[EGD 14] A First Of Many

Review by demonxz95 on Wednesday, September 23rd 2020

EGD 14 judging just ended, so with that, it's time to begin everyone's least favorite part of the competition: Reviewing games. With this being the final EGD before Sploder officially kicks the bucket on December 31st 2020, perhaps makers will want to bring their A-game to create an epic finale. It has been a long time since I've done any reviews, so don't be surprised if I end up being a little rusty with these EGD reviews. With that said, let's get started.

This is a game call The Journey To Mother Turtle by mariogame3333. I chose to do this game first because it's a good example of a VERY recurring trend this EGD. Although the game doesn't officially tell you any backstory, I can deduce that the game is supposedly about a turtle in space (how exactly he got there, I don't know) on a journey to return to the mother turtle, as the name would suggest.

Now at this part is where I would talk about the gameplay. The problem here though is that there is literally nothing to talk about. There is almost 0 gameplay in the entire game. The first level is the intro which is fine (a standard for lots of PPG games), and then the second level has the player fly a spaceship over to a green planet. This takes all of about 5 seconds to do. Then... levels 3 and all the way up to level 8 has literally 0 gameplay interaction. All the levels are just waiting on a screen doing nothing, with level 8 requiring you to wait an entire hour before you get to level 9.

(Pro-tip: Going to a new tab in your browser will slow the timer down, but if you open a new app with that tab still running as the main tab, the timer will still move at the same exact speed. Take this opportunity to pass the time)

Level 9 is the first level where we get any actual gameplay, requiring you to navigate a spaceship with some obstacles that are tricky to dodge and reach the end. This level is neat, although dodging a few of the obstacles are sometimes annoying to do. This level is nice, even if it's slightly unpolished. Surely I'd see more levels like this that get better and better, although the problem is that we're on level 9. In other words, there's no more space for another level. Mariogame literally spent 7 whole levels on 0 gameplay for a joke game.

And that would be the recurring trend of EGD 14 this year. Lots and lots of joke games that are intentionally bad, even from veteran game makers. Personally, I don't really know why this is the case. If anything, I would expect everyone to be at the top of their A-game this year as this is the final EGD game.

Anything about placement, scenery, or the general gameplay in this game I can't talk about because there's literally nothing here. They actually do not exist in this game, and a lot of other EGD games this year.

At the end of the review is where I'd get to ratings, but once again, there's absolutely nothing to talk about. There's nothing to rate, so I'm just left here with no way to go forward and no way to rate the game. All I can say is that if you play this game, you'll get the general idea of what 8/33 (almost exactly one quarter) of the EGD games this year were like.