Kodachrome (MNWS)


Hello everyone, this is a little game that I made – [Author’s Description]

[Play online (Flash)]

29 Comments.

  1. I like this game, but I got stuck on one particular room that was such bullshit I had to stop playing (despite being pretty sure it’s the second last room):

    https://i.imgur.com/zvg05.png

    • I eventually got past this, but the room afterwards is even more bullshit and I can’t get past it.

      • Wow you’re not kidding.

        I really don’t understand games like this. It starts out as a nice explorer with some reasonable challenge. But at some point after the player has invested a significant chunk of time, the veil whips off and hey it’s now a balls-hard platformer.

        Cavenaut got me the same way (never beat that fucking double-room), but I liked the atmosphere in that a bit more than this one.

        Anyway, I’d like to see the end of this but no way I’m doing that tower climb and whatever totally rad challenge comes after it.

      • Funny, I felt that this room was harder than the next. Maybe it’s just the fact that I’m using a wireless keyboard and sometimes a light tap of the up arrow key would result in either an overshot jump or no jump at all when trying to deal with the volley of bullets, and so the difficulty was more on my side of things than due to the game?

        But then after that’s the tower, anyway, which sort of takes the cake for me.

  2. I like the game, but yeah the difficulty is a bit bullshit. Funny, I don’t feel the same way about Cavenaut (well okay that might not be true, but I was willing to tough it out).

    I’m not sure why one is okay and the other one isn’t. Controls maybe? Every move in Cavenaut can be careful, I don’t get that same sense of granularity from this one. (I’m just making up words now I guess).

    • When you die in this, all too often it’s not your fault. It makes you do a lot of tedious backtracking that you couldn’t possibly anticipate. Also, checkpoints are very sparse, so a lot of the challenges involve repetition of boring sections. Cavenaut (which is probably harder than this) didn’t have those problems.

      That said, this is a super cool game that I liked from start to finish.

  3. Link doesn’t work.

  4. Agreed above on the difficulty. I feel like the way variable jumping was implemented made movement frustrating sometimes. And the gun upgrades seemed pretty superfluous, I barely ever used the gun. Also – who has ever thought Megaman-style vanishing block puzzles were fun??? And too much backtracking with no real reason to go back other than mean design, predictable plot, etc. I wanted to like this but overall I just didn’t think it had much going for it :/

    • I had a good experience with the gun – I went all the way down to the bottom of the world without it, and kept finding those gun upgrades that required it. I felt like I’d broken the game somehow, done something I wasn’t supposed to do.

      I really liked that the game was designed so that even though it was a really useful thing, you didn’t actually need it.

      • hahahah, you underestimate the bullshit that is Kodachrome. Though the gun is entirely unnecessary up until this exact point, you need the gun at the end and would no doubt find an already hard section ludicrously difficult without all of the upgrades. You are, of course, unable to go back at this point and get them.

  5. This game needs an epilepsy warning before the end sequence. It includes maybe half a minute of full screen colour flashes.

    Ponderous double jump. Numerous timewasting/padding elements, including poor checkpointing, repetitive challenges and forced backtracking. This is a game that does not like or respect you.

    Plus points… the first three quarters or so of the game is OK, just kinda tedious. It only becomes full-on rabidly hostile in the yellow section.

  6. I’m a little surprised at the negativity on this one!

    The really cool part of this game was this feeling I had of getting lost – I wandered into this dangerous cave system that people kept warning me about, and suddenly there’s no way back – I just had to keep going, deeper and deeper, with no way of knowing if I’d ever get out. I started finding the weapon upgrades, and it told me I couldn’t have them.

    It really nailed this unusual feeling for me; that you don’t belong, that you’re exploring a space and you don’t know where you going or how you’re going to get out. It felt dangerous and cool and that’s why I highly recommended it.

    It’s flawed as all hell, but I’ll be keeping an eye on the person who made this, and I’m really curious about what they’ll work on next.

    • I think I’ll be looking out for their future projects as well; to me it was just that a lot of small but frustrating design decisions that added up. I see what you mean though, and I feel like if the game had had more focus on the atmosphere I might have liked it regardless.

    • It’s just a matter of priority. You place a high value on what you enjoyed and were willing to overlook the flaws. I don’t think anyone is oblivious to them.

