Reviews

Review by amarillion all reviews by amarillion

"Rewrite it in" is essentially a king-of-the-hill arcade game, using a backstory that shines an uncomfortable psychological light for an old C++/allegro programmer like me.

In this game you have to plant projects on planets, which grow (like flowers) to generate ideas. You can catch these ideas to plant them, while trying to fend off "naysayers" that try to ruin your projects. The naysayers continuously spout grumpy comments, that seem especially directed at competitors of the C++ programming language. We note that the game itself is written in Rust, so that fits.

All these concepts are presented as brightly coloured geometric shapes, with a nice glow effect on top, all the while the source code of the game itself is scrolling in the background. This game definitely has a cool look. The music is great but it wasn't made during the compo, so no extra points for that.

The game gets pretty hard pretty quickly. I managed to get to year 3. There is probably also a deeper lesson about focus, and the problem of trying to keep too many projects running at the same time.

As others have commented, the jump is hard to control, and sometimes a jump takes you so far away from your planet that it's completely overrun by the time you get back again. The slow movement of the player, as well as the enemies, makes for long waits in between action. The slow pace feels a bit awkward for this type of arcade game, and could do with some tuning.

One of my favorite entries overall, one that keeps interest

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 5 Technical 4 Genre 3

Review by entheh all reviews by entheh

Rewrite It In pits you as the creator of a new language, keen to see your projects succeed despite the efforts of people so old that they are incapable of learning any language that isn't a literal antique, and so insecure about their continued relevance that they have to sabotage your projects to enable themselves to continue living under the lie that they are even remotely employable any more.

In addition to how true to life the choice of stuff to make fun of is, the game makes a statement with its minimalist but consistent artistic style. Now, in fairness, as a fellow appreciator of Rust, I have to admit that I'm biased, and the fun-poking would probably only deserve full marks if it could be made inherent to the design of the game. All things considered, I decided to award 4 here.

As for the genre rule, flowers are present in the game, but the analogy of using flowers to represent projects felt a little forced, so I felt I could only justify awarding 3 there.

Rewrite It In is a technical tour de force. I particularly like what appears to be the use of orbital dynamics for jumping from circle to circle. A text scroller of sorts is present. I can nevertheless only offer 4 points here because the proceduralilty appears to be limited to the placement of the circles and a few other things for which random numbers would have been the natural choice anyway.

So, is it fun to play? Well, I found myself mostly just waiting, if I jumped wrong or my flowers were still growing, so I didn't play it for very long. Certainly worth a 4 though, for all the good things otherwise present in this game. Well done.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 4 Technical 4 Genre 3

Review by elias all reviews by elias

Those messages made me laugh :) The game play was well balanced, it was easy enough in the first levels but then I had to develop a strategy. I decided it's best to find a good spot on a planet and keep all flowers close together to defend them. Once too many were required for that I discovered that you can get actually speed up a lot if you just keep circling and used that to my advantage.

Scores: Overall 5 Artistical 5 Technical 5 Genre 5

Review by MarkOates all reviews by MarkOates

OK that was fun. I made it all the way to Year 5, having barely scraped by at year 4.

My first impression was I love the music and the style. It reminds me of my actual coding environment so I felt right at home knocking baddies away from my brilliant projects that can only get worse when the invaders come in.

It hit very close to home, if I may say so ;)

I loved the comments each of the naysayers. I found a lot of them very funny and wouldn't mind having 20x more of them so I could just read them and enjoy during gameplay.

I did have some trouble with the controls, and would get stuck between circles. I'm not sure if this was part of the gameplay, but several green circles would go into those notches and I would not be able to reach them. I wasn't sure what was causing me to go faster or slower during the game, maybe there is an indicator that I missed out on?

I'm sure I'll play it some more.

I played on Windows (had no problems running), however, the screen was higher resolution I believe causing the layout to show differently than intended. Here's a photo of my laptop screen running the program.

I think this would be really fun with joystick support.

Technical, I give it a 3, mostly because of glitches in the gameplay, difficulty with navigation controls.

Scores: Overall 4 Artistical 5 Technical 3 Genre 4