Recent reviews by Pickle Da Goldfish

This game is ADDICTING. It is INSANELY good.

As an enjoyer of Getting Over It, I will say with 100% confidence that this game is better than Getting Over It.

While Getting Over It "looks" intuitive to play, the controls are very unintuitive and finicky. This game has the exact opposite quality. The controls look completely unintuitive, but then you play it and the controls feel super good and responsive.

The level design is also much more interesting than what you'll find in Getting Over It, while also being much fairer. There's bodies of waters that act as a sort of checkpoint. While it is possible to fall all the way down to the first layer, it gets harder to fall to the beginning the higher you go up. Also, when I say the level design is more interesting, I'm talking about the gameplay specifically. There are a lot of different challenges that test how well you're able to time your climbs. It genuinely felt like the learning curve to this game was pretty reasonable.

I also found myself just unable to not think about playing this game. If you want to be productive, please do NOT play this game. I literally had a DREAM where I was playing this game. Now that I've finally beaten it, I can move on to smaller and less important things, like filing my taxes.

This game is very fun. It's a social deduction game that is purely social deduction. The gameplay is only discussion. This isn't like Amogus where you have to do simple baby minigames around a map while a person kills you, this is a game of strategy where you have to narrow down the list of suspects to find the sabatogers. It's like a combination between Secret Hitler and the "Push the Button" Jackbox game.

It is free to play which greatly helps when trying to get friends to play with you. There is also a "how to play" button which makes it really easy to learn.

The developers are very active on the Discord and very receptive to any bug reports. Sometimes, updates do break stuff but the developers are always on the Discord saying that they're aware of the issue and are working on a fix. I remember posting a bug report in the Discord and it only took 1 minute for a developer to respond saying that they're already working on it. The very next day there was an update that fixed the bug.

One day I will be able to put into words how amazing this game is.

I highly recommend it.

Gets stale really fast. I played 3 games before getting bored.
This game boils down to mashing the attack button and occasionally dodging. There's no nuance nor complexity to the mechanics. The character I was playing as, King Arthur, had a really easy stun mechanic to pull off. If that doesn't tell you all you need to know about the balancing of this game then I don't really know what will.

Normally in a fighting game you'd want to create a rock-paper-scissor style moveset where one move will always counter another move. A good example of a fighting game that utilizes this in its game design would be Lethal League Blaze, where hits counter grabs, grabs counter parries, and parries counter hits. You can also kind of slightly see this same design concept used in Smash Bros with shields beating attacks, attacks beating grabs, and grabs beating shields. This game has attacks... and it also has dodges. There's no counter play or strategy really. There's no blocking, no parrying, nothing. Because there's no real way to punish people for mindlessly releasing attacks it leads to them spamming the attack button since there's literally no downside to spamming in this game.

Also, I imagine that the skill ceiling for this game is going to be really low. You don't have to aim for the most part; after doing an attack the game automatically moves towards the nearest opponent. And combos are done for you, the game's basically holding your hand at all moments. The most exciting thing I've done in this game is go offstage and time my attack in such a way where it gave me enough height to hit an opponent in the air. Wow, riveting stuff.

There is a lot of potential with the concept, but this game doesn't do anything interesting to warrant downloading it. It's free though, so there's no real harm in trying, but I'd recommend giving this game a pass.

This game reminds me of TF2, not in its gameplay, but with reference to how I'm able to lose and still have fun. Every time I play 2 v 2 with a friend I'm guaranteed to laugh at the tomfoolery that happens in a match, or even just about the game in general. For example, this game has LeBron James. His idle animation is him coughing. He's listed as being a fictional character from Space Jam 2. The game hand feeds you material to make jokes about with your friends, and it does it to such a high degree that I'm not even sure it's intentional, I'm pretty sure it's accidental genius.

This game runs okay. I've never had any experiences where my game froze, but I did have the game crash. I've played 45 hours and if I had to estimate I'd say it crashed to desktop around 4 times. My biggest issue when it comes to performance is the rollback code they use for online. This issue has existed since the game has been released and it's still not fixed, and I'm willing to bet 4 shmuckaroos that it won't be fixed in the future. Whenever you play a match, you can be standing on the stage bing chilling and then the very next second it turns out you've actually been off-stage the entire time getting edge-guarded. This game loves to teleport you to the shadow realm. The UI is also finicky, sometimes you'll press the ready button but it won't queue you to matchmaking and you'll have to press the button again. Sometimes buttons will just not do anything when you click on them and you have to restart the game to fix it. You also have to invite someone to a custom game, you can't just start a custom game from a party (you also can't make custom games with three people so if you don't have an even number of friends who want to play then ♥♥♥♥ you I suppose).

Now for the gameplay. Every character is balanced, but not every character is fun. Wonder Woman might be the most unfun character to play as in the entire game. Spike might be the most unfun character to fight against in the entire game. Dodges decrease the invulnerability frames each time you dodge. Great concept on paper, but in practice most players will not be keeping track of how many times they've dodged so now the dodge seems inconsistent. Hitboxes are also terrible. If two enemies hit each other you have no idea which attack is going to actually land. I've had times where I physically see my attack land on the opponent with my own eyeballs but their attack hits me and they don't get hit (this is probably the cause of why most kills are from the top of the stage). I've also rarely had jumps and attacks not register due to lag. DI also seems inconsistent, maybe this is a skill issue or a lag issue but whenever I'm hit to the side of the stage, whether or not I will be hit into the blast zones seems to be completely random. It feels that I get hit with an attack that inflicts the same knockback and sometimes my DI will work and I will live and other times it doesn't and I will DIe.

