REALLY FUCKING HARD but not so much to the point where i dont ever wanna try again, its really easy to understand but to master that shit you really gotta lock-in and IIIIIIII dont think i got all that LMAO
vividlope has al ot of levels centered around you covering all these tiles and using abilities to whack and blap away enemies thatre tryin to get the drop on you, this is dope its just sometimes you misread the depth perception cause of the angle or youre basically required to have trial and error shit goin on for some later things.
At the very least you can hop back into shit relatively quick and the levels and aesthetics of everything is really nice, i agree with the one person i saw on here say this is more like a PSP game than it is a Dreamcast game
This feels like it'd be an idea for a dreamcast game and some bits of it have that almost y2k thing going on but i think its more fruit aero than it is y2k, but WHATEVER
the game is fun its more like an actiony puzzle game than it is smthing like a platformer like i, and im sure many other people probably thought from bare glimpses of the game
I think my biggest thing im sad about is just how i didnt get to finish this within the year it dropped because id totally have had it as one of my more preferred 2023 releases of then, but thats okay! bc again, it can be brutal in some levels
thankfully u can select whichever ones you want in any order so you dont HAVE to play shit in order
all in all its a nice arcadey game with a great premise and execution that is one tough motherfucker in some bits because of whether its misinterpreting the depth or somethin else going on, cerise is adorable, and its like 10 bucks so yea if any of that sounds nice then give it a whirl
vividlope has al ot of levels centered around you covering all these tiles and using abilities to whack and blap away enemies thatre tryin to get the drop on you, this is dope its just sometimes you misread the depth perception cause of the angle or youre basically required to have trial and error shit goin on for some later things.
At the very least you can hop back into shit relatively quick and the levels and aesthetics of everything is really nice, i agree with the one person i saw on here say this is more like a PSP game than it is a Dreamcast game
This feels like it'd be an idea for a dreamcast game and some bits of it have that almost y2k thing going on but i think its more fruit aero than it is y2k, but WHATEVER
the game is fun its more like an actiony puzzle game than it is smthing like a platformer like i, and im sure many other people probably thought from bare glimpses of the game
I think my biggest thing im sad about is just how i didnt get to finish this within the year it dropped because id totally have had it as one of my more preferred 2023 releases of then, but thats okay! bc again, it can be brutal in some levels
thankfully u can select whichever ones you want in any order so you dont HAVE to play shit in order
all in all its a nice arcadey game with a great premise and execution that is one tough motherfucker in some bits because of whether its misinterpreting the depth or somethin else going on, cerise is adorable, and its like 10 bucks so yea if any of that sounds nice then give it a whirl
While the puzzle-action gameplay is both novel and nostalgic here, Vividlope’s difficulty swings too erratically between fast-paced fun and fuming frustration.
Full Review: https://neoncloudff.wordpress.com/2023/07/01/now-playing-june-2023-edition/
Full Review: https://neoncloudff.wordpress.com/2023/07/01/now-playing-june-2023-edition/
Sony PSP3 (aka Steam Deck OLED) launch title
goes so hard
I know making even vaguely targeted statements is looked down upon, but the general consensus of Vividlope here is skewed by takes that frankly either don’t understand the game, refuse to approach it on it’s terms, or want it to be something that it just isn’t. Please don’t take this as personal slights, those who’ve made these statements; I’m just pushing back on what I see as misconceptions of the game.
Before that, my take: It’s cute! Game is really tough, to a brutal degree by the end of the game, but that’s okay! Mechanically, the game has flaws, but aesthetically it shines. I wish I had more to say, but uh. There!
Beyond that, I’ll leave it at a bunch of Statements I’ve seen about the game, here and otherwise, and responses to those statements.
--
“Enemies arbitrarily spawn and move semi-randomly. It’s Non-Design.”
Enemies spawn over time, and based on completion of the level. Specific spaces spawn enemies. Furthermore, while there are certain enemies that rely on a degree of random movement, each enemy has rules to them; not too dissimilar to the ghosts in Pac-Man. Learn the rules, and you can handle any one enemy. Don’t, you die. Simple as.
“I want it to be a casual PC platformer / it should be a puzzle game but it’s not!”
Nothing about it reads as casual beyond the first level’s batch of stages – Y’know, where you learn to play the game. It’s a tutorial. It’s by and large an extrapolation of Arcade game design; it’s not a puzzle game, it’s not a platformer, it’s feeding off the same roots as Qix, Dig Dug, Q-Bert, all that shit. The “puzzle twist” extends purely to some of the gimmicks of levels; panels “unpainting” themselves, slight navigational puzzles, the works. This is an arcade game.
