this is very original and I love the graffics, allthough I think it could be better
Reviews for "Voiceless (Legacy version)"
fun game but hr2995 made a whole fucking essay about it and its the funniest thing ive seen
I am way to bad at this to beat it, but it is REALLY cool!
This is a really cool idea that was executed poorly.
But before I get to the gameplay stuff, I'll first comment on the presentation, which was pretty good all around, but didn't suit the gameplay very well.
The game looks really good. There's a lot of appeal here, in the character sprite an animations, in the environment, and in the background. It's also pretty aesthetically consistent. I have similar things to say about the sound design. While the sound effects were usually mediocre, the music was actually really good. I think it fits the visuals well and sounds good. If it were extended, I might listen to it on its own.
However, the presentation and gameplay don't mesh very well, which is very important in a game where an element of the presentation so directly affects the gameplay. I'm of course talking about timing your jumps and dashes on rhythm so they actually work. There are three indicators for this:
- the music
- the visual indicator at the bottom of the screen
- the player character's idle bounce
The music doesn't work well to indicate to the player when they can jump or dash, because the beat is far more understated than it should be. There's a reason most rhythm games use majority electronic dance music. It's because the repetition of the songs and the emphasis on the beat allows the player to stay on beat easily. The beat is very soft, especially during certain transitions between sections of a song, making it hard to stick to the beat while platforming. This is especially frustrating, because this issue is fixed with the colored blocks that turn on and off. Whenever you're near them, a metronome sound plays that tells you not only exactly when they'll turn on or off, but also when you are able to jump or dash. Platforming in these areas, while still hard, felt much more fair than the rest of the game. Simply adding a similarly loud beat that dominated the background music would make the visuals be much more of a help during gameplay.
The visuals have different issues. The visual indicator at the bottom was useful, but it directed my attention away from the level, and towards the bottom of the screen, which made gameplay a balancing act of trying not to run into level hazards while still keeping my eye on the indicator. I doubt it was the kind of challenge you intended, and it wasn't very fun. A far better indicator would be where the player is most likely to look.
This is why using the player character's idle animation as a way of keeping the player on beat is such an interesting idea. However, it has a few limitations here. Perhaps the most obvious limitation is that most of the time, players aren't going to be in the idle phase, meaning when they're jumping, running, dashing, etc. they must use the other flawed methods of keeping with the beat. But there's also the fact that using the idle animation as a way to stay on beat is probably not immediately obvious to all players. It certainly wasn't to me. And there's the fact that the idle animation itself is fairly smooth, and somewhat subtle. An ideal alternative would be much more jarring and noticeable so the player is always aware of its presence and able to pay attention to it and use it while platforming. Anything to help achieve this goal would be great, such as a rapid change of color, posing, exaggeration, whatever you can do to get the beat across. Again, there's a reason rhythm games are usually rather abstract, so that they can best sync their visual presentation with their audio. A truly great visual indicator would be impossible to ignore, and incredibly efficient at getting the player to internalize the beat.
The great thing about these changes, but auditory and visual, is that they not only make the game more accessible and intuitive, they also make the game feel much better. Pressing a button in time with the main character's idle animation and some faint drums is ok, but having your button press be instantly rewarded with a noticeable visual shift, along with a very clear auditory acknowledgement, even though they technically aren't tied to you pressing the button, makes that button press feel far more impactful. Solidify this with a few visual effects (such as a screen flash/shake, a color shift, an animation change, etc.) that actually are tied to the button being pressed on time, and you have a system that makes just staying on beat feel great.
I understand that making these changes happen is a lot harder than just proposing them. This game was clearly designed with a certain (relatively grounded) aesthetic in mind that is often opposed to the suggestions I'm making, or at the very least makes implementing them much harder. But not only do I believe that these changes are definitely possible to implement, I also believe that any aesthetic shift that serves the gameplay to the level I've described here is worth it.
presentation nitpicks:
- death sound effect and visual are bad. They don't fit thematically or aesthetically with the rest of the game, and also just look and sound bad. Surprising for a game which is otherwise so visually solid.
- I wish the background music was longer. It gets repetitive quickly.
- I wish there was parallax scrolling applied to the background
- The tiling of some areas becomes very repetitive. While unique landmarks to break up the monotony while making each area more unique and memorable would be ideal, simply mixing up the tiling would be a far less time consuming endeavor that would still go a long way to solving the issue.
Gameplay:
This game is a completely average platformer that is made special by the inclusion of the rhythm based mechanics on top of it, so most of the problems I have with it are problems with the rhythm aspect of it, most of which I've argued above. However, I still have problems with the difficulty of this game, as well as the bugs.
This game has the problem many first games do, where the author, who's had a lot of time to become familiar with the mechanics and feel of the game, makes the game for themselves, instead of the average player, who has no experience with the game. This creates a sharp learning curve and a very punishing difficulty curve in general. Really the only way to solve this effectively is through a lot of playtesting by people who aren't used to the game.
Of course, this kind of game will always be difficult, just by virtue of asking players to pay attention to both the spatial awareness required in a platform along with the timing required for a traditional rhythm game. But you can do a lot more to ease players into it.
Besides that criticism there's also a few bugs I found, so I'll list those
Bugs:
- "The metronome" (the invisible timer that dictates when the player can jump/dash, when on/off blocks switch, when the player character does her idle animation, and other things) can sometimes just stop. This happens when the game window isn't visible on the game tab, such as when I've scrolled down to the reviews section. I've done some testing and whether or not you are actually on the game tab/window, or whether you are active in game, or are even able to provide input to the game, when the game is visible on the game tab, the game functions fine, and whenever it isn't, when you scroll back up, the metronome stops working (that's somewhat of a simplification. if you scroll down and immediately up the game functions fine, but if the game isn't visible for longer, and then you scroll back up, the issue occurs. I'm not sure exactly how long the game must not be visible to cause this to happen, but I know it definitely happens after 3 minutes. Also whenever I scroll back up and the game is visible again, I can see the visual indicator of the beat still working for a small amount of time before the metronome stops functioning, independent of how much time the game remains not visible. So it seems the act of making the game visible again is what triggers to metronome to stop working? Idk either.)
"The metronome" is tied to many functions in game, so when it stops functioning it creates a lot of problems including:
*The player being able to jump twice at whatever timing they wish, and being able to dash infinitely and at any timing they wish.
*colored on/off blocks stop functioning. They remain in whatever state they are before the metronome stops working. For some reason, even some of the active ones lose their collision box. When the metronome starts working again and things return to normal, the on/off blocks end up desynced, meaning the beat they turn on/off on changes from the original, dev intended one permanently.
*The player character's idle animation becomes nonexistent.
*The visual indicator for when you can jump/dash becomes "inactive", meaning yellow circles no longer come from the right side .
These are only the issues I know of / can remember right now. If it's any help, I experienced all this on google chrome.
- Occasionally on the beat visual indicator a passing circle would be invisible, meaning I could still use it to jump/dash and it still took up a spot, it just had no sprite assigned to it. This happens rarely and I'm not sure what causes it. (This is independent from the metronome shenanigans to my knowledge.)
- The player character became invisible at one point. I'm not sure what caused it, and I wasn't able to replicate it. When I died and respawned she was visible again.
Ok that's what I have to say about this game. Many of these criticisms have been made before, but I hope the level of detail I went into was at least somewhat helpful.
Explosion_Effect.mp4