Mr. Spiky Needlearm legutóbbi értékelései

So, for most of the game, the gameplay here ranges from pretty good to really, really good. I like doing speedrunning routing-type things, but I kind of hate the fiddly parts, and the way neon white streamlines out the obnoxious parts while still leaving room for a ton of small tricks and ideas is very well done, and both normal movement and the card discard movements feel great. If you'd asked me how I felt a little before halfway through, I would have said it's a great game tied to an absolutely terrible story, but would have given it a recommend for people who really like this type of game (this is reflected in my hours, since I spent a lot of time optimizing the early chapters before moving on to later ones)

However, there's two reasons that, now that I've beaten it, I wouldn't recommend it.

The minor reason is that the gameplay gradually gets worse, until by the last few chapters, I wasn't really enjoying it very much. It tries to make each chapter more complex than the last, but by doing so, they mostly make them more linear and force you onto their chosen path through the level more and more, until by the end there's rarely a meaningful discovery the player can make to save time beyond just doing minor adjustments to the developer-intended line. The final chapter in particular gives you an ability that is supposed to be extremely fun but instead fully puts you on rails.

The bigger problem, though, is the story. It starts out pretty cringy, full of obnoxious anime things that they're knowingly doing intentionally out of a misguided attempt to feel like shlocky 90s anime. It just keeps getting worse, though, and the game keeps forcing you to engage with it by kicking you out to the hub, and not even allowing you to skip the story, instead only reluctantly letting you "fast forward" though them. The story is still THERE, however, and I suspect most people will end up seeing it anyway simply because it's a full half of the game. The story gradually shifts from annoying, to unpleasantly horny, to outright reprehensible. By the end, the game has:
Given you an absolutely terrible panty shot from the woman who looks, acts, and is treated like an underage girl.
Made the main character have a weird, predatory gay abusive relationship with the main villain (who is the only gay character in the game, and is absolutely depicted like the stereotypical gay panic villain from something that, well, would have been released in the 90s, so I guess the game successfully did a throwback in this case)
Made the moral of the story "you should forgive your abusers".

Even if the story wasn't "problematic", it's just awful, unpleasant writing that is failing even at being knowingly bad. It makes you sit through several character arcs, all of which are doing the exact same thing over and over while trying and failing to be campy. All of these arcs end by dramatically revealing something that was already discussed several times previously, confusingly acting like we don't already know? I was one of the co-captains of the anime club in high school, for god's sake, I SHOULD be the target audience here, and I only stomached it because I was streaming it to my friends and we all had to know how much worse this got. The story gets in the way of the gameplay where it can, too, and vice versa. Narratively, you're supposed to be in constant danger from demons, but since this is a speedrunning game, the enemies are basically just still targets.

By the end, it didn't really matter to me if I was enjoying the gameplay or not, the whole package of the game made me wish I'd never enjoyed it in the first place, because that just made me think about it more.

The music is really good, though. If you want to play this game, I'd recommend getting a machine girl album instead, and then playing that while you do a surf map. It might not have as much variety as this game, but at least you won't be giving money to people who are somehow still 90s anime perverts.

What if you were playing an fps but every enemy was a tank and all your weapons feel like ♥♥♥♥ and randomly miss and you were actually playing diablo but you only have one attack and no interesting ways to build your character

what IF

I love fitting blocks together, maybe more than I like anything else. This game is that plus a soothing soundtrack. Highly recommended if you like putting bocks together.