PersistentDreamer's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[...Vincent: Mansion of The Dead]

It's a vampire survivors clone on newgrounds and I didn't notice performance issues, which is impressive.

Things I liked: I was addicted to it longer than I'd care to admit. That's how you know you got the fundamentals down pat. It was fun to play.

Things that could be improved: Once you beat the boss you can keep playing, but you don't really have an incentive to do so. The addictive spell you cast kind of breaks.

If you do a Vampire Survivors type game, people will always be drawing comparisons to it, unfortunately. Applied here, in comparison V.S. has: More levels, more characters to choose from, ways to combine power ups into bigger power ups, so greater ways to customize upgrade paths, and flashier bright casino like graphics that make brain go burrr more. So those are all things that could take this to a higher level. Also multiplayer would be cool but I realize that's a TON more work to pull off.

Also, I know it's not the priority in games like this, but story/lore wise you have an interesting concept about this Vincent butler guy protecting a ghost from evil spirits. I kind of would like to know more, like maybe a page on the menu screen or a character description in character select where you can learn more about who these characters are and why they're here. Again, I get these kind of games storyline takes a backseat, but seems kind of random, butler in happy mask protecting a ghost.

Technical issues: Only real thing I saw was that you can upgrade crit rate beyond 100% which I'm assuming doesn't do anything. Maybe remove that as an option once player hits 100% crit rate?

Also, it seems some of the characters are a bit unbalanced. If you do the upgrade path right I found Winry to be more overpowered than the unlockable characters. You just have to crank up attack speed and add power ups that trigger based on times enemies are damaged, like wisps and lightning. Since her attack goes through enemies and hits multiple, it's easy to trigger those multiple times with that.

Enemy explosions on death as a powerup is potentially overpowered as well. You can wipe out a lot of enemies with a chain reaction of explosions.

[Ritual Bound]

So were the other entities just a red herring? I thought maybe I was dealing with the mask thing but after failing once and seeing what it looks like, I realized it was the real deal. The runes are a hard but solvable puzzle. Loved it.

[TAMAGARASHI 1.1]

Game looked like a great idea, but every time I load it the screen starts spinning at warp speed the second I touch the mouse, to the point it goes completely black, even if I touch it lightly. The updates show a mouse sensitivity slider, but I didn't see the setting for it in the title screen, only in the pause menu inside the game itself. Still, even when I turned down the mouse sensitivity to the lowest possible, it did nothing to stop the wild spinning.

I suspect when you did the mouse sensitivity toggle update that it messed up the mouse completely, which is unfortunate, since it looked like a really cool idea for a game.

*Edit* I did try full screen in this version and had the same issue. I can't speak for the experience of others, just letting you know it doesn't work for me.

CryptVoice responds:

Nothing is ruined, the game works well for everyone, you just need to turn on the full screen. Or download the Desktop version.

[Bloodlust: Santa Monica (Definitive Edition)]

Mostly great game but a LOT of bugs:

Okay first: bug report for you:

1) Tess and Juliette have a bug where they are there but invisible and if you talk to the wrong one it will do storyline stuff that hasn't happened. At some point it even shows your character getting the two sisters to get along except your charcter is replaced by one of the beach people.

2) alcohol to homeless guy doesn't always complete the objective list or check it off and you can get 4 bottles of vodka by getting it normally from bartender and then using something like bribe.

3) giving books to the starting guy doesn't seem to do anything. I was thinking there was some secret to doing so. Instead I just made things harder.

4) when I gave the CD to bernard, the game froze, and if you give the cd to kirkpatrick there's no other way to get it back (as far as I can tell).

There's a few times where doing stuff doesn't seem to do anything. And the freezing is just a pain.

emontero responds:

Thanks a lot for your feedback and bug reports! I'll make sure to fix them all in the following update. Thanks for playing!

[Home 45 Min Experience!]

So I kind of had a frustrating experience with this game because I think it's quite charming and I really WANT to like this. There's a lot of really good stuff here. Storyline wise, you have the mystery with the entitiy, the sister fighting her brother as a tutorial, (which is genius by the way) The whole her hulking out at the end of the tutorial along with the music. That whole scene is just magical. It's a shame I"ve had to watch it like 6 times now though.

I think other than the not being able to save, which you said you're working on, part of the frustration also is with the way it's set up I think. I do agree that the first real encounter you have with that mushroom is very difficult for first enemy of the game. But the biggest thing UI wise I would change if I could is how items are used. I get you don't want people to just spam them, but when they're having to hit the opposite key they're used to hitting in time and then hit another key to select the item, that's asking a lot when someone is just trying not to die. Like if anything trying to use the items just kept screwing up my focus.

