This is a fun lil' game with some neat concepts to encounter throughout! Some spoilers here of course.
Finding out you can draw anywhere yourself is not only handy for noting things as you go, but also just plain fun to mess around with. The password puzzles were quite clever as they all had some different kind of thing to figure out. My favorite being one of the earliest where the numbers spanned multiple rooms basically in plain sight but easy to not notice. Needing to use the options was also a stunner and reversing controls made the lava rooms more impactful than they initially seemed. You can physically rotate your mouse upside down of course, but where's the fun in that? :P I also liked that as you rescued other pointers they became your buddies to show you various things and do stuff. The point where you had multiple choices as to what to open was flawlessly well thought out as no matter the order you pick they will all come together. This adds a tad of replay value to boot.
PkGam
Recent community posts
Interestingly I became aware of this post through an email from Itch themselves, lol! So I wonder if that's how they planned to do a workaround for the time being.
In any case, Aionaykonn below me I think is mentioning this post which I was about to do too: https://itch.io/t/5149036/reindexing-adult-nsfw-content
So don't panic. They made it so now things that don't accept payments like this visual novel can be reindexed if you toggle a thing in the pricing to say "no payments". From the sounds of the post, it reindexes stuff daily so it won't be immediate. But the sooner you toggle that on anything that qualifies, the sooner they show up again. (Spread the word. :P )
They also seem to be working on getting another payment processor that isn't trying to control what can be bought, so there is a decent chance that things on Itch will get back to normal sooner than later.
Collective Shout, while obviously a bigoted biased nuisance, have no real power in themselves and there have always been groups like them as long as NSFW existed. They are just finding some success in pestering the payment processors. But something tells me they are lying to said payment processors regarding the content hosted at places and saying it's illegal stuff or something. After all, why is it that numerous other places known for hosting NSFW content for decades are not having their payment options threatened while places like Steam and Itch are? Another part of the problem is that there's not really a way around said payment processors: https://www.naka.com/blog/payments-duopoly-global-battle If there were, it would be easy for Itch or anyone else being threatened to simply set up another way for people to spend. So there are multiple deeper issues going on here that need to be solved. Hopefully sooner than later because undoubtedly this will not be the end of places being hassled over the content they host.
I'm guessing there's a lot of symbolism going on here, but I haven't been able to piece it together. Why does she not like dry land, the loneliness up there compared to the ones she met underwater? What were the dark figures in the trench, anxiety? Why do the first two underwater screens infinitely loop horizontally, implied drawing in?
Besides those bits of confusion, the dialog is cute and often funny, plus had a great atmosphere to set the tone for any given scene. It also looks quite nice throughout as every area's graphics and layout feels fitting.
This is a pretty relatable story as I think we all have things wish wouldn't have changed for the worse and that we could go back to living in a better time. Plus how important it is to hold on to hope even when things seem bleak so a better future can be made. I think I woud have liked to see more of the other character's perceptions on the matter because there's a lot of ways people can handle such a situation. But I suspect they were kept minimal to leave interpretation up to the player.
Hmmm... Not' sure I understand the symbolism of this one. Like, I get she's going on a long trip to be changed, but wonders if she should go back at first out of worrying that she no longer will be loved. Yet understood that Saturn may not be what she thinks it would be but wants to see it anyway because she loves it a lot? But yet hasn't ever really seen it in person to know she does yet isn't worry it could shatter her own expectations? I'm not sure if it's conflicting or a facet that she isn't aware of until it hits her later and she decides to go back after the understanding hits?
Was this ever a whirlwind of emotions! It seemed all cute/funny at first, then it took turns with mysterious animal disappearances, plus a lot of dialog about various kinds of emotional pain and death which changed my perception. Like that it was going somewhere dark and even made me rethink the tone of the music. But then the ending comes and it all made sense. Extremely well thought out!
