This game seems pretty cool, but controls are pretty laggy, well, graphics and sound both are awesome, mechanics are medium-good, but the controls kills it a little bit. You can't rush even in the least in this game. I don't say that's bad, but for platformers like this, it's pretty elementary. Super Mario Bros. and Super Meat Boy are the best examples I can think of right now.
Reviews for "Pause Ahead"
Damn, I wasted some time in room 18. I'd have shaved at least another second still off my time if I had not gotten to the right side of the screen with such a painfully low horizontal velocity, because I optimized the HELL out of every other room, I nailed it all perfectly, I played it like a damn chess master. Still, no one's ever going to beat my time. It's there for good. Take that as a challenge, any superhumans out there reading this - try and speedrun this turkey faster than me. I'd wager in 10 years my time of 2:13.55 will still be #1, and the only way it's not going to be is if I go back myself and do it better. Or unless someone cheats. But if I'm listed as #1 and I did it legitimately, I think it's safe to conclude that there is no feasible way for cheaters to forge fake top scores/times the way they can in most of these indy games with leaderboards. Which means I stay as #1 unless someone actually beats my time, and that's just not going to happen unless I do it myself. I bet I would get it under 2:12 if I nailed #18 as well as all the other rooms.
Ironic that I did it all with a newgrounds time fuck themed background on the borders of the game screen, since this is kind of a sequel of tower of heaven which was kind of a less good knockoff of time fuck. This does have one interesting novelty to it, the gimmick of this game being the pausing. On the other hand, there is no "user designed level" feature, which I think is quite a trade-off. Why did you get rid of that? That's the best part about either time fcuk or tower of heaven! You detracted way more from it by leaving it out than you added by having the "pause" gimmick. At least it's not quite as short a game as tower of heaven. I will admit I was a little bit unnecessarily harsh in my review of tower of heaven, and I now have revised my opinion and believe I was mistaken in my original reaction that it was time fuck if made by a religious nutball, since that ending was that the protagonist wished for god to leave our universe and let the Earth develop on its own which might be allegorical to mankind abandoning religion and other superstitions (plus the god was overtly a complete douchebag in that game so religion-themed as it may have been, that game was anything but pro-religion). Incidentally, I eventually made a different user level of tower of heaven, go to that game and try it if you like, it's really, really cruel and you'll be very angry if you win it, guaranteed, angrier still if you win it after getting to the secret region of the level map, though I'm not sure it's actually possible to do that, I may have made that impossible (saying this may be too much of a hint to winning it but c'est la vie):
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Still, there is something to be said about tower of heaven relative to time fcuk, which is that if you successfully design a level, and you lose your connection, it won't be GONE (as what happened to me when I did the most awesome level of all time in early 2010, which I timed so that it SHOULD have been game #10000 - I guess leaving it open for several hours, it screwed it up and maybe logged me out of newgrounds from being idle for too long - so it was lost when I tried to submit it after solving it the last bit of it after game I observed #9999 was submitted), whereas if it's just a matter of generating text, you can copy it into notepad and unless your hard drive dies or you get attacked by a ransomeware virus, you won't lose it.
Be sure to try The Valley Rule and A Kitty Dream by Raiyumi, which are kind of sequels to this. Or at least obviously generated by the same game software engine (and sharing many of the sound effects). What the hell is with the cat/cat ear motif though? And what the HELL is with that HIDEOUS wide-open mouth grin the cat guy in this thing has from ear to ear all the time (according to the alternate dialog, he's a wolf thing, maybe he's a werewolf since "werewolves" is one of the pause dialog snippets, but whatever)? He's trapped in a sort of time-fcuk or cube 2 hellish death puzzle world, that's not something to be friggin' exuberantly happy about. Well no, if I was stuck in the time-fcuk box, I'd be exuberantly pleased about it, but that's just me.
Look on youtube for a walkthrough and you'll see how to get the secret keys - get all 3 and you can access the secret level. Oddly enough, that's how you access the "bad ending" - usually in games with multiple endings, it's the "bad" ending that's the one that's easy to attain and you have to work at it to get the good ending, not the other way around, but then again, you need the bad ending to get the suave sunglasses. And THEN, after you beat the secret level with the 2 guillotines, go back and play the game again, and read the dialog from the narrator while he's wearing the sunglasses. There's a humorous alternate version of all the dialog. Maybe I'll go back and do it while signed in just to kick the asses of all the other high scores in that one too, hmpf.
Well, anyway, it's a pretty good game. Be sure to see the secret level at least. The sound/music is pretty good, though not as good as the audio to time fcuk, that was effin' epic.
RAGE QUIT
Hidden stage(with guillotine) is REAAALLLY HARD!
Very nice. I thought it was just hard enough. Clever boss battle, keeps you on your toes. Nihil was cool, though I'd rather have a better ending upon its completion.
Excellent game!!! Though I did give up on level 7.