Lore: Considering that the dialogues are very simple, I'm curious about what happens to the main character after the ending. The main character is very powerful for surviving those challenges just after "waking up".
Gameplay: Easy to learn and play.
Graphics: Easy to my eyes understand through the fast movement and effects. Seems like the future ones will be "smoother" as the characters drawn in the banner, so nice!
Music and Sounds: I'm very sensitive to sounds. So in many games I get bored with differentes types of effects and music. In this case it wasn't like that. I played comfortably and I also liked the music.
Level design: HARDCORE! Some levels where very difficult. I also got frustrated sometimes because of dying many times but, man! They are all posible to win. Some levels made my poor short-term memory work xD So I could pass through those Red thorn shooters.
i almost completed the game on hard mode, was like 3-2 hits away on the boss, and then the game froze up and gave me: "Error code out of memory" then my computer freaking crashed, guess i took too long?
Woah, that is odd. I doubt the game can crash your computer from within the very restrained environment PICO-8 uses, in fact, the game is limited to work with only 2MiB of RAM. Did the error appear on the game itself, a pop-up Windows message, or a BSoD? Could there have been another program in your system that caused the crash? And did you run the game from the browser, or a downloadable version?
the comment is mildly misleading, when it freezed up, it didnt exactly crash the computer, but directly after the crash i remember checking task manager to check my memory usage, and it was up to 98% (i have 16 GiB of memory), and couldnt use the taskbar to restart to computer it was so unbearably slow, so i had to CTRL + ALT + DEL menu to restart.
the error appeared on the tab itself, the entire tab reloaded and displayed that error on the "aw snap!" screen (I was running it on the browser version) and while writing this reply, some weird things have been going on inside this window and im starting to think that it WAS a different program in my system.
I just opened up task-manager and yea apparently a program called "support assist agent" is taking up all that RAM, its apparently something that only DELL laptops use (the thing im using right now) and from what i can see on the DELL forum some other people are having that problem, so yeah i guess it was just perfectly timed to screw me up from completing the darn game
the bossfight itself? i dunno. i remember being about 90 minutes in by the time it freezed (im not good at this),i also clearly remember the game stuttering at the level directly before the boss fight, and even once it lagged for about 20 seconds before going on like normal, but if i had to give out a rough estimate as to how much time i spent on the boss itself, id say about 10-20 minutes
I'm copying and pasting this from reddit, where I've posted the same review.
To begin this review, I'd like to highlight the parts that were phenomenal: The music, sound design, and sprite designs.
The music was a beautiful 8-bit take on the MD theme, and I would absolutely listen to it for hours on end.
The same goes for the sound and sprite designs. I loved every bit of the art in the game to pieces, especially your character and the supervisor.
As for the bad parts?
To begin with, there's a picture attached, composed of my final playtime. I started playing this at around 8:45 pm local time, ended up taking until *midnight* to finish. Full concentration, full devotion, no breaks to do anything else. Now, my mental state may have deteriorated as I desperately craved sleep, and my ability to play the game along with it, but I still believe this is... not an ideal playtime on normal mode.
There were 2 things that ended up padding out my death rate and my time. If anyone cares to know, they are as follows:
Difficulty wall #1: Final Boss.
There's not much to say here, outside that it's a skill issue on my part. It was cool, overall. Extra health made it difficult to fight, chainsaw hands are chainsaw hands, etc. etc. My main gripes are as follows:
# Why do dives do 2 damage when it's damn near impossible to pull them off? The boss is consistently jumping, you can't damage the boss unless it's on the precisely the same y-level as your character, and if you do dive, you're liable to get ganked by the spikes that you lost track of, because everything's an instakill!
# Tracking orbs. Not much to say about this one besides 'ugh. These things.' I wish they disappeared earlier or faster, but you can't have everything 😁.
Overall deaths caused by boss: Approximately 640, from ~550 to 1100 deaths.
Difficulty wall #2: Escape level, redux.
