Red: In a Corrupted Mind

Once again the autistic gamer girl(tm) comes to rescue with the code to the secret room yippiee 

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I'm only pasting this code here because it looks there are no posts on Gamejolt or Itch.io about the code, so I datamined it, sorry 'x3

Review time!! vvvvvv (this one will be looooong...)

I'll be honest, I didnt like this game like the previous one ^-^"

The stealth sections are.. kinda bad, with how you're forced to redo the entire thing when you get caught, instead of teleporting you to the beginning. It would be easy to make an event that teleports you back to the start right after you get caught instead of killing the player and watch the little guy walk over all the way to the side of the room to try again in the hallway area where you have to pick up this square gem thingy. I hated all those stealth sections, truly, lol x-x I mitigated it by saving after the little guy walked his way and opened the door, but still... The detection cones of these goons is ungodly big, they see you through walls and sometimes you have to sneak a breath away from their backs to be able to walk through on another goon's walk cycle unspotted. 

And.. I was so close to hacking the game again to actually make the robot chase sequence actually passable... In the end, I got through it, lol but it left me with massive ptsd x-x One of the robots by the end comes out of it's compartment BEFORE you reach it, making it very hard to thread the needle and barely squeeze past it and reach the end. And the end isn't very well conveyed with the bright red lights... I didn't know you could disable the alarm and close the doors on the robots, so I darted straight to the control room and experienced the whole cutscene with RubyBot and Goldy while the alarm was blaring lel I realised by the time I tried to walk all the way back the same corridor full of robots that I can flip a switch. It's not very well visible, and the button's sprite is a bad choice. You can see similar buttons to this one that aren't interactable, so the player would assume it does nothing and not try it and experience the cutscene with the alarm, which does get annoying.

The game overall is more buggy, with textures that you can get stuck in, some walls you can phase through, and a little speedrun strat in the lab room where you can walk past the lasers without initating the cutscene, lol.. Out of respect for the game, I listened to it -w-b

And the room with the secret christmas code where you can buy STUFFED items from the puppet, their shop has no collisions at all, making it so you can walk out into the void pretty much anywhere, but I think it is intentional? I'm not sure, lol

Oh! And the actual code for this door is weird, there are no posts on Gamejolt or Itch.io so I had to look through the files anyway to see the code and lower the prices from 9999 to 0 lol... In the end, these items do nothing at all from what I noticed and cannot be used on Red in his fight either, so I think they are just a little lore easter egg

Overall I think this game was a pretty big letdown.. A lot of errors and annoying game design choices and the ending is a little rushed, with it kinda just happening... Sofiel just kills Goldy at the end and the game kicks you to the title screen...

But!! Enough about the bad stuff, while there are many issues, I do find some positives, like the level design. I like the design of some of the stages, it looks like that aspect has improved! The locations look better than the last game, and I do love the world building and the little lore we are drip fed throughout the game about what happened between Goldy and Red, interesting stuff! Would love to see more of it! :3 And how overall, the menus and title screen have gone in a different direction and look better than basic RPGMaker title screens. Another thing that I liked is that Sofiel got more screentime because I love her my brain goes lesbian mode for her <3

Overall... This game was kinda painful to go through for it's first half lol... But I'm sure you'll improve with the feedback! 

I'll give  you some tips, think about what a player would find annoying or fun, think about what you as a player of other games find annoying or fun and try to replicate it. And also find yourself friends or other people to test your games for you and find issues with them like textures you can walk through or get stuck on, I found one in the FNAF pizzeria stage level where if you walk into one of the carusels, you will be hardlocked, or the one where you walk Freddy into a table in his "bossfight" he will get stuck in it's corner until he walks back, or the crack in the wall of Goldy's house location where you can walk inside it and so on- Having people to do quality control for you is important! This game has potential as a series and you are a very creative person, so don't feel discouraged from a negative review ^^" It hurts me to write a bad review, but it was a step in the wrong direction gameplay wise

To not be fully negative, I want to suggest some ways to fix the issues listed

1. Bad stealth sections - I'd fix it by narrowing the detection range into a single line ahead of the NPC. It will make hiding behind walls actually possible and would make the stealth feel better. And instead of it being a lengthy cutscene where they walk up to you and you die- I'd make it so you get the "Freeze! Or I'll shoot!" message and then the game flashes white and teleports the player at the beginning of the room- and do it for all rooms so progress isn't lost. Some patrol routes have pretty close cycles, so I'd look into that too to give the player a bigger window to walk through unnoticed.

2. For the robot chase, I'd make it so the section is in longer rooms with curving corridors- Makes the chase more frantic and allows you to dodge robots by cutting corners. And I would make the robots spawn in rooms further away from the player so the player has time to react, since some robots are hard to spot as they move. The ! sign is a good indicator of them getting aggro, but still, they are hard to spot afterwards. So I'd say tone down on the alarm.

3. The switch and button are very hard to notice at the end- By making the player go through short corridors and exit the other side as soon as they can, you have conditioned the player to not stop and run to the other side. To fix it partially, you can make Goldy scream "The door switch!!" when he gets close, giving the player an idea to find the switch and flip it in time. Paired with lower redness  of the alarm, it should be visible enough. You could also add a texture above it with a white arrow pointing to it, so the player can see it better and know it's important. Same for the button, maybe yellow and black warning stripes around it to mark it as something important- Real life alarm switches do feature that to be easily spottable. And as a failsafe in case the player "sequence breaks" and enters the cutscene with the alarm still blaring, add in the event a line that disables the alarm preemptively so they can experience it without the noise.

4. And lastly, make sure to extensively test new maps by walking into walls, objects, and all that stuff, to test if they have collisions set properly and not have any areas where a player can get hardlocked or walk into the void. You can do it by yourself, or when you don't feel like it, have a group of people to test the game for you and list every area with broken collisions

I hope I wasn't too harsh, I still love your games <3

Excited ^-^