Neither Day nor Night Reviews

A challenging and sometimes rather frustrating game. However, it is also pretty fun and the sense of achievement you gain from passing each challenge is well worth the struggle. If you like 2D platformers and are a masochist that likes games that could count as a mental form of torture, then you will likely enjoy this game. It's basically 2D dark souls in terms of difficulty (as in you sometimes have to practice over and over to eventually succeed.) Also the art and music in this game are beautiful.

Complicated controls to do simple things ? Instadeath bees ? Nah.

I want to like this game, but the instakill bees are everywhere. It's not fun. Also, why does this game lag so much? I know my computer is a potato, but it should still run a game like this no problem.

I impulse bought this game and was not impressed by it. The controls feel so slippery and inconsistent in a game that has insta-kill bullshit flying everywhere, and I'm only three levels in? Not great. The writing isn't clever enough to keep me invested, either. If it gets better, or if there's some sort of bug going on, let me know with a comment or, but seriously, for a "precision platformer," this feels really unpolished.

At the time of writing I'm past the first boss. It took me 6 hours cause I've been playing in chunks and doing things with the game minimized inbetween. The fact that the overall score is mostly negative makes no sense to me. This is a good game. And I am highly critical of janky games. NDNN is like Dark Souls. I don't mean in the meme sense that it is hard. I mean that your actions have weight to them and you have to think before you act, and actually put effort in. You can't BS your way through a challenge. A badly timed roll or attack can be severely punished, and that's by design. The game is actually very tight despite the motion tween puppet animation style that has become largely associated with janky 2005-2014 era flash games. I am quick to rage when I perceive a death as unfair or have to deal with unreal engine physics jank that sucks the fun out of a game, because I see it as just the game wasting my time for no good reason or being jank and broken due to careless programming. Not once in this game have I felt that a death was unwarranted. I saw why it happened and it made sense, and when I adjusted my strategy to counter it, it was a simple matter of execution and patience. This is a solid game. It has elements of Dark Souls and I Wanna Be the Guy, and it works IMO. That said, I have a couple complaints. 1. when you defeat a boss, you can't revisit it. I suppose this is either for realism (the boss is dead, whereas you revisit levels in-story to pick up collectibles you missed), or from technical limitations (maybe the dev couldn't figure out how to balance the bosses for future revisits since you'll have more abilities later on). Whatever the reason, I don't really care. The point is that it hurts the user experience, because if you want to practice a boss for, say, a speedrun, that means you have to have a save file progressed up to that boss, for every single boss in the game. And there are only six save slots AFAIK. Seems really silly to have to play the game 6+ times to advance to various points just to be able to practice a boss. I say get rid of grey levels altogether and just let the player replay a level if they want to. It's not like you can't just exit back to the level select if you regret entering a level. 2. The ledge dropping mechanic is poorly explained. I get that there's a learning curve, the climbable walls in IWBTG have a learning curve, too, but the way the game explains it leads to a lot of unnecessary and cheap deaths from the player simply not understanding the mechanic. You're supposed to run at the ledge while holding down. The instructions imply you need to get close to the edge and then swing your direction down, i.e. stop running. The intended effect is that for a moment you are holding down and left/right, but in reality this just causes a lot of running and walking off ledges and the mechanic feels like it "just works when it wants to", i.e. jank. but it's not jank. It works 100% consistently if you understand how to properly engage it. The problem is with the tutorial. Since this is the only frustrating thing that stopped being frustrating once I figured the mechanic out, I figure it's not intended to be like that. I'll be interested to see if the dev responds to this. I see that they've replied to some threads in 2021, but that was two years ago. I hope the dev sees this and fixes these things. That would be epic.