The final part of the game. Overall deaths caused by this level: Approximately 75, from ~1125 to 1208. This one's a doozy, because of what I feel comfortable calling a bullshit attempt at artificial difficulty. There's already a part that requires incredibly precise inputs way towards the beginning - any progress is locked behind your mastery of a very precise jump - but there's also a dead end that's locked behind a difficult series of jumps and worker k.o.s. You are quite literally forced to redo the end part of the level multiple times, due to an unlabeled dead end that is impossible to recognize as one, all if you take the wrong turn a single time. It took at least 50 deaths for me to finally learn why I was consistently dying at the entrance of the dead-end corridor (an inconveniently placed death block right behind a crowbar drone, hard to notice unless you're specifically looking for it [before you say skill issue, I was under a hard time crunch because of the nature of the level, still moderately pissed off from my ~500 deaths from the bossfight, and frustrated from all the deaths to the extremely difficult jump at the beginning of the level- not to mention that there was a Doll that I had to knock out to even reach the narrow corridor, adding to the need for speed].) That dead end should be removed entirely, imho. Words can't express the sheer and utter frustration and antipathy that consumed as I realized that what I had spent ~45 minutes on wasn't even the end objective. The real ending? An even longer sequence involving extremely precise parkour which was actually pretty fun, all things considered. I didn't have any really unfair deaths there, so there's not really any complaint from me about that, other than that I really wish there was a checkpoint after the dropper/jump part.
Random notes/thoughts on game mechanics:
Doll is incredibly annoying in the prom level. She's got nigh-on infinite sight, meaning knives appearing out of nowhere, necessitating incredible reflexes or a respawn. Flip a coin, that'll be the outcome whenever an offscreen Doll throws her knives. I eventually beat the level with what felt like an incredibly cheesy method, involving dashing past literally all the enemies just to arrive at the stage where they respawn, then doing the level in reverse. Not the most satisfying play, especially when doing the level left to right spawns a giant honkin' wall of Dolls that's impossible to get through. A simple reduction in view distance for Doll would work wonders for making the prom level far less annoying, especially given the fixed spawn location and instant respawns of Dolls.
It's cathartic to slaughter the mundane worker drones. I'd go so far as to say that this was the sole reason I was able to continue for so long. :D
Flight is a bit unintuitive, but overall fun. Takes a while to get used to, but thems the breaks.
Overall review:
9/10, with everything considered. It's the kind of thing you'll love, assuming you like this kind of thing. Would probably recommend if you have an entire free day, nothing else to do, and enjoy platformers. Music was incredible, characters were fun, and as frustrating as it got, there were a few gems in the game that make it worth playing - there was one level devoted solely to killing Dolls, and it was so much fun. I've completely ignored the lore in this post, but hell, I'd say it's worth playing for the lore. A very fun game with (unfortunately) very little replayability for me. Just make sure you don't start playing it at night to relax after a long day at school. Empirical evidence suggests it's not the best at that. Congratulation is in order for the devs, who clearly slaved over the game and made an incredibly captivating experience. The passion and love put into the game absolutely shines through all the frustration it caused, and I'm all for it. All the devs should be commended: from their itch.io page where the game can be played, congratulations to Autopawn, Remi Mixer, Crjönch, Miszuk, and Marshimiiu.
just throwing this reply here too, pay it no mind if you’ve seen it on Reddit
Super appreciative of this big review! And I wanted to say congrats for beating it! The other devs put a massive amount of effort into the sound and sprites.
You have good points about the gameplay and I wanted to go through them one point at a time, not as a refutation or out of spite/anger but because I talk too much and love open dialogue.
I did want to address that I don’t think this game was designed to truly be beaten in one sitting. My philosophy when creating some of the levels (yeah I was in charge of most of level creation) is that the player can quit and come back whenever and their progress is saved. The game was designed like a hard old flash game someone would come back to play repeatedly to get better at it with more game knowledge and time to think, but I probably should’ve taken more play styles into account. If you ever come back to it though I do recommend taking breaks in between; I made half the levels and I still can’t play it for too long in one sitting.
Honestly though? That’s a pretty fair playtime all things considered. It’s not an easy game, beating it on normal is an accomplishment. Congrats on powering through!
Now onto the boss:
dives do 2 damage because they’re hard to pull off; it’s a reward for going in deep and using all of your tools to your advantage. It’s inherently riskier to pull off due to all the hazards you mentioned, but the boss’ behavior is on a pattern so players can learn it and take advantage of the moments when it is open for a dive. That being said, it’s not required to dive to beat the boss, just an extra bonus for those who go through the trouble.
we had several ideas of attacks to add to the fight to spice up the default pattern, and the tracking orb was both the easiest to program and the simplest to tweak for balancing. I know no one likes homing projectiles, but we tried to make it slow enough to simply prevent turtling.
