This game is a rare example of being aesthetically competent, mechanically decent, but filled with disastrous design decisions. The developer is a good artist, but seems to have a poor understanding of level design.
Aesthetically: Looks great, sounds great.
Mechanically: Tight movement and jumping, but nothing special, particularly let down by poor level design with a lot of platforms having weird collision or being so high you can only reach it at the absolute peak of your jump. Parrying seems to have a built in delay, but there's no animation to go with it, it just stops working for a brief moment after using it, so it feels inconsistent. Enemies and objects you interact with are interesting enough so far, but I really don't like the way a lot of things stun you knock you back quite considerably, and for quite a long time (especially over large pits).
Design Wise: Incredibly sparse save points, spikes everywhere like it's "I wanna be the Guy", precision platforming over instant death pits (with a few leaps of faith!), and trial-and-error boss encounters are enough for me to not even finish what little there is so far. It's not insanely difficult, but it's just enough for me to genuinely ponder "why bother playing?",
it's supposed to be a porn game, how am I supposed to jack off if I'm getting my ass blasted, and dying 5 times in a row.
I really don't want to play through another obnoxiously difficult hentai platformer. I don't know why many h-platformer devs feel the need to make their games difficult, sometimes excessively, that design philosophy is entirely antithetical to what porn should be. Concentrating on a difficult game causes blood to flow into the brain, and right out of the dick, and that's actually scientifically backed up. No amount of titty mods are gonna help you cum to Dark Souls or Hollow Knight, the so called 'inspiration' for this game.
It's disappointing because this game's stage is entirely set for something fun to be made with its pieces. If the level and boss design wasn't so actively detracting from the experience, this game has all the pieces to get a 5/5, they're just placed in all the wrong places.
The reviews over if you're a user looking for advice on whether you should play this game or not. But, if you're the developer, you should read on. You're probably a little frustrated with the poor ratings. What do you do to get these higher? Because if you can consistently get 5/5s, your game could blow up, and even this review could change.
Here's a few things off the top of my head:
1) Add a save point at the end of the screen with the combat tutorial, so players that die before getting to the other save don't lose their progress.
2) Upon getting a game over, give the option to 'continue' at the start of the screen they died in.
3) Instead of instant death pits, if you fall in one you should appear at the start of the screen and take some damage. Better yet, instead of spawning at the start of the screen, spawn just before the jump.
4) Get that gallery in ASAP, and update it with every new animation you add, as one dev to another, trust me; people really like galleries.
5) Too many jumps that can just barely be completed. That's vertically or horizontally. 1. You shouldn't be challenging players while they're still learning. 2. It feels clunky and has gotten a lot of complaints in the thread. 3. There are a few leaps of faith. For example in the first area, you're supposed to use a slime to jump to the right of the screen to continue playing the game. Before trying this on a whim, I legit thought the game was over and you only had this single area and one boss.
6) Two issues with spikes:
- They blend in with the background, they should definitely stand out as a hazard.
- Too many pixel-perfect spike areas and jumps, but the movement isn't tight enough to avoid damage in all of these instances. It's possible to tap the movement key as light as possible, and still get hurt. But realistically, why would you ever want such pixel-perfect spike traps in your game anyway?
7) Try to design bosses that can be beaten on the first or second try. Quickest way to lose your players, especially in the genre of
porn platformers, is to make them repeatedly lose to a boss. Heck, they'll just go jack it to something else, won't they? Keep in mind most of your players are going to be playing one-handed, and half-concentrating. Enemy attacks should be easy to react to and dodge, well-telegraphed (most are, to be fair), and probably only do 1 damage.
At the very least, if you want to keep your difficulty, keep it in a different mode. There's a reason why a lot of top rated platformer games on this website are fairly easy, even high quality hard games have controversial ratings because it simply makes for a very poor masturbatory experience.
8) Level design needs to be better, it's not really something that can be taught, but there are good examples. Look at Super Mario Bros as an example. Seriously. Let me give you a small explanation of the Mario design philosophy. In Mario, levels are designed around a single concept, such as 'Springs', like the mushrooms in your game. The level will introduce springs first in an easy way, and then in increasingly more complicated and nuanced ways until the end of the level. With springs fully introduced, you can now integrate them into the game moving forwards.
However, how was your game designed? Okay, there was a basic spring at first, but within a minute I was precariously bouncing between springs over death pits as if I suddenly went from Level 1-1 to 8-1.
Then later, the fireballs in the lava area, instead of being introduced with elegance, and used in creative ways, they were just splashed over the screen, seemingly at complete random. Your levels are like meh Super Mario Maker levels, with a lot of things thrown on the screen with little consideration of why they're there, when in reality, you're can use these building blocks to form something really engaging, different and fun. I can already think of a ton of fun ways to use the springs, and interesting slime monsters you had. The destructible rocks, or the vertical fireballs. You pretty much have three entire Super Mario levels of content there, and it feels weird that you squished it all into only a couple of screens.
and in the future I hope to see it in my library steam.
