Innoquous 5

<3

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I am 32 years old.

My ex-wife and I have a daughter together, and we adopted our son together. Both are now 4 years old.

When we were going through our separation, I felt lost and unhappy. I was self-destructive. One day, I was so angry with everything spiraling out of control that I punched a concrete wall in a moment of overwhelming emotion. This resulted in breaking my fifth metacarpal in my right hand—the hand I worked with, played games with, and used to carry my children to bed—the hand I desperately needed to ensure I could continue providing.

Upon learning the severity of the self-inflicted damage, I became almost suicidal. Keep in mind that just a few months before this, I was the happiest man, with no history of depression or anxiety. I had never experienced anger outbursts, nor was I the type to break down and cry, but I was in a tough situation that truly prevented me from seeing the light on the other side.

With nothing better to do, I looked for a game I could play WITH ONE HAND while recovering. Somehow, I stumbled upon this game and read some of the comments. I decided it was worth a try... I must admit I didn't beat the game, nor did I play as much as some of you. In fact, I may have played this game for only a day or two. That being said, after doing so, I had a new joy and hope for life. I managed to leave behind the pain and suffering that had been thrust upon me. I could experience the joy and happiness of other people. I relaxed for 5 ♥♥♥♥ minutes listening to this music, long enough to realize that I would be okay.

After realizing this, I turned off the game and went back to work. My hand hurt a lot, but I was motivated. I stopped feeling so sorry for myself and became the father I needed to be at that moment, not the weak boy I was behaving like.

Today, I am close friends with the mother of my children. We don't fight, argue, or say hurtful things to each other. We are parents and friends.

Now I have 3 children. My third child is, wait, ALSO 4 YEARS OLD. The woman I am with was going through a very similar situation at the time of my separation, and we just unexpectedly stumbled into each other's lives. We have been dating for a year and are very happy together.

Moral of the story: you never know what life has in store for you, and if I had given up when all odds were against me, I wouldn't be where I am today. This silly little game helped me realize that.

Thank you.

game

Just no

Wow! Only for 99cents!!

A great game that is underated!

you wanna play rough OKAY !!!

this game is ♥♥♥♥

Innoquous 5 is yet another of literally thousands of 2D platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. Admittedly this one is at least 3D rendered, but badly, so it's barely better than the usual 2D retro pixel shovelware that's glutting Steam.

It's worth noting there's a surprisingly well rounded number of features for this platformer, which does put it head and shoulders over most of the rest in terms of core game design. You've got conveyors, switches, breakable blocks, gravity inversion/level rotation mechanisms... if you love platformers more than life itself, and do most of your gaming on an 80386 with an S3 Virge, this might be the game for you... and I think that's a set containing absolutely zero people, so you can understand why this game didn't appeal to anyone (more on that later, let's go over all the technical faults and defects first):

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

The game features lazy minimalist/untextured low-polygon "retro" assets and visuals, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the early 1990s. The lack of textures is a method that lazy devs often use to disguise their lack of talent/interest in doing the graphics properly and trying to disguise it under the name of "art", or "We made it look bad on purpose", which really isn't something gamers should have to put up with. It's unclear why the developers weren't willing to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets and high resolution textures for the game. It looks bad as a result of their decisions, and that's just another reason to avoid it.

The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers. Furthermore, PC gamers will be insulted by the presence of console peasant children's toy controller prompts, despite this being on PC. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're developing for.

While this is on PC, it has all the hallmarks and deficiencies of a console game, from the clunkier than needed control scheme to the less than cutting edge graphics. There's 10's of thousands of PC games on Steam, and PC gamers deserve only the best. This might not appeal to many gamers due to the lack of PC-centric design. It's unclear why this game was never accepted on the video game console appliances it seems to have been designed for.

Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs. Having said that, I think at least some credit is due for the developers working out how to do 3D graphics with the craptastic GMS... the vast majority of amateur devs pushing GameMaker Studio garbage on Steam don't know how to do it, it's just too hard for them. Of course, it should be no surprise that GameMaker Studio's 3D components are just as garbage as the 2D ones. Zero points to Griffyndor.

You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Innoquous 5 has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for finishing the first 5 very short/tutorial levels, but only around 1.5 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.

Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 2 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who weren't even playing the game? Trading cards. Players will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game. That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

Innoquous 5 is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.

I love the platform games and this one is affordable. I'm actually very suprised because this game gives you more than you pay for. Its fun, every level designs are very interesting and colorful, I'd say if you are into the platform games just give a shot. Its "almost" free anyway.

ase

a neat little platformer with a pretty ridiculous amount of content for just a dollar

it does suffer from crappy hit detection at times but it's nothing deal breaking

It was ok...

It wasnt my favourite, on the other hand it was designed very nicely and I can see how people enjoy it

you wanna play rough OKAY !!!

6/10

Update: After falling off and coming back to the game over 4 YEARS later, getting all 100 secret notes and beating all 100 base levels in normal mode (and 60 or so in the firey walls + other modes), my opinion has changed drastically. The first 40 or so levels are okay, and if the game was just those first 40 levels and the dev spent their time polishing the game instead of copy/pasting levels from previous games, maybe this review would still be positive. The rest of the levels are bad and just get worse, to the point where the level is just...the alphabet, or an obnoxious game-lagging amount of guns spammed all over the place. The trick to add difficulty to a level is not to spam more hazards, my god, man.