“The movement is awkward / I can’t commit to certain movements!”
You can use an analog stick, but if you use the D-Pad (as the game strongly suggests when you launch it), the movement sticks to the grids the game wants you to play without being overly stiff. Furthermore… The game isn’t built around free movement, in a sense. You get precision by playing by their rules. You can jump two spaces, one if you hold back as you jump, and a Chess-like Knight jump if you hold hard left or right, relative to where you’re jumping.
“The developer’s response to difficulty tweaks is condescending!”
You are playing an easier version of a game where half the point is perfecting play to get a high rank. The only difference when playing on Easy is having the highest possible rank locked out. If you want to get the best ranking, play the game as it was originally intended. Sounds fair enough.
“I can fill in every space and only get an S/S+ rank!”
100%ing a board is important, but so is keeping an unbroken chain going. It’s Combos Baby
“It’s just like a Dreamcast game!”
Wrong. PSP Launch Title.
--
...And I'm still only giving it a 3.5, like most of the people I think had iffy reads on it here. C'est la vie! ¯\(ツ)/¯
Before that, my take: It’s cute! Game is really tough, to a brutal degree by the end of the game, but that’s okay! Mechanically, the game has flaws, but aesthetically it shines. I wish I had more to say, but uh. There!
Beyond that, I’ll leave it at a bunch of Statements I’ve seen about the game, here and otherwise, and responses to those statements.
--
“Enemies arbitrarily spawn and move semi-randomly. It’s Non-Design.”
Enemies spawn over time, and based on completion of the level. Specific spaces spawn enemies. Furthermore, while there are certain enemies that rely on a degree of random movement, each enemy has rules to them; not too dissimilar to the ghosts in Pac-Man. Learn the rules, and you can handle any one enemy. Don’t, you die. Simple as.
“I want it to be a casual PC platformer / it should be a puzzle game but it’s not!”
Nothing about it reads as casual beyond the first level’s batch of stages – Y’know, where you learn to play the game. It’s a tutorial. It’s by and large an extrapolation of Arcade game design; it’s not a puzzle game, it’s not a platformer, it’s feeding off the same roots as Qix, Dig Dug, Q-Bert, all that shit. The “puzzle twist” extends purely to some of the gimmicks of levels; panels “unpainting” themselves, slight navigational puzzles, the works. This is an arcade game.
“The movement is awkward / I can’t commit to certain movements!”
You can use an analog stick, but if you use the D-Pad (as the game strongly suggests when you launch it), the movement sticks to the grids the game wants you to play without being overly stiff. Furthermore… The game isn’t built around free movement, in a sense. You get precision by playing by their rules. You can jump two spaces, one if you hold back as you jump, and a Chess-like Knight jump if you hold hard left or right, relative to where you’re jumping.
“The developer’s response to difficulty tweaks is condescending!”
You are playing an easier version of a game where half the point is perfecting play to get a high rank. The only difference when playing on Easy is having the highest possible rank locked out. If you want to get the best ranking, play the game as it was originally intended. Sounds fair enough.
“I can fill in every space and only get an S/S+ rank!”
100%ing a board is important, but so is keeping an unbroken chain going. It’s Combos Baby
“It’s just like a Dreamcast game!”
Wrong. PSP Launch Title.
--
...And I'm still only giving it a 3.5, like most of the people I think had iffy reads on it here. C'est la vie! ¯\(ツ)/¯
Reminds me of a 2011 Wiiware game, which is kind of awesome. Arcadey type game akin to Monkey Ball. Fun game to pick up and play for a little while before setting it back down.
Fun but frustrating. Lots of content, but can still feel kind of empty.
Frustratingly near-perfect. The developer's condescending reaction to the objective truth that this game's "difficulty" is broken, enemy spawn non-design prevents it from being the casual PC platformer masterpiece it so aspires to be. Gating you off from ever feeling like you've accomplished anything isn't much of a "compromise".
You can't "Get Good" at Vividlope, not on stages where arbitrary enemy spawn acts in defiance of "uninterrupted-flow" gameplay loops. Instead each run is reduced to the crank of a slot machine arm; the tension of multi-gimmick maestro juggling instead placed poorly on a finger cross that THIS TIME the enemy spawn placement will be kind enough for you to awkwardly dance towards a better-than-decent rank.
