GunTurtle's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[Infinite Tree Pinball]

Fun! Good length, a lot of interesting mechanics featured. The tutorial section might be my favorite part of the game, it has a really good balance between the dash mechanic and using the paddles. The game's main area often feels too centered around the dash mechanic: obstacles like water made me feel like I had to brute force every obstacle with dashes rather than aim precisely with the paddles. The music and visuals are really good, I especially liked the section after the tutorial where you get an impressive view of the ground below.

[Time to Strike]

Kinda fun, but needs work.
Game suffers from legibility issues almost immediately: just a couple of upgrades will put enough explosions or summons onscreen that it becomes impossible to make out the bullets you're supposed to be dodging. Making the player's attacks darker and always appear underneath enemies would make the game much more enjoyable.
Much of the game could use re-balancing, it's trivial to create builds that play the game for you. I noticed you tried to include "downsides" to most upgrades, but many of the downsides were either insignificant or outright helped me: if my bullets also shoot bullets, why would I want them to move faster or be more accurate? I liked the "vulture" weapon which made me try to get close to defeated enemies, I wish more upgrades affected the game's objectives or obstacles like that.

[PINFALL, Classic Edition]

Good! Some of the best tile art I've seen in a PICO-8 game. Takes a little bit to become fun instead of frustrating, but the good parts are really strong. You're good at introducing new obstacles and using them in creative ways (I got as far as the blue note blocks)- it takes a while to get past a new room, but it feels like every time I do there's something new to play with.
There's a few rooms that have water at the bottom, and I found it rewarding when I was able to react quickly and swim instead of falling down another screen. I wish there were more opportunities to save myself from falling like that.

garbo111 responds:

Being able to introduce lots of new elements naturally was a big priority (discovery & expansions on movement are a big draw for me in this genre) so it feels nice to have that recognized. Regarding level design, having to ensure difficulty + obstacle density + fall distance + safe areas + appealing structure + consistent failure sequences all play well with each other made it by far the most difficult & time consuming part of making the game, especially limited to a single screen of width. In some areas I wished I had tuned these a bit differently to give the player more opportunities to catch themselves (although the stun is going to prevent this anyways in a lot of instances.) Thanks for the feedback.

[Fruity Tower]

Overall a good time, but it got pretty exhausting by the time I finished. Love the art and sound work, lots of good jokes in here too.
The premise of "abandon the dungeon and upgrade" is good but feels lacking in execution. The weapons basically all play the same and there aren't any temporary upgrades in the tower, so the gameplay was really stale once I was regularly reaching floor 30+. The boss was pretty fun though.

[Picokaiju]

Really novel turn-based game! Love the visuals and the energy/health mechanics. Wish the music that plays during gameplay was less repetitive.

[Splat Chicken]

Neat game! Fits the jam theme well, and there's some creative puzzles. Only complaint is that some of the levels feel like it was more a matter of executing the solution than actually figuring it out- took me several attempts to just fire an egg at the right angle in some of these, some kind of trajectory indicator would have been nice.

[SACRIFIGHTS]

Loved the artwork and audio. Had a lot of (increasingly bad) performance issues in the conjuring room. I also got some powerful upgrades early on which let me basically insta-kill every enemy in the game (including the final boss), which made the game feel too easy.