      For me, though I was willing, it got to be a bit much and I already have a long list of such games I’ve enjoyed so it didn’t feel pressing to finish this one. 😉

    • I acquired the map very early on, so I never really got that sense of getting lost, unfortunately. I did get the sense of there being hidden things I never found , like the fifth gun upgrade.

      Ultimately, Terry, I find it really hard to believe that you of all people would get a feeling of being lost: I saw a lot of things in this game that reminded me heavily of Don’t Look Back and VVVVVV.

      Probably doesn’t help that I played this right after going through OWWW, though, so maybe I’m just feeling things that aren’t there.

  7. I stopped playing after touching the first spikes makes you go back and redo the unnecessary, unfun jumping back and forth bit.

    • I expect that’s pretty offputting, but the game’s worth seeing beyond that.

      • i just disagree with any game that makes extensive backtracking a core part of the experience…plus the things other people have mentioned

        i definitely adore the feeling you mentioned earlier, about dangerous unwelcome exploration, but i feel i get that from a variety of other games more suited to me

  8. Oh, wow. Lots of comments on this one.

    I’ve been playing it slowly, on and off, and maybe that ends up being a better way to experience it. At first I was worried that even with the map I’d hit a point where random re-exploration would be necessary (since the upgrade boxes don’t show up on the map — not that I knew what they were at the time — and I wasn’t yet sure I’d be invested enough to merit additional note-taking.)

    It turns out, however, that in using the map to track down paths to the remaining crystals I’ve stumbled onto every upgrade I had previously missed. I don’t know if that’s a happy accident or a result of not-immediately-apparent good design. That the map grid shows which rooms do and do not connect is definitely key; had this not been the case, re-exploration would have been a random, stumbling chore. As-is, I found it to be a nice little meta-puzzle. (And maybe playing in small chunks has mitigated the pain of repeating some tricky sections.)

    But I think I may not yet have seen the most difficult parts that some have complained about. (I’m assuming I now need to head to the missing map square in the lower right.)

    Part of why I’m nonetheless chiming in now is that my piecemeal playstyle has meant I’ve forgotten where the entrance to the secret Mario room is. Any chance someone with a better memory than me could point it out?

    • It’s at the top right!

      (There’s also an interesting secret area I found in a nearby room, on a right hand wall)

      • Thanks! (I had expected something to happen in that secret area’s penultimate room — it looked before like the squares were spelling something like “finish me”? — but, alas.)

        And I had missed that other secret room. Curious that the game is basically unfinishable without stumbling upon that one. (Unless that information is repeated elsewhere that I also missed?)

        Stopping for the night now at the yellow room with the lasers and moving platforms. These rooms are much harder, but so far have check points at the beginning of each one. It’s almost like this part is a separate game.

        • Those blocks aren’t spelling finish me. They ARE spelling something, but it’s not really useful at all and is just vulgar and possibly humorous to some.

          Also, the information about the secret room is indeed provided elsewhere, sort of: Two of the natives, one in a far away green area and another very close to that area make mention of its contents- if you talk to the latter before the former, their dialogue can seem a bit confusing.

          I only found 4 of the upgrades and had assumed that the 5th was going to be located in the yellow area of no return, but, alas.

  9. Really liked this, but had to stop after I’d had enough dying. I have a /very/ high tolerance for BS levels of difficulty (I’ll keep at it forever, usually) but not with this game. I feel like it was the way the main character controlled, not sure why.

  10. Oww, I definitly found it too hard in places and had to give up, it’s nice but I felt if the jumping was just slightly higher it would be more balanced difficulty-wise.

  11. I liked it a lot despite sharing the criticism of the difficulty, which stopped me playing ultimately. Jumping into a new room and hitting a spike immediately was not cool… I do love the atmosphere and music. The very floaty jump is not to my taste, but the level designs that work with it make it work, when they work.

  12. After going down again and again, I started getting the feeling that it was impossible to go back up. I felt let down when that wasn’t the case.

    I got half the crystals, got bored, and gave up.

  13. please,any of you can explain where the yellow tower is? i found all the gems and don’t know what to do.i found also the secret chamber with the guy(where i have to go?) and the one with mario…still don’t know what to do! this game is driving me crazy! 😯