Level 12:
level 12 is a doozy that I was personally responsible for, sorry you had such a rough time with it (and shout-out to the other devs for making me nerf the escape several times).
I definitely should’ve put it in the dialogue somewhere, but many of the precise jumps in the game are actually far easier when you speed up, and that section in level 12 is probably the biggest example of that. My bad there that one’s on me
That corridor was meant as an optional path for more experienced players that wanted to save time, and it was never intended for a first run due to it’s difficulty. We thought the monitor pointing down at the junction between the two paths was a good indicator of the intended first route, but apparently I accidentally made the monitor destructible. Again that’s on me. The intended path at the bottom is far easier for a first-time experience. We’ll see what we can do to make the intended path more visible.
other notes
Funnily enough that’s one of the intended ways to beat level 9 (prom). Finding the right strategy to handle everything was the big focus of the level since taking everything on headfirst will lead to a harder time dealing with the Doll wall at the end (which requires its own strategy to deal with).
Yeah killing those little toasters is really nice, glad the allure of worker oil translates to gameplay XD
Fun facts from development:
Funnily enough the design of the level about killing dolls (level 8) is actually the test room we used to create and try her out. When we came back around to making an actual level none of us could make a better level, so we just stuck the test room in the game!
And on about hardmode; yeah that’s understandable. Autopawn made a joke a while back and it’s funny how true it ended up becoming.

And thank you for the high and fair review! I’m actually way more appreciative that you listed off your gripes with the gameplay instead of omitting it, as it gave us things to look at that we didn’t consider before. We’re so glad you had fun with it though! Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts, for playing!
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AHHEEOOPPEETOTOAHHH
(Non-Developer Review)
Lore:
Considering that the dialogues are very simple, I'm curious about what happens to the main character after the ending. The main character is very powerful for surviving those challenges just after "waking up".
Gameplay:
Easy to learn and play.
Graphics:
Easy to my eyes understand through the fast movement and effects. Seems like the future ones will be "smoother" as the characters drawn in the banner, so nice!
Music and Sounds:
I'm very sensitive to sounds. So in many games I get bored with differentes types of effects and music. In this case it wasn't like that. I played comfortably and I also liked the music.
Level design:
HARDCORE! Some levels where very difficult. I also got frustrated sometimes because of dying many times but, man! They are all posible to win. Some levels made my poor short-term memory work xD So I could pass through those Red thorn shooters.
Bugs:
None, in 45 minutes.
i almost completed the game on hard mode, was like 3-2 hits away on the boss, and then the game froze up and gave me: "Error code out of memory" then my computer freaking crashed, guess i took too long?
Woah, that is odd. I doubt the game can crash your computer from within the very restrained environment PICO-8 uses, in fact, the game is limited to work with only 2MiB of RAM. Did the error appear on the game itself, a pop-up Windows message, or a BSoD? Could there have been another program in your system that caused the crash? And did you run the game from the browser, or a downloadable version?
the comment is mildly misleading, when it freezed up, it didnt exactly crash the computer, but directly after the crash i remember checking task manager to check my memory usage, and it was up to 98% (i have 16 GiB of memory), and couldnt use the taskbar to restart to computer it was so unbearably slow, so i had to CTRL + ALT + DEL menu to restart.
the error appeared on the tab itself, the entire tab reloaded and displayed that error on the "aw snap!" screen (I was running it on the browser version) and while writing this reply, some weird things have been going on inside this window and im starting to think that it WAS a different program in my system.
I just opened up task-manager and yea apparently a program called "support assist agent" is taking up all that RAM, its apparently something that only DELL laptops use (the thing im using right now) and from what i can see on the DELL forum some other people are having that problem, so yeah i guess it was just perfectly timed to screw me up from completing the darn game
I see! Thanks for the detailed explanation. And congrats for reaching the boss in HARD mode!
interesting freeze, We'll look into this. you mention taking a while, may I ask how long the fight lasted if you remember?
the bossfight itself? i dunno. i remember being about 90 minutes in by the time it freezed (im not good at this),i also clearly remember the game stuttering at the level directly before the boss fight, and even once it lagged for about 20 seconds before going on like normal, but if i had to give out a rough estimate as to how much time i spent on the boss itself, id say about 10-20 minutes
cool game
Thank you for playing! :D
I'm copying and pasting this from reddit, where I've posted the same review.
