors. to open a door you need a key. to get the key, you need to bring it 3 "eyes".
the "eyes" are those red ball enemies that you can find around the map.
they will follow your position while the light is on, and will not follow you with the light off.
if they touch you, they will also drain your energy, which makes the whole endeavor extra annoying.
you need to lure 3 eyes to the key so that the key will follow you, then lure the key to a door to open it. the key will follow you regardless of the light being on/off.
the eyes also seem to not be able to cross batteries in their path, so if you dropped a battery and are unable to pick it back up, you'll need to do a whole lot of backtracking until you get an extra heart to pick it back up so you can continue luring them.
this whole system is not explained anywhere and honestly is one of the main problems of the game.

another problem comes with the level design: once you're past the first door you're met with spike traps and spider? enemies. if you touch them, you lose hp. i can't tell if the spider enemies also drain your energy, but they will follow you regardless of the light being on/off. fortunately i've found you can kill them by dropping a battery on your position while they're onto you, otherwise they'd be extremely irritating to deal with.

the spike traps however are terrible: once you walk over a spike trap, it triggers and hits you for one heart. unless you're walking straight over it laterally without stopping, you will be hit. if the trap is much bigger than your character, you will be hit regardless. once a trap is triggered, it will not reset even on death, meaning it becomes an impassable wall which deals damage to you if you come in contact with it again.
this is problematic for a number of reasons, due to some checkpoints being surrounded by these traps, meaning you'll be hit almost immediately when respawning, and also locking out some paths once triggered even accidentally. spike traps won't trigger if you're walking over them with the light off, but you also won't be able to see them until you turn the light back on.
once the light is on, spike traps which have been stepped over even in the dark will trigger regardless, and become an impassable damaging wall.

i've only managed to explore the right side of the map so far, but i can say that the rooms layout is kind of all over the place. specifically, the first room on the right has a whole lot of very narrow corridors surrounded by spikes, which also happen to be unnecessarily long.
the room right after, which is the middle room that can be accessed from different doors, is entirely too big and difficult to navigate (i got completely lost).
also because i used the key to enter said room from the top right, it seems i soft-locked myself as i wasn't able to locate any other key to access another room, forcing me to refresh and lose my progress.
between the keys issue, and spikes locking path, there's no soft-lock safety measure.

the lightbulbs you need to collect are fairly noticeable. they have the same designs on the medals, and likely accompanied by some npc characters or at least something that has not been seen before anywhere else. you need to interact with either the npc or the lightbulb itself with X, which if done successfully will get you the corresponding medal, and the lightbulb will start following you.
it seems you need to trade a certain number of hearts of held batteries to get a lightbulb, so it's possible interacting with not enough resources will not work. the specific currency necessary is written on the ground next to the lightbulb.

there are coins scattered across the map, but so far i'm unsure about their purpose.

explosive barrels deal 2 hp on contact. eyes can also trigger explosive barrels, upon which explosion they'll die. it seems eyes can still walk over triggered spike traps with no issue.
there are eyes spawners in the left and middle room that look like space wormholes or something, and are triggered upon standing over them. one problem with these is that they'll spawn infinite eyes as long as activated, and i somehow managed to almost cut myself off from going through the top left corridor due to the room being completely filled with eyes which constantly drain my energy even with the light off.

this is only a first playthrough so i may edit this information as i find stuff, but so far this is all i got

EDIT: soft-locking due to a lack of keys is unlikely, as there are extra keys to access the whole map regardless of which door you open first (not actually confirmed 100%).
they're simply difficult to find because of the map layout, and borderline impossible to get because of all the exploding barrels and rocks killing the eyes and respawning in the worst possible location.
if you happen to go left first, the "flip the switch" prompt boots you into the final boss room with no way back.
it's a point of no return, which would explain why it was previously difficult to achieve getting every lightbulb in a single playthrough.

what's actually possible is soft, locking the bottom right side of the middle room. there's a whole "spike trap maze", except it's not a maze and it's just spike traps.
i can't figure out why sometimes they don't trigger even if i walk over them, but the point is it is possible to trigger all of the spikes at the entrance of the floor. there's also rock enemies which block your path and shoot at you (which seem invincible) meaning dying there is actually extreemyl likely. once you have triggered enough spikes, you are effectively softlocked out of a key and a few other rooms.

honestly the one change this game desperately needs is a revision of how spike traps work. either reset them to the inactive state on death, or at least don't make them a wall. i'm not sure how many invincibility frames there are on hit, but if it's long enough it may still be possible to get past the wall with at least a bunch of hearts, otherwise it's really impossible to deal with.

can confirm all medals work, at least on multiple playthroughs, though some of them sometimes aren't awarded but that's not due to the game.

