Recent reviews by Mercury

I grew up playing these flash games as a kid. I even uploaded numerous "let's play" videos of me playing through many games in this collection all the way back in 2014, including a declaration that "I'm an Achievement Hunter!" before my Steam account even existed. 10 years ago now. I kind of can't believe that I have all of these videos on the internet of me as a kid, playing video games, attempting to commentate. In the videos linked above, for some reason I (poorly) pretend as though I have no idea what's going on and am playing these games for the first time, but the reality is, I had repeatedly played some of these games as far back as 2010 at the very latest. So to revisit these games, which I haven't thought about in such a long time, was honestly kind of emotional, especially with all of the humble developer notes throughout this collection.

Putting all of these classics back together, remastered and with Steam achievements, in today's post-Flash era, is important. Flash game preservation is already really great, but the next generation won't be growing up with them like I did. And that's really sad, because I have a lot of great memories playing tons of bite-sized Flash games as a kid. I spent countless hours on Armor Games, Not Doppler, Addicting Games, Newgrounds, Kongregate, Cool Math Games, Ninja Kiwi, Nitrome, Miniclip... there were so many wonderful games put out on these websites, and I'm thankful that the internet has put so much thought and care into archiving these old creations before their demise in 2020 when Adobe killed its own ecosystem. And I'm thankful that John Cooney, aka jmtb02, has put together this collection so that we can replay these classic games again with a better presentation than ever. Not one of these games is a bore, not one of these games is a slog to play, they are all as fun as I remember them being and even more clever than I could comprehend throughout my childhood.

9/10

It took me ~15 hours to complete all achievements in this DLC, which mainly consist of just completing all puzzles and monuments anyways.

Excellent DLC that outdoes the base game is every way. Other than some cutscenes at the beginning and end of each of the three DLC campaigns, there is no uninteresting interruption or slow pacing to bog down the gameplay. Just pure puzzling. And the puzzles here are very clever at times, the best this franchise has maybe ever seen. Rather than introducing all-new game mechanics, Road to Elysium expands upon the pre-existing ones in really creative and novel ways that I wouldn't have imagined, especially in the "Into the Abyss" campaign which easily contains the most challenging bunch of puzzles. There are a lot of light puzzles that rely on simple yet unintuitive solutions that had me scratching my head for minutes on end, just to realize that the solution was in front of me all along. They demand mastery of the connector mechanics and never feel cheap.

The "Orpheus Ascending" campaign is also great, since it introduces new usages (that always technically existed) of the light connectors while remaining fairly easy to get through. The "Isle of the Blessed" campaign, on the other hand, is slightly less good and lacks much in the way of an identity puzzle-wise. Luckily, it sports a really beautiful "hexahedron" centerpiece you work your way toward, as well as the usual lost puzzles, gold puzzles, and monuments that TTP2 established as the new norm in its base campaign meaning plenty of great new content to work through.

9/10

Played not only because of the advertising from Dunkey and his new publishing company, but because this game really looked like it would be up my alley. This is genuinely one of the best and most satisfying games I've ever played; it contains generally relaxing clever puzzles and gameplay, while also hiding some of the best video game secrets maybe ever. No, really—recall the urban legends of retro gaming that spread before a more factful internet age, such as unlocking Luigi in Super Mario 64 per "L is Real" or finding Mew under the truck in Pokémon Red and Blue, and then imagine that whatever obscure hoax methods within those urban legends are actually real. Those are the types of solutions that Animal Well has to offer in its latter layers, beyond its 64 collectible colorful eggs.

Let me first admit that I was not a patient enough player to collect each of the hidden rabbits in this game, which tend to be a bit more cryptic than the average secret video game collectible. I'm sure I would've felt significantly more satisfaction within my playthrough had I done these. However, even just watching a YouTube video after the fact that described the solutions to the rabbits I didn't find on my own had my mind blown into a million bits. And then, even more mind blowing, is the overarching puzzle that these rabbits serve to help solve. It's no wonder that it took an entire Discord community of secret-hunters to figure out the post-game.

10/10

The first game is one of my favorites of all time, so when this sequel, releasing 9 years later, was announced, I was ecstatic. And after finally finishing the game to 100% completion, I think it's good, but far from great.

Many of the puzzle ideas with the basic elements were exhausted in the first game, meaning new items needed to be added to this sequel to keep things fresh. The puzzles remain solid in quality, with some leaving me scratching my head for half an hour before finally stumbling onto a solution that was right in front of me the entire time. I have to especially give credit to some of the golden puzzles in the end-game stage, which sometimes consist of very few elements but feature extremely clever and unintuitive solutions. But the satisfaction from completing puzzles is different than the first game; the world layout isn't as neat and is instead blown up to a scale that makes it tedious to navigate. It's more of a relief to be done than it is exciting.