Honestly kind of an iffy game. I mean it has a lot of potential since you can not only collect cards, but upgrade them as well. So this leads to more and more abilities and options as you go. But the game also often leads to a point where you've gotta grind to make progress because you need to upgrade your cards and/or get others which requires a bunch of repeat trips through the same opponents. Like you'll probably be able to get by fine on the regular trainers, but when you hit a gym leader's more upgraded cards, you get overwhelmed as there's not much you can do other than tell it you aren't ready and do another loop. Then repeat as needed.
This is genuinely good! I went into it expecting something small to poke at the reason they cut Misty, but got a preposterous amount of quality in it's writing, gameplay and even technical aspects which shows this is actually quite a labor of love! It perfectly encapsulates the dumbness behind the reason for the rotation of female (:P) characters and internet/streaming culture. Looking forward to seeing more of this!
I don't have a Reddit account (and don't plan to make one after the Spez/API stuff as that is some horrible mismanagement of the site and mistreatment of users), but lurk r/AnarchyChess because I found the stuff posted there to be hilarious. This too is hilarious! A collection of in-jokes wrapped up in a functional game!
Pretty neat idea! Trying to figure out the way through by thinking ahead across the piece switch and enemy moves so you don't get trapped is interesting throughout. You can sometimes get trapped when you blindly enter some rooms with certain pieces, which is a bummer. This is seems to happen mostly with the knight though (bishop trappings are rare and king/queen/rooks seem like they never trap you), so I guess in theory you can try to avoid capturing knights to keep them out of the switch queue and minimize the risk. It's also a little odd that to restart you have to refresh the page. But that's pretty minor.
Looks' neat, though oddly difficult to tell what each piece is in the shiny/glowy graphical version and less hard to recognize them if you use the other one. Piece recognition is pretty vital so this is an odd thing to overlook. I mean sure you can still click your own piece you are unsure of to see what it is (by it's movement) if you forget, but not opponent's pieces.
The AI is quite easy to beat (and mess with) if you are somewhat adept in chess as it often lets you have free pieces and doesn't always recognize mate threats, but that may be a plus as oftentimes chess games are inaccessible to many because the AI is too strong, lol! I think that's because too many others underestimate how hard chess is because they are already adept at it when they make a game and go: "This seems about right!" Then it slaughters most who try it. But some higher difficulty levels would be welcome if possible for a "play how you like/can" experience.
Some oddities I found are that sometimes it'll start playing itself even if you set one as human. You can just try it again until it does. Also on occasion it'll "take control of your pointer" in the browser version as you click on it. Which doesn't seem intended since it otherwise doesn't and still works. The game also doesn't seem to have concept of mate other than just taking the king. Which works. It's just unexpected. After a win, you may also see opponent's pieces look like they are being clicked on to move. But this is really minor as it doesn't do anything.
Pretty cute and heartwarming! Not' sure why, but I expected a dark or sad twist after the black time skip screens at some point. But I was pleased to see it was simply nice through and through! Maybe I played too many things and just reflexively expect drama in a story, lol! Or maybe one thing that's sometimes hard to interpret is what the conversation is about because your mom "................"s. I think the idea is to interpret it your own (Maybe personal) way or to just wait for the revelation, but it can lead to all kinds of potential guesses and kind of makes me feel like I missed stuff.
Really aesthetically pleasing design for a chess game in both visuals and sounds!
*Spoilers*
I think some boards are a bit unbalanced depending on whether or not you go first due to zugzwang potential. But I could be wrong as I'm not some pro. There also doesn't seem to be much difference between CPU difficulties as games seem to play out similarly if you make the same moves. But yet it's kinda fun overall anyway. Maybe because games aren't too long so you can experiment a bunch without worry of a lot of effort lost. Sort of like something to play around in and just zen.