By all means it is a fun game and a good (definitely not Dreamcast or PS1) vibe, but the disregard for these glaring issues keeps it from ranking among something such as the best within the PopCap library.
You can't "Get Good" at Vividlope, not on stages where arbitrary enemy spawn acts in defiance of "uninterrupted-flow" gameplay loops. Instead each run is reduced to the crank of a slot machine arm; the tension of multi-gimmick maestro juggling instead placed poorly on a finger cross that THIS TIME the enemy spawn placement will be kind enough for you to awkwardly dance towards a better-than-decent rank.
By all means it is a fun game and a good (definitely not Dreamcast or PS1) vibe, but the disregard for these glaring issues keeps it from ranking among something such as the best within the PopCap library.
I'm so close to loving everything about this game, and every so often i feel like i do. I love the premise, the music, the design. It emulates an early '00s arcade game really well... but that also includes all the bullshit gameplay elements.
There was a point for me, i think halfway through the stages on level 4 where I realised i wasn't finding the gameplay fun a good chunk of the time. It's down to enemy placements primarily. It gets to a point where there's so many of them following you with even more spawning out of nowhere directly next to you, it seems way too harsh. Plus, the game tends to introduce an entirely new enemy every other stage which feels too much. I'm currently on level 7, and I swear I've come across like 50 different kinds of enemy, and half of them are a fucking nightmare to deal with.
The game also likes to push a lot of other stage features and gimmicks at you just as quickly as it adds new enemies. Hidden tiles, slippery tiles, a superjump thing, spikes that only hurt you if you jump on them, tiles that flip between colours whenever you step on them, tiles that cycle through 3 colours whenever you step on them, fragile tiles, a little guy that moves around and resets your coloured tiles that you have to deal with, etc etc. it's.. a lot, and while i can appreciate just how much the game offers variety-wise with this, it's too much too quickly for me. I feel like there's so many more opportunities for cool stages with the features it introduces but instead it chooses to hastily jump to the next thing and then combine gimmicks together in stages.
I appreciated the ability to buy powerups more than ever once i got to the later stages, but i dunno, part of me feels like it was an easy fix to the unfair difficulty of some stages rather than just improving some of the stage designs.
23/06
I made this review the day before i beat the main game, and the issues i have still stand. I made use of easy mode for some of these final stages which made the end game actually fun challenging rather than annoying awful bullshit challenging. I'm pretty sure this got added in an update rather than being in the game from the start which is weird because jesus i would never beat this game otherwise.
The game continued to add more enemies and more stuff right 'til the end. I was saying to myself yesterday 'god what if the game adds like a lights out gimmick later that'll be so fucking annoying' and lo and behold it absolutely did. There was another gimmick, the fan tiles, that were also super frustrating to work with. Some stages had these huge areas full of fan tiles which bounce you around like the dvd video screensaver, and you had to get the exact right position and movement to bounce you around for a full minute until you get to the other end or else you die... and then even when you do that successfully you end up dying to an enemy on the other end that you just can't avoid AHHHHH
A standout moment for me was stage 9-12, where the map is nothing but a giant square. It's one of my favourite levels in the game. Enemies are littered everywhere on the grid but this time instead of being confined to a long 2-tile wide hallways that make death almost unavoidable you have this huge amount of space to dodge them. It's incredibly fun, and the game can for once actually justify throwing a million different enemies at you at once. I'd love to see another endless gamemode added to the game that's just this level over and over but with the square getting bigger each time you fully colour it and the enemies getting tougher and more abundant. I'd play the shit out of that!
Am I ever going to come back to this and get the V rank for each stage? Fuck no. I don't even know if it'd be possible lol. But for what it's worth I did get a good amount of enjoyment out of this. It's a neat premise with a phenomenal art style and soundtrack behind it, and whenever the gameplay wasn't driving me up the wall i got a hell of a lot of fun out of it.
cerise is a very cool character i like her a lot
There was a point for me, i think halfway through the stages on level 4 where I realised i wasn't finding the gameplay fun a good chunk of the time. It's down to enemy placements primarily. It gets to a point where there's so many of them following you with even more spawning out of nowhere directly next to you, it seems way too harsh. Plus, the game tends to introduce an entirely new enemy every other stage which feels too much. I'm currently on level 7, and I swear I've come across like 50 different kinds of enemy, and half of them are a fucking nightmare to deal with.