To begin this review, I'd like to highlight the parts that were phenomenal: The music, sound design, and sprite designs.
The music was a beautiful 8-bit take on the MD theme, and I would absolutely listen to it for hours on end.
The same goes for the sound and sprite designs. I loved every bit of the art in the game to pieces, especially your character and the supervisor.
As for the bad parts?
To begin with, there's a picture attached, composed of my final playtime. I started playing this at around 8:45 pm local time, ended up taking until *midnight* to finish. Full concentration, full devotion, no breaks to do anything else. Now, my mental state may have deteriorated as I desperately craved sleep, and my ability to play the game along with it, but I still believe this is... not an ideal playtime on normal mode.
There were 2 things that ended up padding out my death rate and my time. If anyone cares to know, they are as follows:
Difficulty wall #1: Final Boss.
There's not much to say here, outside that it's a skill issue on my part. It was cool, overall. Extra health made it difficult to fight, chainsaw hands are chainsaw hands, etc. etc. My main gripes are as follows:
# Why do dives do 2 damage when it's damn near impossible to pull them off? The boss is consistently jumping, you can't damage the boss unless it's on the precisely the same y-level as your character, and if you do dive, you're liable to get ganked by the spikes that you lost track of, because everything's an instakill!
# Tracking orbs. Not much to say about this one besides 'ugh. These things.' I wish they disappeared earlier or faster, but you can't have everything 😁.
Overall deaths caused by boss: Approximately 640, from ~550 to 1100 deaths.
Difficulty wall #2: Escape level, redux.
The final part of the game. Overall deaths caused by this level: Approximately 75, from ~1125 to 1208. This one's a doozy, because of what I feel comfortable calling a bullshit attempt at artificial difficulty. There's already a part that requires incredibly precise inputs way towards the beginning - any progress is locked behind your mastery of a very precise jump - but there's also a dead end that's locked behind a difficult series of jumps and worker k.o.s. You are quite literally forced to redo the end part of the level multiple times, due to an unlabeled dead end that is impossible to recognize as one, all if you take the wrong turn a single time. It took at least 50 deaths for me to finally learn why I was consistently dying at the entrance of the dead-end corridor (an inconveniently placed death block right behind a crowbar drone, hard to notice unless you're specifically looking for it [before you say skill issue, I was under a hard time crunch because of the nature of the level, still moderately pissed off from my ~500 deaths from the bossfight, and frustrated from all the deaths to the extremely difficult jump at the beginning of the level- not to mention that there was a Doll that I had to knock out to even reach the narrow corridor, adding to the need for speed].) That dead end should be removed entirely, imho. Words can't express the sheer and utter frustration and antipathy that consumed as I realized that what I had spent ~45 minutes on wasn't even the end objective. The real ending? An even longer sequence involving extremely precise parkour which was actually pretty fun, all things considered. I didn't have any really unfair deaths there, so there's not really any complaint from me about that, other than that I really wish there was a checkpoint after the dropper/jump part.
Random notes/thoughts on game mechanics:
Doll is incredibly annoying in the prom level. She's got nigh-on infinite sight, meaning knives appearing out of nowhere, necessitating incredible reflexes or a respawn. Flip a coin, that'll be the outcome whenever an offscreen Doll throws her knives. I eventually beat the level with what felt like an incredibly cheesy method, involving dashing past literally all the enemies just to arrive at the stage where they respawn, then doing the level in reverse. Not the most satisfying play, especially when doing the level left to right spawns a giant honkin' wall of Dolls that's impossible to get through. A simple reduction in view distance for Doll would work wonders for making the prom level far less annoying, especially given the fixed spawn location and instant respawns of Dolls.
It's cathartic to slaughter the mundane worker drones. I'd go so far as to say that this was the sole reason I was able to continue for so long. :D
Flight is a bit unintuitive, but overall fun. Takes a while to get used to, but thems the breaks.
