GregMustache's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Evil Asylum]

Movement is awkward and nonsensical, the background music is loud, choppy, repetitive, and kills the atmosphere, the artwork (if you can call it that) manages to look lazy even when it's good, the display clashes with everything and collecting orbs is silly.

selfdefiant responds:

And I would have thought you could find one good thing about the game. Wow! It's ok, I'm not offended. Not this time.

[A Tough Sell]

I got a bug where the opening dialogue was "Snow White lies dead at your feet", and nothing responded; I had to reload.

This was actually a lot of fun! You get plenty of text parser games where the difficulty comes from the text parser itself, and the gameplay isn't solving the puzzle or achieving anything beyond getting the machine to understand, it's like talking to a three year old. This one understood plenty, it was just trying to figure out what she wanted to hear...which is what you have to do when you try to gain someone's trust. Very effective, good work. The artwork is excellent, too.

[The Cloud]

Small suggestion: don't center your game about the tragedy of clinical depression if your main character's only dialogue is interchangeable with Linkin Park lyrics, and the gameplay involves deliberately avoiding happiness.

As depictions of depression go, this is... pretty gross, actually. It's presenting a depressed person, acknowledging that they're depressed, but then everything they say and do is based around these overwrought metaphors about clouds and darkness and monsters and other stuff you find in a moody teenager's poetry blog, and actually making an effort to reject positive thoughts and happiness just so they can stay depressed. Given how a lot of people treat mental illness as just being "a matter of staying positive", this presents a horrible image of people with clinical depression as just being sadsacks who are only miserable because they want to be.

Botched message aside, the game itself is not great. Finding the Tuesday door took forever, the BGM loop is shrill and annoying, and I never had to use the Dash function in the minigames because I could pretty much just stand to the far side of the screen and occasionally move, and the eye animation was so much more detailed than the rest of the game that it came off kinda uncanny-valley levels of creepy.

JackAstral responds:

I appreciate what you're saying, but this is just this one character. It's about a teenager who feels depressed and has comfort in feeling that way. He rejects help, and instead slides deeper into the feeling until he decides to end it all. He lets negative emotions control him, while rejecting anything positive. It's not suppose to represent every possible type or form of depression or anything- though I've done more vague projects that do. This is just one individual story and experience, obviously something like this is different for different people

And that linkin park dig was brutal, ha ha. I don't mean to come off as emo and whiny :b

[Famine]

Couldn't play, got a failure to load error.

deadnation responds:

Yes I'm aware. I'm doing an update right now fixing a few of the glitches.

[Comfort in Isolation]

The game is glitchy and difficult to read due to text size and spelling/grammar/format issues, not to mention the logic issues (why would anyone who gave you a crate of stuff not give you something to open it? And when they give you, a person in captivity, a hatchet, why would you just throw it away as if the only thing you could do with it was open a box?). This game seems to be trying to copy Presentable Liberty, but doesn't really get why Presentable Liberty was good.

It's not a mystery if you just hand the player all the information, and there's only one thing to click on and the game tells you to click on it, so there's no point in clicking everywhere.

[Where is cat?]

This was so cute! And surprisingly well put-together, too.

[Escape THE GAME]

I'm sorry, I couldn't get through the first ten minutes before I got bored. The writing isn't interesting or funny enough to carry an intro that long, it's basically just telling the same "Hey, we totally know we're in a point and click game! lol fourth wall, isn't it how hilarious that the artwork is terrible instead of just being terrible artwork?" joke over and over..and over.... and over... and over. The tutorial is unnecessary (it's a point and click game, if we didn't know how to click on things we wouldn't be playing it) beyond the "click something twice for a description" function, which is at least different enough that it warrants a note, but a note would have done the job. Two stars for the obvious hard work that went into it, but reviews are supposed to give a quick rundown of how good or bad something is, and I couldn't stand this for more than a few minutes.

I'll probably come back to this at some point because the other reviews suggest some interesting puzzles, but I hit bad joke saturation in record time with this one. It felt like taking a bite out of an apple and getting a mouthful of salt.

Muja responds:

Man, what a harsh review.. But at leats it gives some constructive criticism, which is always welcomed.
Let me clarify a few things:

- Yes, I guess I could have abused those kind of jokes. The thing is, the whole story and most of the puzzles revolves around this concept. The protagonist doesn't just "know" he's inside a videogame: he's a human player trapped inside the videogame you're playing. The jokes aren't breaking the fourth wall, the whole game is.

- Tutorials are ALWAYS needed. That's the first thing you learn as a game designer (and as a gamer, you learn to never skip those). Most point and click games share the same instructions, true, but each one has its own interface with its own quirks. Magnifying lens that highlight interactive items is a rare function that most player might not know about, for example.

Thanks for acknowledging the hard work I put into this, and for your review - I'll try to do better next time.
If you come back to finish the game, please let me know your opinion about it once again - send me a PM!

[Going Nowhere]

Neat idea, but glitchy in places; the game hasn't stopped telling me how to grab ledges and climb after about three minutes now.

[PRIOR]

Very nice story and interesting mechanics, but there was a glitch somewhere around Ventilation and the entire map disappeared.

[My Escape is...]

Not bad. Interesting idea, unobtrusive music.

Couple suggestions for improvement:

Call "spirit" something other than "spirit", because a spirit isn't a solid object and you have to use it as a block for a lot of the puzzles.

Use different keys for some of the functions. E, F, and R are close enough to each other that a typo will end your game.

Please make the death animation faster. Watching the sprite slowly fall down is cute the first time, but platform games are pretty much built on the idea that you're going to die a lot, and the animation isn't detailed enough to be interesting. Just let it restart and skip the wait.