The game also likes to push a lot of other stage features and gimmicks at you just as quickly as it adds new enemies. Hidden tiles, slippery tiles, a superjump thing, spikes that only hurt you if you jump on them, tiles that flip between colours whenever you step on them, tiles that cycle through 3 colours whenever you step on them, fragile tiles, a little guy that moves around and resets your coloured tiles that you have to deal with, etc etc. it's.. a lot, and while i can appreciate just how much the game offers variety-wise with this, it's too much too quickly for me. I feel like there's so many more opportunities for cool stages with the features it introduces but instead it chooses to hastily jump to the next thing and then combine gimmicks together in stages.
I appreciated the ability to buy powerups more than ever once i got to the later stages, but i dunno, part of me feels like it was an easy fix to the unfair difficulty of some stages rather than just improving some of the stage designs.
23/06
I made this review the day before i beat the main game, and the issues i have still stand. I made use of easy mode for some of these final stages which made the end game actually fun challenging rather than annoying awful bullshit challenging. I'm pretty sure this got added in an update rather than being in the game from the start which is weird because jesus i would never beat this game otherwise.
The game continued to add more enemies and more stuff right 'til the end. I was saying to myself yesterday 'god what if the game adds like a lights out gimmick later that'll be so fucking annoying' and lo and behold it absolutely did. There was another gimmick, the fan tiles, that were also super frustrating to work with. Some stages had these huge areas full of fan tiles which bounce you around like the dvd video screensaver, and you had to get the exact right position and movement to bounce you around for a full minute until you get to the other end or else you die... and then even when you do that successfully you end up dying to an enemy on the other end that you just can't avoid AHHHHH
A standout moment for me was stage 9-12, where the map is nothing but a giant square. It's one of my favourite levels in the game. Enemies are littered everywhere on the grid but this time instead of being confined to a long 2-tile wide hallways that make death almost unavoidable you have this huge amount of space to dodge them. It's incredibly fun, and the game can for once actually justify throwing a million different enemies at you at once. I'd love to see another endless gamemode added to the game that's just this level over and over but with the square getting bigger each time you fully colour it and the enemies getting tougher and more abundant. I'd play the shit out of that!
Am I ever going to come back to this and get the V rank for each stage? Fuck no. I don't even know if it'd be possible lol. But for what it's worth I did get a good amount of enjoyment out of this. It's a neat premise with a phenomenal art style and soundtrack behind it, and whenever the gameplay wasn't driving me up the wall i got a hell of a lot of fun out of it.
cerise is a very cool character i like her a lot
Adore the dreamcast aesthetic and the core gameplay is fun enough, but I don't enjoy the way the game chooses to increase difficulty. The enemy spawns in a lot of stages are just out of control and some of the tile conditions can be a hassle to work around when being swarmed like the stages where there's no limit to color changing. Cute game though.
silly fun
Very addicting. Both in gameplay and visuals. Awesome music too
If VIVIDLOPE has 1 million fans then I am one of them
If VIVIDLOPE has one fan then I am that fan
If VIVIDLOPE has no fans then that means I'm dead
If VIVIDLOPE has one fan then I am that fan
If VIVIDLOPE has no fans then that means I'm dead
Alright this game inspired in me some feelings
I went very high to very very low to high again in my enjoyment here. First off: I have to admit that no matter my thoughts on the design philosophy here, this is an incredible realization of a great concept. The whole package is lovely from the get-go; the style, music, gameplay are all lovely and super cohesive. You can tell an absolute shit-ton of time went into refining the entire experience, and it's most of the reason my score is so high. I loved the first two levels a lot, and having a couple harder bonus stages in each level was a welcome addition
I think Level 3 is where I started feeling the pain. This is where I realized that the "Difficulty: Easy" shown below the stage wasn't a statement letting you know how hard that particular stage was, it was a slider, and I had been playing on Easy the whole time. I switched to Hard and it was a nightmare. I beat one stage and the next one was just a catastrophe. Frankly, I don't understand how someone could enjoy the whole game being like that, but that's beside the point
Even leaving it on Easy, by the time I got to Level 5 I was getting irate. Peeved. Some of the stages just felt ridiculous, owing mostly to the fact that I would reset every time I died. I was going for a personal goal of A+ or higher because that's the rank where I felt like I did a good job of properly conquering the level. I genuinely don't know if I would have been happier just taking the deaths and moving on with a B, C, or even D rank. This is the part of the game where I started wondering, "Is this unfair? Am I bad? Should I care about my ranks this much? What is the platonic ideal gameplay I should be going for here?" It may sound silly but I generally try to play a game closest to how the developer imagines a competent person would play. I really like to get the experience that they wanted to impart on me, the gamer. So when I'm presented with a situation like this where I'm faced with the choice of continuing to "conquer" each stage or lower my expectations of myself and move on, it starts to generate the bad feelings
