Boss's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Marelza's Cauldron]

This is gorgeous and has a ton of style

[goodbye, doggy]

This game is really incredible. It almost makes you want to cry. Its sort of zen. and it looks and sounds great

[BBYS]

this game is totally fucking sick and the music reminds me of the music in the game quest 64 in a good way. also the cutesy aesthetic is just magnificent

[Detective GUI]

really unique and inventive idea

[Flanet]

This game is really awesome and addictive. I skipped the tutorial at first (lol) and wasnt sure how to buy the towers because im on mobile. I thought i was selecting different kinds of seeds and the flowers themselves were temporary towers or something? This is why we should just play the tutorial lol. I found the game really interesting and fun and the graphics were really cool and interesting too. As i got closer to level 100 i found it really rewarding to realize you could jump to stack towers by dropping them . I sort of wanted to be able to make a 2nd layer of the shield tower by bouncing above it and then using the buy tower command and have another layer of the shield appear like layers of a stratosphere. i think that could be amazing if it was easiee to bounce and get air off enemies so its like a platform climb game that leads to you flying around orbit or even going to other planets. That might just be really chaotic and ridiculous though. When i hit level 100 i dont know if i overclocked the game or if my build made this happen but i had tons of gun towers out and they all died at once. Then the enemies came in and i couldnt jump into them all. I went back and did a mostly health build and that basically gives you a god mode where eventually you can tap to plant seeds endlessly and you wont die, maybe a hidden metaphor about what towers are the best for our own planet? Lol. I think if you ran this on a Computer and do a heavy health tower build you could let it idle forever. I hit level 145 and was like ok this is going too far. It got a little more fun to hit jumps into orbit at that point because the game was starting to lag/overclock so my air direction inputs were more precise. All in all i think its an amazing game and you could turn it into a really engaging story oriented tower defense game or really do anything with the mechanics here. In a way it was like a puzzle and like an action game too already. This can definitely give you carpet tunnel if youre playing on mobile. I think it could be sick if somehow the game doesnt overclock when a million objects are on the screen and you instruct the player to do a god mode style build and then crazy bosses came in that you had to fight that did enough damage to make the health build fail. I think all the action on the screen makes you want it to be a japanese shootemup in a way, this mechanism or gameplay dynamic is the perfect blend of tower defense and attacking things to defend but the style doesnt feel jaded or industrial at all, it still feels really artistic. Maybe some of that is because pico 8 is just a great platform too, idk. I also felt that at a certain point this game became like a meditation and was relaxing and made me re-realize the purpose of video games. So theres that i guess. I better stop typing i hope this review doesnt break the web page for being too long

Elastiskalinjen responds:

Thanks! Impressive review and for hitting such highscores :O

[Hanukkah Runner]

This is really awesome. I played it on easy mode because im watching tv and due to the nature of that specific multitask, I don’t know if I could commit to beating it on harder difficulties but aside from obviously how great the pixel style of this is and the firm and simple goal and physics something I really love is that the theme is cultural in a cute way and there are some hebrew words that pop up and I think anytime a game has these it gives it more objective value for exposing the players to other cultural concepts and vocabulary (even if it’s brief)

[Ranata the Frog and the Broken Forest]

This is really fun. Playing on mobile is so fucking annoying because you will accidentally press down! I had a glitch similar to others, got to level 13 and i had one purple fruit, a few levels before this the witch stops saying what fruits she needs until you bring her one fruit, I figured that lined up with 4 fruits being present instead of 3, level 13 i know i need a purple because the bottom right get fruit icon, so I bring her the purple fruit, it disappears, them she says she needs purple and green, theres no purple left so either there was not enough purples or this is a glitch where she eats a fruit and doesnt register it at first, also like others have said the scoreboard thing which I think is still glitched maybe and its out of judgement for sure now but idk if any of this would be worth the time to fix, or if the glitch i got was super rare or somehow there was user error on my end altho i flew across the whole canopy atleast twice to double check. this game is dope and under rated

[Le Chat Foncé: Petite Adventure 3]