SuperSomethingGame responds:

Congrats on collecting all the medals and thank you for seeing it thru + reviewing :D

I understand where a lot of that is coming from and appreciate the feedback. So much of what you identified are byproducts of the game having more systems, scale and scope then time to make those things works as well as they could have lol.

Consequently, this will be improved upon this in future projects!

If this was a project that was in active development I would be really eager to implement some of this feedback, but this was intended as a one and done for a Game Jam + Learning.
This project was built in less then a week as my first project for the game engine GDevelop.

Not so long ago, I was considering switching engines for future projects and came across GDevelop and noticed the company was in the middle of its own fairly big game jam, so I decided to use that as a reason to speed run learning and trying out the engine + a new project management system that was also entirely new to me (Miro, having used Trello and all the sticky notes+notebooks in the world before)

I had 6 days at that time to work on the project and have it summitted, I also worked my normal job during that time, I missed a fair bit of sleep trying to wrangle this one in haha.

I vastly overestimated how much crunch that really was lol.

This new engine is parallel in a lot of ways to the engine I use but wound up a lot different then I expected, and this kind of got in the way of a few things I would have normally included like save states which was a planned feature but was cut due to time. I ended spending a lot of time scoping out the project, (over?)planning and building out the features and systems I had and got bogged down in the systems building.

Finishing the systems I scoped out took me easily 25-40% longer then I expected due to some unaccounted knowledge gaps in this new software, and I wound up short on time to balance the core loop and map, I spent literally half a day being able to test the full game loop after completing the whole map. 97% of the testing done was for feature testing along the way + implementations, that left very little time for polish, which I regret because my usual design philosophy would have been more iterative and focused on the moment to moment stuff that would make it way less annoying to play while maintaining a challenge.

I finished with all my key goals checked though which included having a
* Build from a fresh project + ground up to better learn the software
• A complete story, coherent theme/style/setting with a lesson, even if simple & silly
• Can be completed with low chance of game breaking issues.• (ie, minimum viable product)
* Gamepad, Touch, and Keyboard + Mouse Control
* Complete Pause Menu, with newgrounds login + at least music, full screen toggle, and link to my work.
* One continuous play session ( no hard pauses in gameplay after the pre game introduction)
* Newgrounds API = leaderboards + achievements (first time trying this too) (this missed the deadline but I added it along with some other "zero day" fixes, making for a total of 7 days, even though 98% was done in 6)

+ Ultimately learn GDevelops/ Miros core systems in a sprint, so I can decide if it was worth using in the future for other prototypes, jams, full projects etc.

I unintentionally put features/ game feel mechanics ahead of the UX for a lot of the project while I was focusing on testing a range of things inside of GDevelop and this cost the gameplay + onboarding a fair bit.

I have a lot better sense of how to scope out future projects thanks to this experience haha.

Despite its flaws, I hope you found some real enjoyment or meaning

Again, I am truly grateful for you sharing your time with my weird internet art project and you taking the time to write up your detailed review post :D

+PS I got rid of the cost on dropping the "night" lights, because that just took deleting one line of code and might help future players more ^_^ ( or cause some unintended knock on effect >.>).

I had to at least address one of these issues otherwise I wouldn't be able to sleep lol,
Then I started on a save system, got about 20minutes in and then remembered that this is closed project for me and reluctantly put it back down.

[Puk]

making a review because the game's quite confusing if you don't know what you're doing:

for starters, to unlock the hide ability you need to lure a human to the monkey to force it to hide itself. this will allow you to get most of the other abilities like float, trap etc.

to "tile" the floor, you need to cover it in traps then interact with the chupacabra.
to "complete the pit circle", you need to place a trap where a pit would be needed, then lure something else onto it (a human is easiest).

whenever you die or fall into a pit, both drumsticks for the sasquatch quest respawn.
i haven't encountered the bug where you're unable to collect items if you get more than two of these, but i would recommend watching out about it and making sure you aren't collecting either of them more than once.
moreover, the reward from the sasquatch quest is palette swap, which can already be done even without the item by pressing P.

to complete the game, you need to collect another 5 livers from humans after clearing the final quest to trigger the cutscene on the nest. for some reason the dialogue you get before clearing the quest resets after completing it the first time.
it's possible that the medal for completing the game only unlocks if the final quest is completed "correctly".

the map medal doesn't seem to unlock, no matter how many times i collect the map.
turns out there's more than one location where you can collect the map; my guess is that only one of those triggers the map medal.
so far i've found 4 different map locations:
- near the sign that warns about cryptid appearances;
- to the right of the shed near the farm, where the hat is located;
- below the pit where the party is held, somewhat hidden behind a tree in the corner;
- using the secret exit in the goatman's maze, in front of the "entrance" (before it resets to the actual maze exit).

none of these triggered the medal for me, so there's either an extra location, or something wrong on my side which i can't explain.

