TharosTheDragon's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Feathered Escape]

Ha ha, I accidentally beat the game with all the fruit without even knowing I could ceiling run and stuff because I didn't read the instructions :P

yokoboko responds:

Epic!

[Piñata Poppers]

I don't want to be mean since I did enjoy the game and I feel like you put effort into its charm, but if I'm being honest I have to award almost no points for originality. There have been a ton of suika games on Newgrounds lately and most of them have at least one thing that sets them apart. Your game might be the most generic of all. The only thing different about it is that there are fewer levels than usual, so I can get that happy feeling of making it to the end, but that's more like a missing thing than an extra thing. Also I guess there are multiple ways to handle getting to the end. I think Cthulhu Merge just prevents the top level animals from merging. Another approach would be to form higher levels automatically by doing something like making the balls a little bigger and changing the color a bit. Your approach is to allow two top-level pinatas to merge into one top-level pinata, effectively destroying one of them, so I guess that's something unexpected at least.

Also, I lost because an explosive merge sent a few smaller pinatas flying :P

Reply: Yeah Fit Cats has a mechanic that allows you to destroy cats, and Cthulhu Merge lets you devolve animals, so that kind of thing definitely can work. With pinatas you have a lot of possibilities. Pinatas are supposed to drop candy, right? Maybe you could get to break a pinata when you collect enough candy, though that would be kind of backwards. Maybe you could get a bat that you drop the same way you drop pinatas, so you could only break pinatas at the top. Maybe pinatas could have hit points requiring them to get hit multiple times. You could even get rid of the suika mechanic and just make a game about trying to bash pinatas against other pinatas hard enough to break them before they fill up to the top

UnitedFailures responds:

I appreciate the honest and well thought feedback :)

A mechanic we had like 50% working (and maybe I'll return back to it if I have a better vision for it) was to add the ability to break open pinatas. I wrote a shader and some custom code for the pinata breaking effect, and we were planning on you building up "charges" to activate "pinata breaker mode." In this mode, you'd move your mouse around on the pinatas and slightly hit them around and deal damage.

However, we realized this is hard to balance and disrupts the natural difficulty escalation of Suika game (think of the small pieces that get stuck and build up over time, now you can just essentially delete them) -- and could lead to seemingly endless playthroughs.

I would want to add some sort of "pinata breaking" mechanic to the game, and I think it would help give the game more of a unique flavor. If you have any suggestions or thoughts on that I'd be down to hear them :)

[To Kill A Fidel Castro]

Pretty tricky games. There needs to be like a practice mode or something. The penalty for failure is too high, having to restart and go through all the dialog again

[Boxling's Garden]

You sell the boxlings by talking to the drone.

[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