So far I've listed a ton of negatives but that's because I don't really know I can say for the positives other than it is simply fun to control these characters. The problem with going into specifics is that every character is so unique that I can't really make any broad general statements about the gameplay. I mainly play as Tom and Jerry whose moveset is incredibly coherent. All of his moves interact with his other moves and it makes for an incredibly dynamic character with a high skill-ceiling.

Anyways, I would recommend this game despite its problems because it's fun and it's free. I also highly recommend getting into a voice chat with a friend and playing together.

I've read some of the other negative reviews and they all generally say the same thing about how this game is too hard. Well, I actually beat this game and I enjoyed it. You might be confused as to why I gave this game a negative review if I enjoyed it. The reason for this is that Steam asked if I would recommend this game to other players, and to put it bluntly: no, I wouldn't. But this game is free so more likely than not you played the game first and then read the reviews after playing it.

The only other game I've played that is in this niche punishing no-checkpoints vertical platformer genre would be Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. However, that game actually had a good reason for being frustrating and unfair. If you listen to the narrator, the entire game is a commentary on video games and what the role of difficulty is in them. And this is conveyed through the gameplay with you constantly resetting and having to scale a mountain with the wonkiest controls known to mankind. Now, I don't know why this developer decided to make this game punishing, but from my experience playing this game, it seems that they enjoy wasting the player's time. I think maybe the developer wanted each failure to be more impactful, and they succeeded at the sacrifice of the player's enjoyment of the game. Yes, being at risk of having to start all over again does make failing and succeeding both more unsatisfying and satisfying respectively. But it doesn't make the game any more fun. All it is is a waste of time. It's not really interesting doing the same baby platforming at the beginning of the level for the umpteenth time just to get back to where you were.

When you get past 50% completion there's this weird addition to the level which I can only describe as a "pinball machine area" which you end up having to platform over. If you fall into it you have two options: go to the exit of the pinball which sends you to the beginning of the level or climb back up to the pinball to go back to 50%. Either the developer put this here as a weird checkpoint, or they just put this here to waste the player's time, or both. I have not managed to leave the pinball area once and have found that it's faster to use the pinball exit and climb back up to 50% then to try to escape the pinball area. Sadly, I don't think the mystery of the pinball area in Eraser will ever be solved. It's just another example of how this game loves wasting your time.

After 50% completion the entire level design seems to completely change. You basically have to constantly parry across moving cannonballs shot from various cannons and you do this for around 8 cannons straight. That doesn't sound hard, and it isn't. The only difficulty that comes from this is completely artificial trial and error. There are multiple instances where you have to parry a moving cannonball and you then do a 180 turn and parry another moving cannonball. I actually remember one time where I was at the very top and failed because I followed a trail of cannonballs to a dead end. The only way you will figure out where to go without outside help is with trial and error except every error sends you to the beginning of the level. Fun! And this cannonball section is long, it makes up around 40% of the top 50%.

The last thing I want to bring up is the hard mode. It isn't harder, it's simply more annoying. The only noticeable difference is that instead of being stunned when you take fall damage, you get stunned if you fall for around 1 second. That's annoying, but it has no substantial impact on the difficulty.

Now, these complaints are incredibly easy to fix. First of all, there should be a checkpoint at 50%. The first 50% of the level is completely different from the last 50% of the level. In the first 50% there are plenty of moments where you can just wait in a platform and examine what the next jump you're going to do is. In the top 50% I think there's only two instances where you could do that since for a majority of it you're parrying on cannonballs trying not to fall. After adding the checkpoint you can then remove it for hard mode. Also, in the cannonball part there should be arrows to eliminate the annoying trial and erroring that must be done in order to get past that section.

Also, I mentioned at the very beginning of the review that I enjoyed this game. The only reason I found this game fun is because of the movement. Despite the lack of depth in the mechanics, it's fun to pull off jumps and parries, and navigating the level (despite its flaws) was enjoyable. And now that I've beaten the game and don't need to do any trial and error to figure out the cannonball part, I can basically just free style and mess around with the physics.

Most free multiplayer games are fun, and Muck isn't an exception. It's basically a more "arcadey" and less "sandboxy" version of Terraria, now in 3D.

The best puzzle game I've ever played.

Does not like to work. I have to have ♥♥♥♥ resolution and graphics just so my game doesn't crash everytime I join a server. And whenever my internet cuts out, there's no warning message, it's 3 seconds of freezing and then it says I timed out. The actual gameplay itself isn't anything to write home about but the interactions you have with people can be hilarious. If all of these technical difficulties weren't here it would be a fun game to play.

Boring "game" with an awesome art style. You get bored of quests really fast and there's not much to explore. There are collectibles but I don't have fun collecting them since the only challenge is how much time you want to waste finding all of them. If you've ever played celeste, you would know that almost every single cherry (which is the collectible in that game) is a challenge to get. Here it's just: fly to that rock, congrats here's a telescope, go to that hill, another telescope. In order for a game to be a game you have to be able to win or lose, but it is impossible to lose in this non-game. When you crash you don't explode or die you just bounce off the ground. At best, you can play this game in the background where you don't pay full attention to it.