What Remains Of The Acid?

Review by jackjoshseb on Monday, February 13th 2012

Chemistry . a compound usually having a sour taste and capable of neutralizing alkalis and reddening blue litmus paper, containing hydrogen that can be replaced by a metal or an electropositive group to form a salt, or containing an atom that can accept a pair of electrons from a base. Acids are proton donors that yield hydronium ions in water solution, or electron-pair acceptors that combine with electron-pair donors or bases. There's a definition of Acid for yo guys, I thought it'd be interesting for ya'll

Well hi there! Jack here for another Review, it's my 10th Review since I was accepted and awarded the badge, and it's been a fantastic time so far, hopefully my 10th will be one of my best. We'll see though, eh? Anyway, I'll be Reviewing Acidic Remains by Stanleykitten. Let's get into it.

Review

Stanley and I have had a few brief chats before, but have never really talked a whole lot. He's a Mod, a fantastic Reviewer, and is on his way to Editor, how does that sound? Great right? Well, yes, when an opportunity comes to play a game by a member as cool as this, I've always jumped at the thought of it, but I've been meaning to play this for a *long* time now, and have always forgotton, hopefully I can have a good time playing Acidic Remains, by Stanleykitten. The thumbnail to me, looks very good, you can see there's plenty of objects and things that he's added into the game that will grab the users attention, and that's what it did. With switches, and looking like there's a starting puzzle are few of quite a lot of things that grab my attention, looks like a unique tile choice from my perspective, a lot to look forward to.

Back And Forth, Back And Forth... In An Amusing Way

The gameplay was pretty enoyable, I liked the start of the game where going back and forth through a few areas in order to procede to the actual and larger area of the game, hitting switches, triggering and untriggering perm blocks, it was all going back and forth and once all completed, you could continue to the next stage. It had some great puzzles, and some traps which'll take more then one occassion to get past, which I'll talk about later. I got no lag at all really, I quite enjoyed the fast pace of the gameplay.

Scenery.. Blandish, But Some Nice Touches Added In

Now onto the scenery, I thought that the scenery had a couple of effects, I'll talk about both sides here. First off, I found it a little bland, personally I don't like the Custom Backgrounds but that's just me, and I can't control that, what I was most disappointed about was that the background, there wasn't really any background, or much of it, if there was to where I made it to. I think that there was nothing that really made the sceneric design of things ~pop~. I thought there were a few good touches added in though, with some nice sections of grass, while I thought the tile selection played a role in making the game more enjoyable, imagining Acidic Remains with the default tile, Oh God! So they're a few plus's, but I also think the use of switches and hot blacks played an unnoticed part in the game's scenery.

Few Enemies To Be Placed?

I didn't encounter too many enemies, there were a few, but not a whole lot. There wasn't really any action, it strikes me it's more of a precise moving game, some nice uzzles and traps also. Although the enemies, when they were there, were placed good, obviously they caannot be cramped as there isn't as much as most Plats, but they were placed in positions, where there was also other traps to worry about while fighting off the enemies. I found it was a nice display as multi tasking in one area was important. I thought switches were placed to perfection and I'll talk about how the contributed in trap like circumstances later on. Health placement was average, I think I wasn't a fan (at first) of the numerous amount of lives, but once I got further and further into the game, I found I earlier too for granted how much I'd of need them.

Fantastic Design, Amirite?

I'll talk a little about the design, now. Stanley did an amazing job at designing the game and laying out blocks, tiles and hallways to perfection. I thought that the amount of blocks used to construct the paths and traps were great, and just enough to give the user the irrits, but not too much to make the user give up completely on the game. They were placed in such areas were possible, but had a tinge of challenge inscripted through the gameplay. Honestly the design is what made me enjoy the game as much as I did, with slopy design or layout a game is nothing, but boy, the final result when it's done to perfection is great, play Acidic Remains to get a feel of it.

When I Was In Primary School, We Had JRT = Just Right Text's, Now, In Acidic Remains We Have A JRT = Just Right Traps

The traps are probably my favourite part of the game and in certain areas surpass how good the puzzles were. I mentioned earlier I'd go into some detail about the traps, but I'm not going to give them away too easy. There were certain attractions that left you too amazed not t go into a certain area, so on your way there, the inevitable often happened, think crushers, think cl0sers. Those are pretty basic traps though, although working to perfection, they could be easily bypassed if intelligent and cautious enough. There were some where the excellent design and layout came onto play, for example sword climbing to reach areas that are just to high up to jump, and in the process holding down the spacebar rather then tapping would lead to being trapped by a switch. I found the tricky and plain frustrating areas a great touch to the game, for example the high ledges and switches that if in the slightest wrong position, you'd have to start your attempt on the area again. The puzzles were surpassed by the traps in my opinion, but they were quite good, nowadays looking for certain invisible switches became a puzzle when you think you've looked everywhere when you haven't, and other good areas, example the start of the game, looks puzzling, but once in the game, not so much.

Lots Of Health, Yes, But...

You're right, there were plentiful help, notice the possible of all 4 extra lives spots filled up. It sounds a fun thought and usually make the game easier, but all it does is cause extreme frustration in areas (don't ask me how, I guarantee less then 2 minutes into the game this'll happen to you at least twice). The 4 lives were needed, and for the game was still extremely hard to complete. Go figure. So the challenge was there. The creativity was good, I found excellent use of switches, in a good positions to make it unique yet relating to the challenge.

Final Scores

Excellent use of going back and forth, back and forth near the start of the game, wher eit all leads to one pathway.

I thought the background was disinteresting, but I enjoyed the good use of grass, switches and hot blocks in early areas to make the scenery pop a little.

The placement of enemies was good when they were there.

I loved the design of Acidic Remains, it was well designed and the blocks were layed out one.

The traps surpassed the puzzles, but both were rock solid, if not better, the traps.

The difficulty was definitely there, there was creativity and areas that were unique, but there wasn't as much as there could've been.

Feature Worthy

Is Acidic Remains feature Worthy? The final question, in my opinion it is, by far, and with ease. It had excellent traps, solid puzzles and while there wasn't really any action, the fast paced and precisive gameplay made up or it. Finally a game which I liked extremely without any puzzles. Hopefully this gets Featured, it's well deserved and I'd love to see this on the Featured Games page in all honesty.