There is a fair amount of content here, and I avoided puzzle and monument solutions throughout my playthrough, so I'm proud of myself for that. Sometimes, I was able to bring items outside of their respective puzzles to help make Pandora monument solutions easier, which I'm not sure if I'm happy about or should be criticizing. I guess it was my choice to do so, but it's hard for me not to take the easy way out and not navigate an entire island for a single drill, for example.

The writing in this game is overbearing. If it were great, I would welcome it, but it's instead overly long, consistently drawing away from gameplay (especially in the very beginning of the game) to a frustrating extent. The first game is great in that it solely offered terminals to read, for those interested in digging into the world's story and regurgitations of classic philosophy. But here, we're forced to sit through a plot with a bunch of other characters trying to collectively decide what's best for "New Jerusalem," which culminates in an effectively inconsequential election at the end of the game.

The stars in the first game were more fun, offering bonus easter-egg-type challenges. In this game, they're relatively easy puzzles whose main source of difficulty is trying to locate their elements across huge maps. The puzzles that took me the longest to solve in the entire game were some of the Pandora monuments, where in some cases items are strewn across these massive levels, with obscurely-located connectors hidden in some random crevice that requires an eagle-eye to spot. They feel more tedious and annoying than challenging in the way that the main puzzles are.

Overall, I'm still very happy that this sequel was made, since I was such a sucker for this style of slow-paced first-person puzzling featured in the first game and always had wanted more. But this is leagues behind the greatness of the original, despite being much more ambitious.

7/10

It's been a long time since I've played a game that genuinely made me laugh.

The Looker is, of course, a parody of Jonathan Blow's critically acclaimed puzzle game The Witness, with plenty of creative gags up its sleeve, including numerous clever nods to the source material. Given that, you wouldn't expect much in the realm of good gameplay, but there actually were a good deal of puzzles that were well-thought out with creative solutions. The audio logs have got to be some of the most comedic bits.

7/10

Fun game, except it's riddled with glitches that took me HOURS to find workarounds for. If you end up in a level where a grapple or collision object doesn't work like I did on several occasions, you have to restart the level from main menu repeatedly until it works.

Very stressful achievement for top 20% on leaderboards for monthly/weekly/daily simultaneously. Took me hours to do, and while in terms of raw difficulty it's not the worst ever, given the impending doom of the game's servers (which have no date) I was stressed out of my mind playing this game all day, feeling as though I couldn't quit due to my time possibly dwindling. Luckily I didn't, even when all hope felt lost due to the softlocking issues, and I managed the 100%. Good luck to anyone else who goes for it, it's a really frustrating game due to its flaws, including the aforementioned bugs and many deaths in which you can feel as though you had no control over due to poor collisions or game programming.

The most fun I had was the tutorial achievement speedruns; the least fun was everything else. Missing a lot of polish.

4/10

Maybe the funniest horror game I've ever played

Took me long enough to play it, and thank god it's short, because it's pretty terrible. See, the puzzles themselves are fine, as is the content itself in the Against the Qlock DLC, but some of this game's programming is outright atrocious. You have to give a painful second-long delay between moves, meaning that every misclick turns into frustration. When you know want to do, the game doesn't let you do it! This is especially terrible when speedrunning the DLC maps. I also ran into some moments when story achievements didn't pop, or when sequences didn't initiate because I moved too quickly and missed the trigger. It's like there was hardly any playtesting put into this thing. The plot is also unbelievably dumb; it's like Portal (I know, overused comparison) but worse oh, but actually they have the twist! so it's different and therefore good! I'm strawmanning, but this really is how I felt like they tried to differentiate. And the graphics are an eyesore after hours of gameplay, leading to such a sense of dread in combination with the slowness of the game.

I remember seeing a clickbait YouTube video nearly a decade ago claiming to show gameplay of Portal 3, but when you clicked on it, it was just the opening sequence of Q.U.B.E. I can't imagine how disappointing it would be if Valve released that anticipated threequel and it was as terrible as this game.

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What a genuinely wholesome, creative, innovative, short-and-sweet little game. It's clear that the developers crafted this game with a whole lot of love (and poop jokes). Games like these, where there's tons to collect and nothing achievement-wise that is missable, are right up my alley. I can't possibly imagine someone playing this game all the way through and actually disliking it.

It took me a little bit to get hooked on this game, but once I'd invested a good portion of time into it, I was set. It's a pretty small world, but new abilities keep the levels fresh and filled with tons of secrets throughout. Very fun game to do collectible cleanup in after finishing the main story.

8/10