TharosTheDragon's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Lumera Numbera's PUZZLE POP]

"Surely any genuine attempt will do."

Surely this is the effect where developers underestimate the difficulty of their own games

[Oblivion Eve]

The triple-diamond shape seen in the thumbnail and when you change color made me think of CrossCode

[N Step Steve: Part 1]

Making resets part of the puzzle solutions, and allowing us to undo all the way back including undoing your resets, and being a great mind-expanding puzzle game, it reminds me of Pico's Puzzle UFO: Shooting Stars.

Speaking of stars, I kept thinking they were all impossible until I accidentally moved a flag in one level where you weren't supposed to. That trick motivated me to go back and get most of the stars. Now there are just three left and that trick doesn't seem to be helping me. Two of the three involve clones so I'm guessing there must be some clone trick I'm not getting.

[Le Chat Fonce and the Secret of the Clock Tower]

How do I get ending A? I placed all the paintings but still got ending B

[Bunny Bun]

I like the aesthetic. It reminds me of Armed With Wings. The dark creepy visuals don't go with the happy music at all, though. But I love the music too.

And damn, that training bunny is so hard. Good job designing that AI. I had to restart the whole game to get there because I didn't buy the feather soon enough. It's too bad it becomes unavailable later.

ErikSwahn responds:

Thanks! AI can be very fun to design :)

[Hide & Skink]

It's like Untitled Goose Game meets Neighbors from Hell

[Get on slime level!]

Since I'm a slime and it's telling me to let the levels move through me, I thought I would be eating the levels by absorbing them

[Palm Cracker]

I can see lots of people complaining about textual errors, and I can see that you say you've fixed some, but there are still many more. The very first library book explains the Caesar cipher backwards from how you've implemented it, so even though you say you fixed a typo in there already you seem to have fixed it wrong. And your explanation of the rail cipher doesn't tell us how to account for an odd number of letters. I assume the top row would have more letters than the bottom row because we're supposed to start with the top row, but that gives us DOWSOUOTYRR which doesn't work.

Also the calculator is super jank. The division button seems to just divide by 100 which I assume is what the percentage button is supposed to do, and the percentage button doesn't seem to do anything. I'm sure there are other bugs in there but it's hard to say because I'm not quite sure I understand how it's supposed to work to begin with.

I appreciate that you tried to make a game like this, but you gotta pay way more attention to detail to make sure you get things right for this kind of game. When your players are relying so much on your instructions, the intricacies of the instructions need to be correct.

EDIT: Okay, now that I know the solution I can see what the problem was. You explained it backwards again. This is probably because you're confusing encryption with decryption. This is understandable because you need to explain to the player how to decrypt when you're the one doing the encrypting and not the decrypting.

I don't actually know which way is which, but I'll assume the way you explained it on the last page of the library book is how to encrypt a rail cipher so I'll call it rail cipher encryption, and the way you've implemented it in the game (and apparently how you explained it before the last page) is how to decrypt a rail cipher so I'll call it rail cipher decryption.

Rail cipher encryption is splitting the word into halves and interlacing the two halves together, much like shuffling a deck of cards. That's why I needed to know what to do with an odd number of letters, because I didn't know which half the middle letter should go in. Rail cipher decryption, therefore, is recreating the two halves by sorting odd letters into one half and even letters into the other.

If we were to decrypt LTRTRIEAUE this way, we would get LRREUTTIAE and not LITERATURE. If we want to encrypt LITERATURE with a rail cipher, the actual code should be LAITTUERRE. So like I said, if we try to decrypt DWOOYROSUTR using rail cipher encryption like you explained instead of rail cipher decryption like you wanted us to, we get DOWSOUOTYRR instead of DOYOURWORST. And if we were to "encrypt" DOYOURWORST the way LITERATURE is encrypted in the book (using rail cipher decryption instead of encryption), we'd get DYUWRTOOROS.

On further examination, I think the calculator percentage button does work as a division button so you just swapped the labels.

I don't know if you'll read these edits, but now that I've beaten the game I'll provide a list of other mistakes I found.

1. Typo in the readme: "Do with is as you please."
2. It's unclear if we're supposed to click on the words "Princess Diana" or her picture.
3. Book 4 explains the cipher backwards again but this time I was prepared.
4. I never unlocked book 5. I'm guessing I was supposed to input a three-letter code in the I SEE YOU app to unlock it and I wasn't smart enough to figure out the code, but if that's not the case then it's pretty weird that it lets you highlight the letters like that.
5. With M + D * Y, you've put multiplication after addition and expected us to know that we're supposed to disregard the order of operations and just calculate it from left to right. Also, you called it a SUM even though the last operation is multiplication which makes it a product.
6. In book 6, you've written "it's both a combination of." I'm guessing English isn't your first language but this redundancy makes it incorrect. It should either say "it's both" or "it's a combination of."
7. In book 6 you say to use the row and column even though the column is supposed to come first and you don't mention that. We can only see which one comes first by interpreting the examples.
8. In book 7, the message ending in VDVX does indeed translate to LITERATURE, but it differs from the message you've shown in the earlier grid which ends in XDVX. It seems a bit strange to have just one letter be different because it looks like it should be the same message in the grid examples and the last-page explanation.

It turns out no one has been able to crack the Crypt Killer's codes because he explains them so badly! That was his criminal mastermind secret all along!

Anyway, thanks for the game, glad to see it, happy to play it, hope to see more :)

Hurr durr, I just figured out how to unlock book 5 when I watched FutureCopLGF's video and remembered what the I SEE YOU app was originally. I didn't need it of course because the pigpen cipher is pretty intuitive. The letter buttons in the pigpen key flicker a bit but I assume that's intentional for the palm pilot effect.

Another bug for you: books 1, 5, 6, and 7 can all be clicked while another book is open. Books 5, 6, and 7 will then open automatically after you close the current book, but that doesn't happen for book 1.

I updated my rating because I can see you're so committed to improvement.

Deklaration responds:

Appreciate it, finding and cracking out bugs is a part of the process. You’re corrcet about the caesar cipher, I fixed a typo and ended up with another one. But I don’t see how the rail cipher would work any differently based on if the letters are even or odd. They can still be placed according in the rows and added?
Just swap between the top and bottom row, one letter at a time, when typing out DWOOYROSUTR.

It should look like this, no matter if the password is even or odd:
DOYOUR
WORST


I’ll take a look at the calculator, it’s one of those things that can get messed up depending on ports and system. Html5 is pretty janky, thanks for letting me know.


EDIT:
Oh, right! It took me a while to understand the issue, but I get it now. You're absolutely correct and I'm a doofus. Thank you for your insightful comment, it really opened up my eyes to fixing the issues. I've updated the game, changed the passwords, the explanation in the books and the calculator as well. Thank you a ton!

[Leap of Life: Alone]

Like others have said, it's a lot of pixel-perfect nonsense. More of a precision platformer than a puzzle platformer. The "puzzle" is usually figuring out that you can break the game mechanics more than you thought, like with having more time to turn around in midair than you expected. Being able to jump/flip in midair but only for an unspecified short time after walking off the ledge feels a lot more like a bug than something that should be an ability required for an actual solution. And it's always strange to introduce a new game mechanic only for the last two levels of the game. The new mechanic doesn't even work well because you should be given a little timer that shows you when you're about to take damage. And the whole vague fake-deep love story is such a played-out cliche for this kind of game.

As you can tell, I love the game, great job

[Mother's Sword - Web Demo]

Really high quality demo. Like Dark Souls meets Dead Cells. I imagine you were inspired by both