It's like, it's a combination of bad level design (there is some REALLY bad level design in all of the innoquous games, but 4 had the worst) and janky physics. Janky physics which are pushed to the extreme in the harder fiery walls levels, to the point where it actually breaks the game. Where literally one frame of input means the difference between you barely making a jump and flying into a sawblade. Most of this game is an exercise in figuring out how to work around or exploit the game's jank to make something possible that shouldn't be possible or vice versa, which is not normal. Usually jank exploits are used in speedruns, in metagames, not something you have to do to just beat a game. And the dev KNOWS it's shitty. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen situations like this in a level:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/549385493876572171/1063253751831461918/image.png

This is not good level design. This is a band-aid.

20 good levels is better than 100 crap levels. The dev should have designed (or had someone else design) 30 really good levels and left it at that, using the time to polish the game more instead of copy/pasting every single level of innoquous 4 to pad out the length. My opinion that 4 is the worst still stands. I forgot that I had played the first 4 and replayed them a couple days ago. 4 was horrible.

And the game is very janky. Your movement is jerky, the engine lags a lot, the physics do weird things all the time, there is one level where you have a shaft and bullets, and you're supposed to time the switch so that only one bullet comes out of each gun and breaks the platforms, I think? I say I think because it is so inconsistent and buggy that the level was almost impossible to finish. You can start a level two times with the same input and have different things happen. The water physics are absolutely horrible.

If 4's biggest problem was its shit level design, then 5's biggest problem is the engine. Pretty UI and music variety this game may have, but that doesn't matter if the game's not fun.

Less is more.

Original review:

I went into this with no expectations, and the game surprised me with the depth of quality and polish. Which is to be expected for the fifth game in a series of indie games. Actually, this guy has made a LOT of games.

I'm gonna review the whole series. You can find 1-4 by going to his website (nalgames.com), download via gamejolt.

This series of games is a light puzzle platformer that's hard to explain. If you like the first four games, then you're going to *really* like this one. Also note that in my playthroughs of 1-4, I did not install the thing they wanted me to install. I don't know if that would enable controller support, but since the games play without installing it, I didn't install it.

The first game is quite nice, with a simple design and simple rules. Kind of what you'd expect out of a flash game, except it's an EXE made in game maker. It moves really fast sometimes and somehow manages to lag, which leads to a lot of deaths. The music choice is really good, too. Rank #3

The second feels like a rehash of the first and I didn't care for it. It's short, though. Rank #4

The third is where the polish starts to come in. Colors, a proper menu, save and load, different modes including fire floors, conditions and speedrun. I didn't care for the music selection, though. For example, there's a very boring newgrounds audio portal sounding techno remix of the Mortal Kombat movie theme. Wat. Rank #2

The fourth is IMO the worst game in the series. This one adds a 3D perspective to the mix, the controls are sped up significantly, and it has a menu resembling 5's, except it has almost no polish and is boring as hell. Rank #5.

And finally we get to this game, the best of the series, which is a good thing because it's also the only one with a price tag. The 3D perspective is kept and polished significantly, the controls are fine-tuned, the levels feel interesting and have decent variety, CONTROLLER SUPPORT is added, it has a sleek menu with more logical item placements. It's better than 4 in every possible way, and is totally worth its $3 price tag. Also, the music selection is among the best in the entire series.

I not only recommend this game, but I also recommend playing 1-3 as well.

A puzzle platformer with 175 levels, 8 game modes and a good soundtrack with an editable playlist. As other reviewers wrote controls are a bit over-sensitive. The game leaves not much else to desire. Innoquous has clean visuals and many options available you won't find in similar games.

I bought this on a whim, and I'm glad I did! It's a great little platformer, chock full of content and variety. It has 175 levels, each of which can be played in numerous play modes. Even with several hours of playtime, I'm far from exhausting the game's content. It's worth noting that there are essentially two sets of levels: Levels 1-100 are the "Innoquous 5" levels, while levels 101-175 are based on levels from the developer's prior game "Innoquous 4." As levels 1-100 began to get quite difficult, I welcomed the ability to play additinonal easy and medium difficulty levels in the Innoquous 4 set.

The game also includes a level editor and steam workshop functionality. I'm really looking forward to playing around with the gravity rotation gameplay to build custom levels.

My one criticism: as the levels became more difficult, I began to feel that the controls are just a bit too sensitive--the speed of your ball is quite fast, so it can be difficult to nail subtle left/right movements (at least with a keyboard). The game is certainly fully playable and enjoyable as it is, but I'd love to see how the game would play with a slight adjustment to the control sensitivity.

I grabbed it because it was cheap and looked like fun! I have only tried it out for about 10-15 minutes but clearing the first few levels in all modes was fun! controls are solid (have to see if I can enable WASD, Haven't checked yet) and the levels seems to be straightforward at the beginning but still challenging when you just start. I'll update as I get further along but the one thing that I do appreciate is that in the settings you can toggle on/off the music you like or dislike in the playlist. Also, you can slide the music volume around if you prefer slight background noise or full 100% volume!