Stalemate not existing didn't make sense to me given the tightness of the boards and how many setups can lead to everything being stuck, until I unlocked and tried the other play mode types. Then it made sense because even just king VS king could end up coming down to luck of the draw since they can be next to each other waiting for a winning move to come up. There's also no threefold repetition which also is likely due to the extra modes. But you can end up getting into basically infinite loops until you purposefully move your king where it can be taken to just try again. I mean if a game would otherwise be a infinite draw due to piece shuffling, you may as well just chalk it up to a draw in your mind and throw the game to move on, lol! "Sometimes" in such scenarios you can win by trading down to break out of lock and waiting for the AI to flub, but it's seemingly random if/when it happens and sort of rare. So it'll be up to the player to try and see if it'll work out or not.
A hilarious game that is remarkably well thought out! Like, your hacks are indeed overpowered...
*Spoilers*
...at first. Then things start taking turns and it becomes more and more balanced.Even the nuke, which is preposterously powerful, only usually can chip off around half the queens in the final battle because the opponent's king gets in the way. So it turns into quite a interesting battle of unique rule additions that you need to utilize to the fullest.
The gameplay is relaxing which works out well for the idea, though it gets pretty grindy with how many flowers you need to grow to reach the next part of the story getting progressively more lengthy as the flowers take longer to grow (Starts' reasonable, but ends at 50 of each?). So I think it could be re-balanced pacing-wise. I also noticed that money from customers is more sparse when you are growing something. Which is odd since that leads to odd lengthy time spans of inactivity.
But the story is fantastic! I was always wondering what would happen next with all of the characters and that kept me going. While a lot of the ires that took place were fantasy-based, it was the symbolism of what they represented that hit home. They all had some sort of relatable trait or scenario that you could empathize with and parts got me a bit teary-eyed. There was also a bunch of good advice sprinkled throughout to boot.
Very cute game of vampire world and relationship building! Gakuto for instance warming up as you go was really touching. Plus building trust for the donation part. (Or not if you pick that of course. :P) That also sounded like what I heard regarding actually donating blood so it should do a good job telling others what they will experience. Well, besides the vampire bite part of course, lol! Though I have also heard there's something similar where they numb the area before a stick. But I haven't experienced the process myself because I have always been too nervous (I am very weak to pain plus have anxiety) to try donating.
Not too many paths to take through it though. Whether you get perfect scores or not doesn't alter the dialog much for instance. (But will reorder or skip the re-quiz of course)
This is way more thought out and funny than I expected despite first impressions, lol! Couple of weird hiccups like not being able to search some objects if too close and getting booted to the title screen if you pick a seemingly invisible answer, but even that it minor as it still seems to remember where you left off despite hitting new game.
I got puzzled by that myself when I was finally beginning to sort the contents of that huge bundle in collections recently and...
I found this post:
https://itch.io/post/5507338/view-in-topic
...Mentioning:
https://lampysprites.itch.io/egg
...Which is deleted and corresponds with the deleted link you get in the bundle:
https://lampysprites.itch.io/deleted-1
That doesn't help too much because I don't know what "egg" is either, lol! Based on what lampy makes though, it may be some egg sprites, blender egg or a game based around an egg.
Ah I see! Yeah, that was my thing where I was looking all around for something, then couldn't tell where I was looking at, lol! So I did slow spins while looking up and down until I re-found it. But keeping the eyes on the horizon would eliminate that since you wouldn't be able to lose sight of the portal for long. Although that may eliminate the idea of it being somewhat disorienting. In hindsight, I probably should've picked up on that and was careful how I looked, but was tired at the time. So maybe it was more me.
Came for the Fennecs.
Found the end of the Feno... Err... Demo.
Joking around aside, when I seen "nothing else happens", I of course figured something else happened and thus was intrigued, lol! It ended up being surprisingly entertaining with the atmosphere changes and the dialog. It's also set up pretty neat in that you can't accidentally come across the secret rooms in the museum without first getting the dialog that unlocks them. So one couldn't just check walls and find the end of the demo by mistake without experiencing the rest.
One hiccup is it's a little easy to lose where you are in the dark space if you first and try to explore thinking there's a solution before trying to exit and finding a pink thing appeared with new dialog. I did find my way back to the portal with some flailing, but I guess if you don't, you can just restart as at that point you are not far in.