qwerty741's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[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]

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

[Ms. Rainbow]

there's nothing wrong with the difficulty, the problem is how jank the controls are.

for starters, there should only be limited fixed jump heights. one short jump, one high jump, maybe a medium jump.
as it is now, there's too many different "jumps" that have no use besides getting yourself killed.

i hate it when i try to short jump onto a platform, but i didn't press the button "long enough" and i just faceplant into the wall. or i pressed it "too long" and i just barely jump past it (but it's not a long jump so i don't even get to the next platform).

there's also something about the timing of your jumps, where you either don't have enough time to jump on consecutive short jumps, or it doesn't register having landed on the ground, but sometimes the jump doesn't come out?

this is just a me problem, but i also feel like the characters runs just slightly too fast, and that also affects the time you have to perform jumps correctly

the wall-jumping mechanic introduced in the third level is really weird because there's only one fixed jump height for it (despite the many problems caused by having multiple heights on the normal jump).
this isn't especially relevant on later levels, where you can change the height of your double and triple jumps, but level 3 becomes one of the hardest levels because of this.

also not sure how it's actually supposed to behave, but it doesn't really work properly when trying to get the egg on that level, because you try to wall-jump to get out of the cave and it still sticks to the wall.
i have to mash at different intervals until it randomly decides to get me out of there, and hope i don't accidentally fall to my death when it actually starts running again.

on level 4, you need to pick the high path on the last few jumps, because your double jump doesn't come out on the last spike pit if you take the low road, at around 97% (turns out if you hit your head on a ceiling mid-jump, you lose your double jumps)

the hitboxes on the spikes are way too big.
one such example is that they can hit you from below.
this is especially relevant on level 5, since wall-jumping pushes you up a fair bit before leaving the wall, and most pillars in this level have a spike on top, forcing you to slide down a bunch first before being able to jump.
on 64%, theres a gap where you'd think you can just walk and fall to the next lower platform (like every other time), but the spike on the ceiling will hit you as you're falling if you're walking. you're forced to make a specific jump from the previous platform that crosses the gap without landing to make it through, even though it's at the same distance from the spike.

the way glide is introduced in level 7 is awful, because you're immediately thrown into a narrow spike tunnel, followed by circular saws. you have no idea how glide works, and by the time you think you have it figured out, it expires and you're either falling or flying, and you have no idea if it's due to the glide mechanics or not until you realize it's on a time limit.
also half of the "difficulty" introduced by gliding is just adding blind jumps that lead to immediate death unless you trigger glide at the right time, which isn't great imo.

the variation on level 8 is already much better, because you go straight, and you can decide when it ends. though for some reason it takes a lot more time to restart on level 8 previous levels, which is somewhat annoying.

also the egg on level 8 is impossible to get without the debug controls.
there's only one ledge you can wall-jump against to reach the left platform with the egg:
if you jump too early, you slide up and hit the bottom of the spikes (same bug as level 5).
if you jump too late, you hit the death plane at the bottom.
if you manage to jump in time, you still won't make it on the left ledge, because the first wall-jump has fixed height (which is too low), and the double jump doesn't come out. you'll end up clinging on the left wall.
from the left wall, if you hold the left arrow mid-jump you can wall jump up the left wall and make it onto the left ledge, otherwise it's impossible.

same for the level 9 egg. you can get there just fine, but once you've gotten it you can't wall-jump away from that position onless you're holding left while wall-jumping, for some reason.

EDIT: i didn't realize no one ever managed to get past level 9, but i can see why.
i happened to encounter a glitch at around 45% with the glide boxes, which somehow bounced me off the vertical wall and sent me flying upward, which allowed me to use arrow keys to scroll over the layout of the level. it's honestly evil, and i have no idea how it's even physically possible.
https://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/22103d3f3f39f45ed15707ebe25e7bbb
it also awarded me the "level complete" medal once i reached 100, so i had to manually remove it because that's wack. best i could do legitimately was 51%

[Impossible Hardy]

the single spikes (the one on the floor and the one on the ceiling in the pattern with the gap) hitboxes are far too big on the right side, every single jump requires almost pixel perfect inputs (and by almost i mean like a few frames window) and your jump doesn't come out half the time after landing from mid-air (be it after jumping or falling from a ledge)
also sometimes when i jump it somehow jumps forward for some reason. not sure why

i feel like this isn't a case of the game being hard so much as "it requires inputs more demanding than what you can perform with the available controls".
the fact that i have to mash left click just to triple jump in time, and even that doesn't guarantee that my jump comes out, should be enough of a statement.

edit: after miserably dying on 19 at attempt 981 because my jump didn't come out, i've finally scored 20 on attempt 1127;
though in exchange both my eyesight and sanity have considerably worsened

[World chaser]

i came to this expecting nothing and found myself pleasantly surprised.
i really like the gimmick of the gameplay loop, and i feel if this got a proper overhaul the result would be pretty unique.

the game as it is in its current form is fairly unbalanced, as proven from the fact not a single person seems to have cleared it (going off of medals).

the main offender is probably the extremely low chance of actually landing into the final world, since it's only a 6%, and to even get there you have to go through literal hell itself at least once lol.
one solution would be to increase the chances of getting to circle 4 slightly every time you reach a circle 3 world.

the second problem is the high variance caused by the sheer randomized nature of the gameplay: there's no real difference between easy and hard mode, since all it boils down to is getting lucky by landing in good worlds, and especially not ending up in the 3rd circle 7 times in a row.

the controls are somewhat slippery, so it's real easy to just slam into enemies and take a bunch of damage; the fact you can bounce off walls if you walk into them is especially annoying.
ironically i found myself more comfortable moving with the actual slippery modifier than normal controls, and that's saying something.

the rate of fire is also a problem, as enemies spawn at a much higher rate than you can shoot any of them down. their hp also seems inconsistent, as sometimes i can defeat the same enemy in different amount of hits on the same level (regardless of world rules).
it ultimately boils down to how many screen wipes you manage to luck out in a row, but it would be nice if there was something like piercing already built in, like in the sniper level.

boosts stack, which does help if you somehow manage to survive long enough in a single run to get more than one of them, but the overall control of your character still ends up being somewhat poor.

i also learned that pressing R at any point resets all your progress (awards, worlds album) , so heads up on that.

t4upl responds:

Thanks for the comment. Glad you liked it.

[Obsolescence]

i like this but how does one get past level 9 is simply beyond me.
can't find a single reference online.

you are forced to destroy the laser spawners otherwise you'll have to deal with too many bullets on screen, and the worst part is that as soon as you trigger the things right behind them that shoot those massive bullets, super fast, at random, you're basically screwed.
i can deal with everything else except those.

i lose all 3 lives there way before i can get rid of even half the lasers, it's simply unfeasible for me.

[Pico's Ludo Vengeance]

thank you newgrounds player for bypassing the barn softlock.
now the game is playable again, and it's a damn good game at that

[360 Degrees]

to complete the "pump it up" objective, you need to interact with the waterwheels in the lower level of the map.
to activate them, you need to jump and manually perform a 360 board spin while in proximity of the waterwheel.
leaving this for future reference since i had to ask about it, as i couldn't figure it out on my own