Loved it, really cool aesthetics and sound was relaxing, the way you only jump half a block was cute and the game was really clever. a few times the text box had text that disappeared because it didn't fit and i usually tap talk buttons like twice to see if i can get the text to just auto fill but that makes me miss text here, which isn't that bad and I'm not sure if many other people care about that but thought i'd mention that, really fun and cool to explore the kind of maze and try to remember where all the key pieces are, i love the way youre forced to do that because your key meter fills up, overall would like to see you make more

[Brink Of Alienation III]

really awesome heydey flash era contra style game

[Miskatonic Brain Drain]

You the man now dawg! I liked the theme and story and art it all went together really well and made the confusion of the gameplay seem to make sense and match especially tied together by the BSOD screen which is a great way to trick the player into fucking up which key they want to press. at first hitting q and a for slide and the answers to questions was really fucking me up and the BSOD fucks you up more but its good to have someting like that really confuse you. I have to say I understand why people are confused as fuck but I found it fun even though I did have to play a long ass time to beat it the first time, I wish the timer was on in retrospect because I feel like it took me thirty minutes as not knowing what hitting what things / getting hit does to the meter means, going down to 20% and then almost all the way back up which is emphasized by some instances of double spawn death, glitch into the side of a platform while sliding and one or two times i even slide moved and got stuck outside of the screen on the left side probably bolstered out by a paltform or something? the weird thing is the necronomicon theme made me feel like the more glitches there were the better, the BSOD being slightly meta atleast to the extent of the players computer made me feel like the confusion was supposed to be there.

I think the confusion definitely got fucking aggravating when I started wanting to hit the 3 minute medal and was confused what did what. I eventually had to focus and realize I couldnt punch the heart bubbles and for awhile I thought I had to run into the skull bubbles and the heart bubbles. I think the first thing after realizing how to beat the game that sped my play up a lot was using the slide like a tech maneuver by jumping and sliding over onto the long platform constantly where I knew I had space and using that to speed up as far as I could but I still couldnt hit even 5 minutes so I kept playing and playing. getting like 3 and a half minutes and then getting an 8 or 9 minute run after that is so fucking annoying!! lmfao. eventually I could do them all under 5 minutes and I found out the jump slide tech where you jump and slide at the same time so that you get thrown in the air at around a 45 degree angle diagonally, perfect for some tight spots you encounter in the platform pattern and this was necessary to learn and something i didnt figure out for awhile.

I got a 3 minute run but because I had selected one of the girls specifically I think it didn't give me the medal at first. I could have actually just fucked up and not turned speed mode on for all I know but I think the timer was there so this might be a real thing, hard to say when you played it like 50 fuckin times. Eventually getting down to 2 minute area times was exciting but i realized i had something wrong and i found out you have to punch the skull word bubbles, touch the heart ones, and i also realized i had to stop spammin the diagonal slide invincible tech because it was slower than just going straight up, even though thats riskier. this was a pretty cool game and the mixture of the questions and platforming hectic chaos was really really cerebral and hooked me in and got me to passionately play it for a while. Would love to see something like this expanded and be made even more confusing and have more questions that you have to really focus more on to answer or something like that, like maybe a math question or history mode or some ridiculous and evilly insanely punishing shit like that.

Anyways all that being said, its too confusing to be developed into something that you would sell like on the steam marketplace as is but I think it would be easy to add some things to the tutorial that outline the details of what is happening during the gameplay,and you would probably have to make the controlsand movement feel prettier and smoother so any random person would immediately feel like oh this is fun i get it even though i like the way this all chaotically matches the theme. also kinda curious what the original form of this was before people started reviewing and some changes were made. sick game, probably a really good team because there seemed to be a lot of chemistry with the final product

Maprower responds:

You are absolutely the man now, dawg.
Probably know more about the intricacies of the controls than I do.

As for what the original game looked like, it wasn't that different - most post-launch support was just around trying to make thing a little less obtuse. For example, if I was going back to Brain Drain at this stage I'd have added some telegraphing to the skull/heart bubbles to indicate that you're meant to punch one of them and pick up the other, like so many unattended pieces of gum stuck to the back of people's heads. All mine now. My empire.

Character controller could have used a bunch more work too, honestly, that's been a thorn in my side since day one. But have to move on at some stage, onto my ever-increasingly pile of failed prototypes.

You earned those medals of triumph, though, dawg. Absolute boss.