TharosTheDragon's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Pico's Boss Run!]

I definitely wish I could hold down the shoot button

[Package Man]

I really love how there are so many unique tiles. The graphics offer so much variety despite being a tile-based game on one screen.

The gameplay seems so simple at first but after some experimentation I see that this is a complex speedrunner's game. I liked discovering new skills like airjumping and launching the box upwards with my momentum. These were key to maximizing efficiency

[Pico Untamed]

I love that I can append numbers onto the end of "Invalid" on the keypad

TrickWithATwist responds:

That is strange, I could've sworn I fixed that bug. Ig I'll look into it soon. ty for the 4.5 stars :)

[Darkspace Ambush]

Stage 10 doesn't seem to be possible. The enemy always destroys its target in 4 moves and I can't reach it in that short time.

I definitely wish I could use the keyboard since the game is only controlled by moving in 4 directions

[Pico-Cross Collab 2023]

The fact that you have to click each individual artwork to view it and then click on the back button before clicking on another artwork makes it seem like the game doesn't intend for us to view everything. It's like we're supposed to hover around and pick and choose based on which thumbnails look interesting. I definitely think there should be an easier way to view all the artwork by switching between zoomed images easily.

The voices are way quieter than the music so I have to change my volume every time I listen to a cutscene and then again when I stop listening to it. Also, it would be nice if it was more obvious when an interrogation was over, like if the play button popped up or something.

[Bundle Beeline]

Yay, I got all the medals! I got the Bingo! medal when I had exactly 332 credits even though the medal says 333.

This game is a good metaphor for life. You can try to do everything perfectly and it will work out at first but your performance will slowly deteriorate when you take on too many responsibilities and new tasks keep piling up and waiting for you to finish your current tasks.

It's really interesting to me how much this has in common with Boxbrawl Delivery just because of the one-word theme you were both working with. Package Man also feels similar because it's a platformer where you can throw the packages, but there's just one delivery location and there aren't any enemies to throw the packages at and the package doesn't get damaged.

[Days Without]

I wish I could load my saved game after getting an ending so I didn't have to replay the whole game to get different endings

[The Wizard Ran: chapter 8]

Ha ha, it's permadeath like You Only Live Once :)

https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/505914

adriendittrick responds:

if you feel like unpermadeathing, you can ask for Balldude's help (by holding B)

[Dinner For Mom!]

The final crowd dispersed when Billy was still at like 30% health so I beat the game without killing the boss

Sulfur-Cretin responds:

Oh that'll be an easy fix, thanks for letting know!

[Train Journey]

Hey good job on the game. I can see this winning best of the month even though I haven't tried the other nominees yet.

I did find some bugs, the most serious of which is the numbering of the diary pages. I'm guessing there was some problem where the page number increments and the pages remaining decrements more than they should, but the page numbers seemed to get too high and the pages remaining went pretty far into the negatives. Also, I wasn't able to proceed past the end of the sand cave even after I found the last diary page and the game acknowledged that I found all of them (even though the pages remaining never said exactly zero). I don't know if the page number bug prevented me from proceeding or if I just couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do. The other bugs I found were mostly just things going through walls.

Apart from bugs, I think the pacing could be improved a bit. I'd like to be able to move faster, destroy enemies and objects in fewer hits, have more checkpoints so death is less punishing, be able to pogo on my first jump, and be able to rocket on subsequent jumps without having to stop jumping first.

Since you seem pretty serious about fixing bugs, I think you'll be interested in checking out my full stream of the game here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1835123390

(Note that you should watch the stream soon because it will be auto-deleted in a week)

Meivuu responds:

Wow thank you for the review!! I'll definitely check out that stream video. Thanks for the bug reports, I'll try to sort that out. I seriously thought I fixed that bug before, but I guess it stuck around. The page number is actually what order the page goes in (since you can collect them out of order) but the pages remaining is definitely messed up. Thanks for playing!!