Trippy!!
Very cool game. My favorite part was the brightly colored squares/room on the 3 level. For some reason it reminded me of Donnie Darko and Alice in Wonderland. Idk, might just be me, lol. Any chance of a sequel?
Reviews for "MindScape"
HeRetiK responds:
Possibly, yes ;)
It's a brilliant, trippy, original and insane game
wow. it's fucking GREAT!!!! and pretty addictive. damn monkeys!!
Woah! Fuck! Someone made a good game!
Graphics: Thick, crisp lines and a color aesthetic that's all over the charts bring a boring emo kid and an army of wacky enemies to life! Nice animations. I loved that lookin' around animation, even though I didn't notice it 'till level 4 because I was constantly on the move. Simple, well-designed stages come in a few flavors. An occasional trippy background adds WTF factor. Not to mention great cutscenes! This game has it all!
Style: I *really* have to hand it to you for maintaining such a strong, unifying art direction over such a wide variety of elements. The diverse parts all come together to form a cohesive, demented whole.
Sound: Great music, nothing annoying about the sparse sound effects, and TONS of atmosphere. Was I immagining things, or did you fade different tracks together everytime I turned a corner in the psychadelic section? Voice in the movies woulda been nice.
Violence: The ESRB probably things that robots punching a person counts as some sort of voilence. But Newgrounds regulars know better!
I dunno about you guys, but by now I'm desensitized to the point where my personal goreometer consists entirely of what happens when a character's head is crushed by a brick.
So If a bright red splotch comes out and barely interacts with the envrionment, that's a 1. A seven would be a really graphic head-crush with bits of bone and brain and the blood's all brown and kinda hemmorages a bit with the body twitches.
You don't wanna know what a ten is.
So anyway, don't take the 0 personally. It's not your fault.
Humor: Nothing was boring, not even the boring parts. Like, you know those monochromatic sections of blue wall in assylum stage? Not boring! Even those parts still managed to add to the ambiance in some way.
And I have a hard time classifying that ambiance. It was too goofy to be serious and too tragic to be funny.
So how do I, as a reviewer, convey that in statistical form? By putting a big ol' seven up there in the Humor category, even though it wasn't funny. (Also, by using several sentances to explain what the seven means!)
Interactivity: Loved the rotation, the switches, and the race at the end. Yes, they were all gimicks. I liked them anyway, because they were FUN gimicks that DIDN'T SUCK. They added new gameplay, without making the game annoying, tedious, or impossible.
Let me tell you a true story, about the gimick that had the potential to become the deal-breaker, here: The rabbit key fight.
As the battle ran longer than I expected it to, I had no way of knowing if my actions were having any effect. I began to wonder if there was somehting I was supposed to be DOING during the tug of war animation... I started to worry. And then he got faster, and I started not getting there in time, and it wasn't until then that I realized I could take damage from the misses. I started to panic. It was happening faster than I could possibly hope to get to the right hole...
Then I suddenly got him, for the LAST time, at around 1/3 health. Apparently through pure random chance, he popped out of a hole that was close enough. And when the animation sequence started, I let out a very real sigh of relief.
I don't know whether you used statistics, careful scripting, or just playtesting to determine that this fight would not be impossible. But it had the desired effect on me.
Overall: Everyone involved needs to PUT THIS ON THEIR RESUME. (Assuming you punk rebel types use those.)
In fact, do you think you could maybe do a Tutorial open-sourcing your control and movement code? Not the rotation, so much. Just the jumping and collision.
It's just that people keep submitting these crappy, half-assed platform games on NG all the time. You know the kind I mean? Where you get stuck in the walls, or fall through floors, and holding down the key makes you bunny-hop?
Well, your game had NONE of that bullshit! I wish every noob could work with this engine, instead of the de-facto standard, the 2001 tutorial they're all apparently using.
HeRetiK responds:
You took yourself the time to write such an elaborate review so I'll take myself the time to answer your questions.
-) I didn't fade different tracks in the psychedelic part. It would have been a cool idea though. Only thing I did was fading from one track to another when leaving / entering this section.
-) I did a lot of careful play testing at the rabbit key fight.
-) Actually I did use a tutorial for the collision detection part:
http://www.harveycartel.org/m etanet/tutorials.html
The greater part, however, was modding the basic engine in a way that would make gravity shifts possible.
-) I know what kind of platform games you mean, I made one of these myself until I got off my lazy ass and read through the tutorial mentioned before. And I hate reading tutorials. The things you do for a proper game engine...
Thanks for stopping by!
I loved it!
The style is amazing. I love it. It's just so original, a welcome break from the norm. I like the sound too. Especially the third level. The creepy spooky ambiance it delivers just makes the third level my favorite. Speaking of the third level, the pills were just hilarious.
Great!!
One of the most original games I've played...a perfect 10.