I'm sure if I asked the dev personally, they would simply want me to do whatever gives me the most enriching experience in my eyes, and not to worry about how good or bad my ranks are. But I definitely care about how competent I am at a game like this, especially when I've already completed multiple hours of the game while achieving my personal goal. So, I kept on with what I was doing, and I got angry, and I continued anyways
Level 6 felt like a breaking point, but I powered through to 7, and halfway through it, I kind of had my eureka moment. I was really seeing the vision. The stages were flowing one after another, everything felt cohesive but like in a new way, a more meta-gamey way. I was enjoying myself fully again. In Level 9 I had a few gamer rage moments again, but then the Finale was really cool and honestly felt like the only place in the game where I was okay with taking a death and continuing
And then it was over, and I had to sit there and accept the fact that even though the day before I was rumbling and grumbling about the game, I felt way more positive about this game than negative. I may have issues with stage layouts, mechanics, enemies, general difficulty, and whatever else, but in the end I can properly see the vision here. I don't think I share the vision, but that's not what a game is for. A game is a chance to experience someone else's vision and see if it clicks in your reality. This was overall a very cool experience, especially after following its development for quite a while, and I look forward to Jaklub's future works
I went very high to very very low to high again in my enjoyment here. First off: I have to admit that no matter my thoughts on the design philosophy here, this is an incredible realization of a great concept. The whole package is lovely from the get-go; the style, music, gameplay are all lovely and super cohesive. You can tell an absolute shit-ton of time went into refining the entire experience, and it's most of the reason my score is so high. I loved the first two levels a lot, and having a couple harder bonus stages in each level was a welcome addition
I think Level 3 is where I started feeling the pain. This is where I realized that the "Difficulty: Easy" shown below the stage wasn't a statement letting you know how hard that particular stage was, it was a slider, and I had been playing on Easy the whole time. I switched to Hard and it was a nightmare. I beat one stage and the next one was just a catastrophe. Frankly, I don't understand how someone could enjoy the whole game being like that, but that's beside the point
Even leaving it on Easy, by the time I got to Level 5 I was getting irate. Peeved. Some of the stages just felt ridiculous, owing mostly to the fact that I would reset every time I died. I was going for a personal goal of A+ or higher because that's the rank where I felt like I did a good job of properly conquering the level. I genuinely don't know if I would have been happier just taking the deaths and moving on with a B, C, or even D rank. This is the part of the game where I started wondering, "Is this unfair? Am I bad? Should I care about my ranks this much? What is the platonic ideal gameplay I should be going for here?" It may sound silly but I generally try to play a game closest to how the developer imagines a competent person would play. I really like to get the experience that they wanted to impart on me, the gamer. So when I'm presented with a situation like this where I'm faced with the choice of continuing to "conquer" each stage or lower my expectations of myself and move on, it starts to generate the bad feelings
I'm sure if I asked the dev personally, they would simply want me to do whatever gives me the most enriching experience in my eyes, and not to worry about how good or bad my ranks are. But I definitely care about how competent I am at a game like this, especially when I've already completed multiple hours of the game while achieving my personal goal. So, I kept on with what I was doing, and I got angry, and I continued anyways
Level 6 felt like a breaking point, but I powered through to 7, and halfway through it, I kind of had my eureka moment. I was really seeing the vision. The stages were flowing one after another, everything felt cohesive but like in a new way, a more meta-gamey way. I was enjoying myself fully again. In Level 9 I had a few gamer rage moments again, but then the Finale was really cool and honestly felt like the only place in the game where I was okay with taking a death and continuing
And then it was over, and I had to sit there and accept the fact that even though the day before I was rumbling and grumbling about the game, I felt way more positive about this game than negative. I may have issues with stage layouts, mechanics, enemies, general difficulty, and whatever else, but in the end I can properly see the vision here. I don't think I share the vision, but that's not what a game is for. A game is a chance to experience someone else's vision and see if it clicks in your reality. This was overall a very cool experience, especially after following its development for quite a while, and I look forward to Jaklub's future works
on dort
So tantalizingly close to being capital-G Good as a package but doesn't quite reach that height.
