Since every other games blog has written about this game(click on picture at left to play), I figured I had to as well. This game is a maze-like escape game which reminds me a lot of the Shift game from Armor games and by no coincidence either. It is built quite like the shift series where you are stuck in a maze and have to find the exit. Like shift, you also have a special physics based power - in this case its the ability to rotate the level 90 degrees with the Z and X buttons. However, if your not careful, this may cause unwanted objects to fall on you.

When you rotate, the heavy object besides you is now on top of you and will crush you, the spikes that were to your left are now under you and you will meet an untimely death falling on to them. So while rotating the room is a great and needed ability to win, you need to be careful as to how to use it. I was a bit upset initially at this game because it didn’t have an easy instruction page link that told me how to rotate the room. I had to push a large number of buttons before I found the ones to control the game-play mechanism. The keys to move were easy enough to find as the arrow keys are usually the first ones that people try. However, lacking an instruction page that tells you how to rotate the room may make a few impatient people come to the conclusion that this game is impossible to beat as you cannot advance past the first level without rotating the room somehow.

Another thing is that unlike shift where each level had a defined door that you had to get to in order to beat the level, this one is kind of like one big level. In the second room, I didn’t see a way out and it took me a while to figure out that I had to jump into one of the boxes to go to the next real level. This lack of a constant goal on each level takes away from the game a bit, at least to me.

But, for these two nagging complaints, this was a great game. It wasn’t as good as Shift, but its still much better than most of the portal clones made. The mechanics of the game work very nicely and the Physics of the spin are fluid as objects act as they would in real life. There’s also enough run and jump mechanics in the game to make it a game of not completely rotating. The game also keeps track of your progress and how many rotations and moves it took you to get out of a certain room. This way you can compete with friends as to who found the easiest way out of a certain room with the least number of rotations.

Altogether the puzzle aspect and the game-play are excellent, the lack of instructions and a door for the end of each level is a little disappointing but should not keep you away from the game because you’ll be missing out a lot if you don’t play. Its good enough to keep you busy for a few hours.

Text hints and Never end walkthrough:

Hints and Walkthrough

I am looking for a video walk-through on youtube for this game, if you know of one, please email me at webmaster[at]flashninjaclan.com with the title “Neverend Walk-through” please.

Other games worth a look:

Escape the freaky deaky room

Billy Genocide

Recently a lot of arcade webmasters(include myself) have had complaints about Yougame.com, a site that buys “non-exclusive licenses” to the source code of games, then re-compiles the game with their own site logos and mochi-ads and submits this “new game” to newgrounds and many other places as well as a large e-mail distribution list. There’s only one problem — these aren’t new games at all, they are the SAME EXACT GAME that someone else has already published just with Yougame’s links. The thing that makes many developers and sponsors angry is that Yougame.com originally said they mainly needed the source code so they could implement their Facebook API, but then later decided that they would submit everywhere because it looked like a good way to promote the site. Unfortunately most developers don’t read the long contract that gives them the ability to basically do whatever they want with the source code. This, in the eyes of many people in the flash games industry, is an unethical business move — advertising one thing and then doing another. The reaction has been severe from some sites(my own site, funny-games, and some others), enough that the owners have decided to never publisher any Yougame branded games. Much of the industry is still unaware of what Yougame does but thanks to a few discussions at Mochiad forums, more and more of us are catching on. Yougame.com is not the only one that does this. Another site that does this is freeonlinegames.com, which has also earned the scorn of many webmasters(also to their credit freeonlinegames.com does produce many of its own games).

There have been more than a few cases where the developer of a game that already had a primary sponsor or an exclusive sponsor sold the source to Yougame.com thinking that it would only be used on Facebook, but later found out that Yougame had tried to spread their version of the game to as many sites as possible. I have had this problem with my exclusively sponsored game Elite Forces Defense, which Yougame bastardized and made into Elite Corps Defense . Notice that the two games are the exact same thing, except the Yougame version ripped out my logo and replaced it with his. Another example is Global Defense which Yougames took at made into Global Defense 2, which is the same thing except with Yougame’s logo and a ‘2′ attached to the end of the title. Since many of these games where exclusively sponsored, you can see why some developers and sponsors would be angry at Yougame for tricking developers into selling the source code under the pretense that they needed it for their Facebook application.

If you are a developer, know that you absolutely cannot sell your source code to Yougame.com or any other site if you already have a primary sponsor or exclusive sponsor for the game. Most of the time the agreement is that you can only sell site-locked licenses to other sites. However, if someone has the source code, they can just remove the lock.

If you are a sponsor, I highly encourage you to make a condition when sponsoring that the source code of the game cannot be sold either exclusively or non-exclusively to any other site. I usually do this now after the fiasco with Elite Forces defense and mention Yougame specifically as someone that they cannot sell to.

A final note to all webmasters, if Yougame submits a game that you find interesting, just search for the game on Newgrounds or Google and you will find the original game. I encourage you to add that version to your library to give due credit to the rightful sponsors and developers.