[Dark Sword Demo]

oh man, this has been updated a whole bunch since the last time i played it. time for the big rant:

for starters, you can actually lose against the boss in the tutorial area, and if you do, you don't get a second chance.
you get thrown directly into the main game either way and i think this is bad considering the first boss isn't particularly hard, and losing against it means you still don't have enough of an understanding of the controls.
also once you enter the main hub, the second boss statue from the left is missing already. i'm assuming this is the tutorial boss? (haven't looked at it when i lost against it, only after restarting my save and beating it, so i'm not sure if it was there when i lost)

speaking of the controls (and i think i'm alone in this tbf), can we have the movement controls to explicitly state "shift" instead of showing the button? for some reason i didn't realize that was meant to be shift, and ended up only discovering the dash ability accidentally at about the 4th boss, while misclicking my weapon rotation.
i was used to the previous versions of the game where you "dash" by mashing dodge (which is still better than normal dashing imo because you get invincibility frames), so i didn't see a need to have a separate dash button.

to reflect this addition, the dodge mechanic has been reworked to consume your energy whenever you dodge (at least, i don't recall it requiring energy in previous versions).
if you run out of energy, you can still dodge (which is good), but i don't really understand the use in having it drain your energy then? is it to incentivize using dash instead of mashing dodge, so you can save energy for parrying/shooting?

the energy mechanic has also been reworked. now when you run out of energy, a black ring appears around you (which is a much needed visual indicator for it).
the ring also acts as a "screen clear". this means you can parry until you run out of energy, then use the black ring to destroy even more bullet, which is really useful to create more openings against some of the bosses.

speaking of shooting, i've never found myself using the gun pretty much for the entire game.
the energy consumption is too fast, and you'd still rather save it for parrying rather than ranged damage (which can still be done with the sword after upgrading).
for that same reason, i put all my upgrades into the sword (i'm assuming you'll be able to upgrade both to the max if other minibosses get added).
the gun still seemed to get upgraded anyway by the time i got to the end-game.
btw great idea adding an upgrade system at the forge, real neat.

since the shotgun upgrade has been integrated with the gun (by right clicking), now the dungeon awards you with an extra weapon, which is the hammer.
at first i didn't see the use in it since you can neither dash nor dodge (oof) while wielding it, but eventually i realized the extra damage is actually really nice, and it can help melt some of the bosses real fast (more on that later).
it actually took me a while to figure out the secondary attack of the hammer, which requires holding right-click to store energy, then release right click for a large shockwave.
i kept charging the attack but then pressing left click thinking it would "double my normal damage", which instead cancelled the attack.

the difficulty for the bosses is still all over the place, though that's to be expected due to the upgrade system.
i don't know if it's me, but i felt like all the bosses i tried to face had massive amount of hp (or took negligible damage for how much i was wacking them), so it took me a whole hour before i managed to defeat my first boss (which was the top one), and then afterwards another hour to complete the game, but the first hurdle is really rough.
your weapon seem extremely underpowered, until you upgrade the sword like 2 times and then you have both ranged attacks (with no energy consumption) and a consistent way to heal your energy for parrying (and also extra damage? or maybe that was just me getting better at the game).

the way i finally managed to "get started" was realizing you can just brute-force the north and north-west mid-bosses with hammer.
you just stand close to them and keep mashing left click while face-tanking whatever they throw at you.
you can also heal while attacking for one more hp (which isn't much but it's better than nothing), and then use those 2 upgrade points to power up your sword.

the most annoying bosses were definitely the dragon in the north-east (as per usual, which somehow got even worse than it was before) and the swordbearer in the south-east (which was the last boss i defeated, before the final boss).
i ended up having to mostly brute-force the dragon with the hammer because god knows how you're supposed to actually dodge any of its attacks (idk it seems faster than even my dodge speed), and then the sword guy has a BS attack that covers the entire screen (first left side, then right side immediately after) for a shit ton of damage, which i could only get past by screen-wiping once i got the ability to (by pressing 2).

i actually like how the final boss has been changed to be harder (especially the laser part which was just free damage before with all the room to walk around).
all it needed was some bullshit massive attack that you need to screen-wipe to survive, and a second phase with "release of the id" + "super-ego" lol

speaking of upgrades, healing is also something that wasn't there before. the max total hp you get from defeating all bosses has also been reduced (probably to complement this addition). personally i find it somewhat annoying, because its recharge time feels really slow for only one hp. i feel like it would be better if it had a faster cooldown (30 instead of 40 seconds) or it healed 2 hp instead of one (so even if you get hit mid-heal at least it's worth something).