There's a lot of frustration to be had in how a game that is for all intents and purposes is 2D expects the player to react to situations it presents as if they were in 3D. Enemy spam becomes pretty annoyingly common in the later stages of the game, making it feel less and less like a puzzle or puzzle-adjacent experience at all and turning it far more into a reflex test with movement and controls that don't quite feel hand in hand with one another.
To elaborate, the way you move is an awkward in-between of omnidirectional and extremely limited; on paper the controls are intuitive, but in execution they feel almost unfitting for the game they're in. You can jump and walk in just about any direction but the game softly locks you to a grid, making it tough to commit fully to more precise jumps or square skips. I would imagine that the awkwardness probably by design to some extent, as emulating the sort of arcade-meets-Dreamcast feeling does involve bringing in some level of disparity there. I just find it doesn't really do a lot to elevate the game.
The aesthetic and sound are, as many have mentioned, quite adorable and liminal to an extent in a sort of 00s way. I found it a bit sad how limited the soundtrack was, and once I reached the final world I become retrospectively disappointed in how its particularly strong aesthetic and its more evocative music were totally absent from the game up until that point. Even the finale afterward didn't reach where it had just been. I find it bizarre, and it comes across as a result of either a rush or some break in development between the rest of the game and the last world. Other small things like the shop being a bit empty-feeling at times and the very limited designs on enemy creatures made the game feel like it could have used a little more time in the oven for balancing and pacing purposes, but I do think things work well enough in general in this title.
If you have any interest at all in it, Vividlope is absolutely worth a play on whichever difficulty level speaks to you personally. Don't feel like you need to complete it, either -- I did, and I felt like I would have been just as satisfied simply practicing the earlygame for max ranks to have a more puzzle-feeling experience. As sad as I was that it was not particularly puzzlelike after the first couple worlds were said and done, I think the game has plenty to offer that is unique, memorable, fun (for the most part), and refreshing.
There's a lot of frustration to be had in how a game that is for all intents and purposes is 2D expects the player to react to situations it presents as if they were in 3D. Enemy spam becomes pretty annoyingly common in the later stages of the game, making it feel less and less like a puzzle or puzzle-adjacent experience at all and turning it far more into a reflex test with movement and controls that don't quite feel hand in hand with one another.
To elaborate, the way you move is an awkward in-between of omnidirectional and extremely limited; on paper the controls are intuitive, but in execution they feel almost unfitting for the game they're in. You can jump and walk in just about any direction but the game softly locks you to a grid, making it tough to commit fully to more precise jumps or square skips. I would imagine that the awkwardness probably by design to some extent, as emulating the sort of arcade-meets-Dreamcast feeling does involve bringing in some level of disparity there. I just find it doesn't really do a lot to elevate the game.
The aesthetic and sound are, as many have mentioned, quite adorable and liminal to an extent in a sort of 00s way. I found it a bit sad how limited the soundtrack was, and once I reached the final world I become retrospectively disappointed in how its particularly strong aesthetic and its more evocative music were totally absent from the game up until that point. Even the finale afterward didn't reach where it had just been. I find it bizarre, and it comes across as a result of either a rush or some break in development between the rest of the game and the last world. Other small things like the shop being a bit empty-feeling at times and the very limited designs on enemy creatures made the game feel like it could have used a little more time in the oven for balancing and pacing purposes, but I do think things work well enough in general in this title.
If you have any interest at all in it, Vividlope is absolutely worth a play on whichever difficulty level speaks to you personally. Don't feel like you need to complete it, either -- I did, and I felt like I would have been just as satisfied simply practicing the earlygame for max ranks to have a more puzzle-feeling experience. As sad as I was that it was not particularly puzzlelike after the first couple worlds were said and done, I think the game has plenty to offer that is unique, memorable, fun (for the most part), and refreshing.
So... I spent the last month or so of my life getting a V rank (perfect clear) in every stage, partially out of a completionist urge and partially to see if it was even humanly possible. And after all that I can say that Vividlope is indeed a game worth your attention, though maybe not with the exacting lens that I took to it.
