Cuttledile's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Hexpress]

A good start, but the text is hard to read and while the dual tone looked nice, it was difficult to figure out what was walkable vs. not sometimes. The camera movement also felt like it worked against ease of movement. And of course, it's vampire survival. The delivery aspect is cute but I'm not sure it's enough to distinguish it from the hoard of VS clones.

RunicPixels responds:

Thanks for your feedback!

[5 Dice Ver. 1.0 (Old)]

The difficulty of the game isn't the problem, but the lack of design and tutorialization / onboarding is. I don't mean telling the player how to play, but the gameplay itself should introduce new mechanics slowly to teach the player through gameplay. If you love Celeste, I'd suggest you look into some of the talks the devs have done on how they made their game feel challenging but also fun and fair.

Two suggestions you could make without looking into that;
1. get the player back into the level faster. You shouldn't be toggling through beginning of level speech every time you die.
2. Make your controls feel snappier. The floating jump makes gameplay longer and more difficult without feeling good.

And as a reminder- you will always be the best player of your game. If you think it's just hard enough, it's probably too difficult.
And if you find yourself thinking, 'the people who are playing this game aren't my intended audience', you're ignoring valuable free playtesting feedback.

J4cko16 responds:

Thank you for your advice. I didn’t add much tutorials since I thought the player wouldn’t want to go through “tutorial hell” and figured it would be more fun to make the player learn how to play with basic instructions. I am aware of the dialogue problem and have actually patched it I just haven’t released the patch yet. I know how challenging the game is and have watched many people play. Most players seem fine with the difficulty but from your advice I might try to ease the player into the game s little slower.

[Pinewood Pastures]

I'm was surprised to see that there were tier 3 plants, because I can't see anyone having the patience to get there.

Pros:
The character and environment art looks good. There's a solid base for a farming sim here.

Cons:
This game is way too repetitive. Usually in farming sims, there's an assumption that crops will sell for more than seeds- having to walk to the store every single loop to see if seed prices are down and check if I can actually sell my crops for a profit is not a fun way to spend my day.
The music track is about 10 seconds long before it repeats. That does start to grate after a while.
Crops all take the exact same amount of time to grow (at least at tier 1- I unlocked tier 2 at day twenty-four and stopped) so every day is just - get up, water water water water. Go to store. Go home, sleep. Repeat until harvest day. Harvest.
If I'm lucky, a day with high sell prices comes early, so I don't have to walk to the store every day and can do my tedious watering in peace.

Keep working on it, look into the details that make similar games fun outside of the obvious structure of 'plant, water, sell'.

[Upset Crab]

Very cute, took me a couple deaths to figure out I could reflect the projectiles. The cooldown on the sword swing can be a bit frustrating, sometimes it looks like you can swing again before the cooldown has ended and you get stuck taking hits.