I'm not sure how I would fix this but maybe make a menu of hotkeyed items the player can set up before battle? Then they just hit the hotkeyed item once when their rhythm hits? And in pause menu they change the items they have hotkeyed? It's more keys to remember downside doing that, but they don't have to hit 2 seperate keys from what they're used to hitting. I don't know.

One thing also with item usage that was unintiutive for me in the tutorial by the way, is that when it's demonstrating item usage, and he mentions the two bars, I thought he meant just the regular black bars where there's nothing coming. I kind of assumed yellow was attack, red was block and the little tiny black beat bars were for items. It took me a lot longer than I'd care to admit to discover that wasn't the case.

The other thing, again tied back to the save is I was looking for the save, and I thought maybe if I quit it will save. Nope, just had to start over again, so the quit option actually made me expect I would save.

Overall, art, music, story, characters are all great and makes the game feel FUN. It's just the above stuff really threw a wrench in it and broke the experience for me.

*edit* Okay, a few other things. There's a bug where occasionally you beat an enemy and it just shows the floating orb and a blank screen basically the experienced gained thing doesn't pop up. It seems to happen at random. The bad thing is when it happens during a level you can't see which one you're picking. I actually memorized the position of the things to work around it.

There's at the very beginning if you hold the arrow keys where cutscene is playing, it moves the orb early.

There's also a bug where when I defeated jon or joh or whatever his name is, I checked the trashcan behind him and the game froze. This after playing such a great game and beating all the enemies, finally beat him only to have to AGAIN restart. Please fix that.

Tried one more time. Didn't do touch the trashcan. Got teleported by joh, chose to "tuck him in" and then the game froze with the music still playing. Sorry there's just too many bugs. I think I'm done.

Tried not tucking him in for good measure. Got out the door and could walk around but no character was invisible and couldn't really do anything.

SquishY-Bottom responds:

Amazing critique, I'll get on these bugs right away, the steam version shouldn't have them and has saving if you'd like a good play through. These ideas are good and thorough that you suggested. I will be adding some of them, thank you for taking the time to write a fantastic critique.

[HelioBacter]

great td game. Greatest problem I ran into it was ui issues. Couldn't figure out how to change direction of trap triggers beyond mouse wheel which also scrolls the screen. No control listing. no tutorial. No explanation on damage or what is better.

Basically you throw people into it and i guess that's alright but I would have appreciated something to work with.

Graphics wise, music wise love it.

I disagree with people who spammed towers in middle and had success. I had more difficulty for whatever reason, skill issue lol.

Overall I enjoyed. Maybe just leave more info on the controls and what stuff does and how to use things etc. Can't expect people to know this if the mechanic is unconventional etc.

HelperWesley responds:

From the title screen, there is a button in the bottom right corner to full screen the game, then you can use the scroll wheel without scrolling the page. (I really should add alternative controls for that....)

As for a different experience with difficulty, I actually ended up changing the way enemy health scales and tweaking some other minor things to try, to improve the later game balance. So that's probably why you had a different experience.

[Stay Indoors]

Is there an option to fullscreen this? Also this game taught me that if my dog runs away, to move back and forth between screens and he'll eventually teleport to me, unless a monster does.

[Dead Estate CLASSIC]

I was pretty addicted to it until I had a bug where I got stuck on the shopkeeper's head.

[Mars Underground (full game)]

Is this a Limezu tileset? If so, freaking awesome.

I remember a demo of this! I was psyched the first time I played it!

AND I'm a sucker for time loop/ reality loop games! This game is awesome!

Also the music is banging.

I was wondering why such a high quality game was made free online. Guess it was originally on steam and you made it accessible to everyone...which is REALLY cool. Hard to believe you pulled this off in RPGMAKER. I wouldn't have noticed if not for a few things like familiar sound effects and Himeworks in the credits.

Overall amazing experience and I enjoyed every minute of it.

[Homecoming]

As someone who isn't trans, this spoke to me. I think there's something extremely relatable about this, the estrangement, political division, the fear and lack of understanding and acceptance. I think many people are going through this right now. Hate has torn so many families apart. I can't image how much worse it must be for someone in the trans community to go through this.

I'm not normally a crier, but I confess this brought me to tears. It hit a little too close to "home." Thank you for making it.

Bleak-Creep responds:

It means an awful lot to me to hear this. I made this first and foremost for myself as a way to cope with my own fear, but I had always hoped it might help other folks too. I know we live in an incredibly tense and stressful time, and I just wanted to make something that avoids that stark black and white headspace we all get into when things get heated.

People are complicated, and there's no easy way to fix everything that we disagree on, but if we learn to listen instead of acting out of sheer impulse, we might be able to make a little progress in time.