qwerty741's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Bug Ball 3D]

EDIT: i've figured out what was making the game completely unplayable on my side, so now i can run it "properly".
it still has some random hiccups every now and then (which does get annoying when it makes you miss important jumps), but i still managed to get S rank on all the courses.

the roll mechanic works fine, except the ball randomly decides to go sideways instead of straight.
i understand it's directional influence, but sometimes it still happens even when i literally don't press any direction.
it feels really bad when you're doing the same thing every time and getting different results (especially when it gets you killed).
jumping is also really finnicky, and dependent on running speed in an overly precise manner.

level 3 on hard is COMPLETELY RANDOM: you literally only have to run up and then time your jumps without pressing anything else; and yet it never works.
sometimes you jump and it speeds up, sometimes it slows down.
other times you straight up plummet to you death before reaching the next platform as if you didn't gain enough speed.
i swear the ball doesn't even land on the platforms proper, it just bounces off walls until it randomly decides it can't do that anymore.
all of these, from doing literally the same thing over and over.

i also have a personal grudge against hard 6. that whole level is just "do the thing in one go or die trying".
you need to go full speed, jump way before the end of the platform (otherwise you'll fall off the next platform), then hold full down and right to follow the path AND make sure you have enough speed to make the second jump.
once you're on the other side, if you stop you won't be able to get enough speed to cross the last gap, and if you miss the boost pad you also won't make it. it's really rough.

the hard course in general is really volatile because most jumps rely on you either keeping the ball perfectly straight through multiple curves, or very strict timings.
i was struggling to get under 3 minutes thinking it was barely possible, and then ended up getting much less than the required time for S rank simply because i got extra lucky and somehow only died once the whole time (don't even remember where. i was sure i died a lot but the endscreen says otherwise).

the pillbug movement is still the most annoying thing ever because you want to hold back out of panic but end up walking forward and falling into pits.
it's the game distinguishing feature so i wish it wasn't the worst part of the game.

EDIT 2:
someone asked, so i recorded myself getting S-rank on medium and hard
medium course: www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgRzhTsidCU
hard course: www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW77_LkaZKI

i wish it would have also recorded the stuttering i experienced while playing, but i suppose it doesn't show because the whole pc is affected, so the recording itself is no exception.
if i randomly stray off instead of going straight, i'm not doing it on purpose;
the ball seems to have a mind of its own sometimes so it's really difficult to keep it steady.

for level 5 on hard specifically: the door is supposed to open as soon as you get the key.
in my case it takes 2 or 3 laps before it opens because of lag, which messes with my jump timing a bit since i have to guess when the door will actually be open.
if sometimes i slow down before reaching a door (like for level 12 on medium), it's because i don't want to bash my head against a closed door that's supposed to be open and end up bouncing back into a pit.

StaggerNight responds:

Not sure why its chugging for you so much. There are downloadable options of the game if you want to keep playing it in steam and itch. Those are always gonna be more stable.

[Gem Frenzy]

couple things about the game mechanics.
during the early game the rent feels like it ramps up way too fast (this is particularly noticeable while attempting the "against the system" achievement).
i understand it's balanced around upgrades, but unless you get really good upgrades early (sell for more, or shop open for longer) it's really dififcult to get the snowball going.

the real problem with the game imo is that there's way too much "dead time", where you're just moving around without it being helpful towards your goal:
you're already on a strict clock, and between having to run around to collect material, going back and forth making individual ingots, and to a minor extent having the furnace so far away from the counter (you always need to use the furnace so the extra travel time impacts the total customer patience meter), makes it so you feel like you never accomplish much in a day.

one mechanic that really needs an actual explanation is "mineral recycling profit";
i haven't pinpointed the exact specifics, but i get the gist of it:
if you collect every single material in excess, at the end of the day a certain amount of all your ores gets "sold" automatically, which nets you extra income before being cut down by the rent.
this ends up being relevant for the no-upgrades run (especially on day 6) where customers don't always show up and selling only gives you 1 coin per item, so you're better off just spending the whole day mining, and maybe sell something if there's remaining time and customers once you've cleared out everything.
do note that you need EVERY material in excess to benefit from this. if even one of them is at 0 or too low, you won't get anything from it, and on day 6 you unlock 2 new ores that are way deep below the surface, so you REALLY need to dig to make it past that day.

the only problem with this mechanic is that it forcibly removes ores from your total inventory, which means you can't just hoard ores for subsequent days (to minimize time spent mining to prioritize selling).
you can choose to only focus on collecting the ones you need so it won't trigger, but that means you get no bonus money from the recycling system.
still haven't been able to figure out what affects the "bonus profit" at the end of the day, even after fully clearing the game.

assuming you manage to get the snowball going, and buy out all upgrades, the only rng holding you back depends on which recipes you roll;
during endgame there's a total of 11 different ores (let's say 1 is coal, 11 is diamond. gold is 7).
the recipes are (ordered by increasing value? not sure about the last few):
- 1+2
- 2+3+4
- 5+6+7
- 3+8+9
- 4+7+10
- 6+8+10
- 2+8+11
assuming the first 2 recipes stop showing up during endgame (or aren't worth enough), you can see that 8 (blue gem) and 6,7,10 (ruby,gold,emerald) show up more than other ores.
the tricolor gem also uses three of those at the same time, which means they naturally end up depleting faster than other ores.

from my own experience, i could still replenish enough emeralds while collecting diamonds, although they're pretty deep.
the sapphire is used in 3 recipes so it needs to be replenished fairly often, but i had more trouble with ruby and gold because they show up around the same depth, so they contend space with each other (meaning you end up finding less per day than you would other ores, overall).
i ended up starting each day by clearing out the ruby/gold level right away, and then replenishing diamonds/sapphires while i'm not busy selling. just some food for thought in regards to balancing.

extra note: interacting with the counter, while holding an ingot, if no one's at the counter, throws the ingot away. not sure if it's intended, just putting it out there.

pabten responds:

HI thank you so much for taking your time for this review i hope you have enjoyed our game 😁

We did change the balance on early let me know if that helps to the snowball

Your balance anotations are really helpful we'll let you know if we change something about it
Thank you for your feedback!

[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.

EDIT 3:
i recently moved the recordings that were sitting in my filedump to youtube because of the supporter update.
it's the same recordings as before so don't expect anything professional, but at least they should be more easily accessible now that there's no need to download all of them if you want to check out just a few of the solutions
www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUTUHYuM-2qpNWOdbtlrMV-AiLhqbfyhN

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.

[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 stated, 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.

[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!

[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.