Don't be fooled by the cutesy characters into thinking that this will be an easy game; the difficulty ramps up fast, especially on hard mode (originally the only difficulty level). Said difficulty doesn't come from the stages themselves as much as it does from the overwhelming presence of enemies, most of which have semi-random movement patterns. While many are predictable and can be played around, if you're running through a level at full speed you sometimes get so little reaction time that it might as well be random. When aiming for a V rank, one enemy randomly choosing to move in a different direction than planned can have significant consequences for a run, if not just ending it immediately.
That said, if you don't care about rank you can use additional items in stages which makes accounting for enemies much easier. I think that this game has a great concept and is genuinely fun when you're in the rhythm of it that I don't want to make it seem like it isn't worth a playthrough, or at least a try. Perhaps a testament to that is me finishing the entire thing despite finding aspects of it pretty frustrating. Because there is a lot of game to play (135 stages and 2 other modes!!), it's better to take this game pretty slow, as rushing to your goal (no matter what it is) is not going to go quickly either way.
I'm not afraid to admit that some of the levels are unfair as fuck though lol
Don't be fooled by the cutesy characters into thinking that this will be an easy game; the difficulty ramps up fast, especially on hard mode (originally the only difficulty level). Said difficulty doesn't come from the stages themselves as much as it does from the overwhelming presence of enemies, most of which have semi-random movement patterns. While many are predictable and can be played around, if you're running through a level at full speed you sometimes get so little reaction time that it might as well be random. When aiming for a V rank, one enemy randomly choosing to move in a different direction than planned can have significant consequences for a run, if not just ending it immediately.
That said, if you don't care about rank you can use additional items in stages which makes accounting for enemies much easier. I think that this game has a great concept and is genuinely fun when you're in the rhythm of it that I don't want to make it seem like it isn't worth a playthrough, or at least a try. Perhaps a testament to that is me finishing the entire thing despite finding aspects of it pretty frustrating. Because there is a lot of game to play (135 stages and 2 other modes!!), it's better to take this game pretty slow, as rushing to your goal (no matter what it is) is not going to go quickly either way.
I'm not afraid to admit that some of the levels are unfair as fuck though lol
Pure liminal bliss of the Dreamcast/Playstation 1 era captured in a beyond adorable 4D puzzle/playtformer featuring what redditors would call the most oingo boingo scrunkly protagonist of the 2020s.
This game however omega sucks balls because while all my friends were enjoying it and I've been following development for years the Makeship campaign got extended meaning that the complementary steam code I was supposed to get for purchasing the Cerise plushie got delayed until just a few hours before writing this. :c
This game however omega sucks balls because while all my friends were enjoying it and I've been following development for years the Makeship campaign got extended meaning that the complementary steam code I was supposed to get for purchasing the Cerise plushie got delayed until just a few hours before writing this. :c
Dreamcast aesthetic?
Nah man. This here is that primo kino "budget PC game you download a demo of through a shady game website in 2004 and play the provided 20 minute demo on loop before school" aesthetic.
Nah man. This here is that primo kino "budget PC game you download a demo of through a shady game website in 2004 and play the provided 20 minute demo on loop before school" aesthetic.
vividlope is kicking my ass but in a cute y2k bunny way.
it's probably fine playing casually. it's fun but challenging if you wanna "V" rank it (yes all good games are going to do that now). I think Pizza Tower was right to lock first time runners out of the second lap and P-ranking until beating the level. as for V-ranking, there's a lot of silly rank requirements for it. it can be hard to predict and plan for where the fruits appear, and there's no good indicator for unbroken chains. A lot of the challenge comes from the game speeding up as you do well, hazards hiding around corners, and enemies building up like crazy unless you picked up an item to deal with them. usually I give the level a few tries and develop a strategy for getting the first unbroken chain, then winging it from there lol
gameplay aside, there's a shit ton of effort in the aesthetic. I could see this being a cult classic from 20 years ago
it's probably fine playing casually. it's fun but challenging if you wanna "V" rank it (yes all good games are going to do that now). I think Pizza Tower was right to lock first time runners out of the second lap and P-ranking until beating the level. as for V-ranking, there's a lot of silly rank requirements for it. it can be hard to predict and plan for where the fruits appear, and there's no good indicator for unbroken chains. A lot of the challenge comes from the game speeding up as you do well, hazards hiding around corners, and enemies building up like crazy unless you picked up an item to deal with them. usually I give the level a few tries and develop a strategy for getting the first unbroken chain, then winging it from there lol
gameplay aside, there's a shit ton of effort in the aesthetic. I could see this being a cult classic from 20 years ago