another new thing that was added is the whole "purifying the sword" quest. it seems like you need to find 3 keys, then the crystal to purify it.
i'm actually not sure where one of the keys was, but i must have gotten it accidentally?
i found one in the dungeon, and one on the left side of the map of the top mid-boss.
the crystal was on the lower side of the west mid-boss, past that annoying gauntlet of traps (btw the fact that spike traps deal 3 hp instead of 1 like every other attack feels real scummy imo. not sure why that's a thing).

even after collecting them, if you re-enter an area you can still "collect" the keys (they don't disappear).
once you beat the bosses, you also can't re-enter their areas, unless it has some collectible in there.
i'm assuming this is the case because i can re-enter both the top and left area even after defeating every boss, but only up until the mid-boss (which is where the key was).
i can re-enter the top-left mid-boss area, so i'm assuming the third key was there, but i still never found it even after looking for it (assuming it would still show up like the other ones even after collecting it).

i did get some weird rock thingy i never figured out the use for, by destoying some skeleton that was in the bottom right of the main hub, but i don't think that was the key.
i think i've done pretty much everything that's available (beat all bosses, upgraded my sword to the max, purified it, got that weird skeleton stone) but i still have not figured out how to "get a companion", or how to get the secret ending, so there's clearly something i'm still missing.

now for the bug report section:
funny thing really; you can actually walk through walls on any map in the entire game.
when your healing power is available (not on cooldown), hold 1, and while holding it mash dodge in the direction you want to move.
you can basically go through any wall, even during boss fights.
while it is not especially useful against bosses (since you can't attack them from the other side of the wall) unless you want to spend a million hours healing (which still isn't reliable because some bosses "fly" over walls), it's especially useful to get past that annoying gauntlet before the left mid-boss, or completely bypass the dungeon area (there's actually some kind of closed off debug room in the top right of the dungeon which can't be accessed otherwise. though it's just some corridor with bullet traps)

that's about all i can think of.
still an amazing game btw, i just wanted to give my recount on the new update

EDIT: once you beat the final boss, if you continue, you can re-fight each boss.
once you beat a boss, it locks their area again.
if you enter a different area then walk back to the map, you can re-fight the bosses again (it's not locked off anymore).
mid-bosses don't respawn, probably to avoid them dropping more "upgrade stones".

if you enter the dungeon, then exit the dungeon, you'll respawn on the square where the final boss is located, immediately booting you in the final boss area. thankfully you can just walk out, but it's still something that happens.

once you get the upgrade that gives you pillars when you parry, you have infinite energy generation because whenever you activate and de-activate parry, the pillars destroy themselves and gives you energy.
this means you can shoot you gun to your heart's content (as long as some energy remains to summon the pillars), switch to sword then spam parry to instantly heal all energy to max

i also realized it's likely that the areas that are still accessible aren't the ones "where you find the keys", but simply the 3 mid-boss areas, which just happened to also be relevant for collectible purposes

ended up finding a guide online:
seems like the companion is in a secret area in the bottom right of where you find the crystal that purifies your sword. you need the stone from the skeleton to recruit it, and it seems to sometimes appear randomly to aid you in battle.

one of the keys is apparently tied to beating the tutorial boss, meaning if you somehow lose that fight you can't get it unless you restart the whole game again.
it also appears that the "secret ending" is in fact tied to beating the final boss before vs. after purifying the sword; though i somehow managed to get my sword purified right after beating one boss, so even though i did get the "secret ending", i guess it didn't count?
tried beating the final boss again, still with the purified sword. still didn't count.
my only guess is that the game awards you the "secret ending" medal only if you manage to beat the boss with the corrupted sword, and then with the purified sword (meaning getting both endings on the same save).
if you happen to get your sword purified before beating the game once, you're out of luck and are forced to restart the whole game again

edit: playing the whole game again, getting the corrupted ending, then the uncorrupted ending, does not award the medal.
you have to get the secret ending specifically on easy mode to get the secret ending medal.
also i can see now why the healing has such a long cooldown. on easy mode it's a full heal instead of only 1 hp lol

[Odd Verdure]

i'm so glad there's no medal for getting all stars because i absolutely suck at the challenges lol.

love the movement in this: the walking feels extremely slow but if you can figure out how to use the grappling mechanic it's actually pretty fast.
you can grab forward if there's a wall to immediately zoom over instead of walking there, and since there's momentum on the grapple you can grab up multiple times and walk along the ceiling.

it's also possible to continuously climb up the same wall for the same reason:
you grapple diagonally, stop before crashing into it, use the momentum to get enough distance from the wall, then turn around and diagonally grapple higher than before.
it's pretty slow but it beats having to climb up platforms again in some of the levels.

the only one thing i don't really like is how if you bash into a wall mid-grapple you get knocked out of it and can't act for a while.
it's not the mechanic itself that's bad, but when i try to climb over a ledge and instead of climbing onto the platform i end up knocked back because i grabbed the corner "a bit too low" it can get pretty annoying