Overall review:
9/10, with everything considered. It's the kind of thing you'll love, assuming you like this kind of thing. Would probably recommend if you have an entire free day, nothing else to do, and enjoy platformers. Music was incredible, characters were fun, and as frustrating as it got, there were a few gems in the game that make it worth playing - there was one level devoted solely to killing Dolls, and it was so much fun. I've completely ignored the lore in this post, but hell, I'd say it's worth playing for the lore. A very fun game with (unfortunately) very little replayability for me. Just make sure you don't start playing it at night to relax after a long day at school. Empirical evidence suggests it's not the best at that. Congratulation is in order for the devs, who clearly slaved over the game and made an incredibly captivating experience. The passion and love put into the game absolutely shines through all the frustration it caused, and I'm all for it. All the devs should be commended: from their itch.io page where the game can be played, congratulations to Autopawn, Remi Mixer, Crjönch, Miszuk, and Marshimiiu.
I am aware of a hardmode, to which I respond: No.
just throwing this reply here too, pay it no mind if you’ve seen it on Reddit
Super appreciative of this big review! And I wanted to say congrats for beating it! The other devs put a massive amount of effort into the sound and sprites.
You have good points about the gameplay and I wanted to go through them one point at a time, not as a refutation or out of spite/anger but because I talk too much and love open dialogue.
I did want to address that I don’t think this game was designed to truly be beaten in one sitting. My philosophy when creating some of the levels (yeah I was in charge of most of level creation) is that the player can quit and come back whenever and their progress is saved. The game was designed like a hard old flash game someone would come back to play repeatedly to get better at it with more game knowledge and time to think, but I probably should’ve taken more play styles into account. If you ever come back to it though I do recommend taking breaks in between; I made half the levels and I still can’t play it for too long in one sitting.
Honestly though? That’s a pretty fair playtime all things considered. It’s not an easy game, beating it on normal is an accomplishment. Congrats on powering through!
Now onto the boss:
dives do 2 damage because they’re hard to pull off; it’s a reward for going in deep and using all of your tools to your advantage. It’s inherently riskier to pull off due to all the hazards you mentioned, but the boss’ behavior is on a pattern so players can learn it and take advantage of the moments when it is open for a dive. That being said, it’s not required to dive to beat the boss, just an extra bonus for those who go through the trouble.
we had several ideas of attacks to add to the fight to spice up the default pattern, and the tracking orb was both the easiest to program and the simplest to tweak for balancing. I know no one likes homing projectiles, but we tried to make it slow enough to simply prevent turtling.
Level 12:
level 12 is a doozy that I was personally responsible for, sorry you had such a rough time with it (and shout-out to the other devs for making me nerf the escape several times).
I definitely should’ve put it in the dialogue somewhere, but many of the precise jumps in the game are actually far easier when you speed up, and that section in level 12 is probably the biggest example of that. My bad there that one’s on me
That corridor was meant as an optional path for more experienced players that wanted to save time, and it was never intended for a first run due to it’s difficulty. We thought the monitor pointing down at the junction between the two paths was a good indicator of the intended first route, but apparently I accidentally made the monitor destructible. Again that’s on me. The intended path at the bottom is far easier for a first-time experience. We’ll see what we can do to make the intended path more visible.
other notes
Funnily enough that’s one of the intended ways to beat level 9 (prom). Finding the right strategy to handle everything was the big focus of the level since taking everything on headfirst will lead to a harder time dealing with the Doll wall at the end (which requires its own strategy to deal with).
Yeah killing those little toasters is really nice, glad the allure of worker oil translates to gameplay XD
Fun facts from development:
Funnily enough the design of the level about killing dolls (level 8) is actually the test room we used to create and try her out. When we came back around to making an actual level none of us could make a better level, so we just stuck the test room in the game!
And on about hardmode; yeah that’s understandable. Autopawn made a joke a while back and it’s funny how true it ended up becoming.
And thank you for the high and fair review! I’m actually way more appreciative that you listed off your gripes with the gameplay instead of omitting it, as it gave us things to look at that we didn’t consider before. We’re so glad you had fun with it though! Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts, for playing!
Great Game
Thanks, and thank you for playing :)