Reviews by MathBrush

This is the third and last Sophia Zhao game I'm playing this competition. The other two were fantastic, and this is now an author I'll keep an eye out for in the future.

This is the shortest game, and while it has a great gut-punch ending, it's the weakest of the group to me (but it has some very strong competition, so that's not saying much).

You play as someone grabbing some groceries in a store. Money's tight; I thought this was a reference to recent tariffs in the US at first, what with poor quality onions for $2.

Things descend a bit from there, and there's a lot of strong profanity (which matches the strong, bitter taste of the onion, I suppose). It's when we got to dairy that I started getting what was going on (despite strong hints earlier).

The ending was a really creative take on the event it described, I'd never seen anyone describe something like it before, so I thought that part was really neat.

The reason I think the other games are stronger is that this game was fairly one-note, while the other two Sophia Zhao games were a great study in using contrasting tones and evoking a variety of emotions.

(Warning: This review might contain spoilers. Click to show the full review.)

This is a brief stat-based Twine game where you explore an island that has a civilization on it.

You are a renowned explorer joining an exploration team to check out an island. You can choose things like your weapon, whether to conserve or spend resources, how to deal with strangers, etc.

It has some interesting elements, but many of the mechanics don't make sense and the story relies heavily on pre-existing tropes.

For instance, mechanically, we have the choice to build up our food supplies or rush on ahead. But the game is over in around 20 choices or less, and there's no time to use supplies or not. Many choices are just straight up 'right' (stat boost) or 'wrong' (stat decrease) with no indication of which one is right.

Story-wise, the island has us hunting for food, crossing a decaying bridge, encountering a tribe, etc. There are a couple of twists but overall it could be stronger. There are a lot of plotholes (like the (Spoiler - click to show)chieftain saying they've been aware of us for quite some time but we just barely arrived on the island).

I think that with more time the author could develop these ideas into a more compelling narrative, if that is something that they're interested in. The most impressive part was the smooth UI presentation with nice stat indicators.

The first thing that struck me is that the 2 is so bold and red. Then I noticed how jagged it is. Was it, I thought, just drawn in MS Paint?

I looked more closely. No, that doesn't look like MS Paint. Instead, it looks more like a texture brush, like the ones procreate has that are fun to play around with but not really useful (I only use four brushes ever: flat brush, gel pen, round brush, and whatever pencil one I see first).

But no, I thought, something's off. The 2 is really well-done. It wasn't just sketched in a second (or maybe it was, in a moment of serendipity). Could it be--I thought--that this was actually a special font, like a 'display' google font, that was made large, bold, and rotated slightly? But it's not a perfect 2 so the questions still remains: font, or sketch?

I zoomed in closer. The resolution on the 2 isn't as high as the resolution on the other text. It was added later, after all. It could be scaled up from something. But if the author drew on it at full resolution, wouldn't it have more details? A scaled up font makes more sense. But I tried tracing the movement of the 2 with my mouse, and it felt natural. This could be just a sketch drawn with a single gesture.

I tried a font-matching website (does it use AI? Probably a GAN but not an LLM). Nothing came up, but could be rotation.

We may never know.

Also the game just says 'you win' that's it sorry for spoilers.

I felt a strong connection to a lot of the material in this game. You are an alien visiting the Human Resources Administration to sign up for SNAP benefits. In the process, you learn a lot about how human bureaucracy impedes and hurts others.

When I was first married at 26, we got a little government income from a disability program my ex had been on before marriage. There were tons of restrictions; for instance, we weren't allowed to have savings over around $500 or $1000 (so we had financial pressure to not establish any emergency savings and be more irresponsible). After almost a year, the government told us that we hadn't properly reported my income and we had to pay back thousands of dollars. I told them that our bank account didn't even have half of that, and they said, "Are you offering to pay off half of it now? If you do, we'll forgive the rest." So that worked out, but it was a real mess. We messed up reporting, they took forever checking.

Similarly, DMVs have always been old, decaying buildings (not enough tax money?) and hard to figure out. I ended up with a 'Female' marker on my Pennsylvania ID (which got me out of at least one speed trap as the officer found it amusing when I showed him my ID).

It's not all dour out there, though. The low-rated post office in my area had a stand-out clerk who pointed out problems I had with my passport application before a work trip to Spain and saved me about a month of work and hundred dollars.

This mostly-linear game does a great job of showing just how messed up the world is by making the alien go through the whole process. But then it goes through and says all the same things much less effectively and without any subtext by having a ranting human explicitly lay down the moral. I think the first part was so effective by contrasting the cruelty and inhumanity of the system with the placid alien, and the second part just didn't work as well for me. It's kind of like when you're drawing something and it looks good but you flip the mirror and the flaws just jump out at you; the first part was that 'flipped reality' for me.

The author's end note mentioned working in this area, and I salute Jesse for the good work!

This is a brief Twine game about someone who becomes addicted to the use of AI.

It felt pretty realistic (until its turn in later chapters, although that's not too unrealistic). I have some students who rely almost entirely on AI. A lot of the panic when things like the SAT or IB exams approach as its been so long since they did work unassisted that they've forgotten how. Thankfully most of the come to that realization early enough that they can lock in and start studying themselves.

There were occasional grammar mistakes (the only ones I noticed were sentences that had an extra 'be' in them) but they kind of fit with the slow degeneration of the main character's cognitive skills.

I liked the voice of the author and the creativity shown in the presentation.

This was a salient game for the current job environment. It presents a fake version of an AI-run personality test (no real AI is used) where you are presented with different images and scenarios and your answer determine your employability.

This is a real thing that's been going on; I've seen a lot of screenshots of job applicants that are taking tests featuring a 3d cartoon guy or girl in various scenarios with inane questions like 'do you relate to this picture' or something.

I failed the test, which is reasonable as I doubled down on being willing to sacrifice the CEO's life to save the plebeians, even though I otherwise had expressed undying loyalty to the burger empire.

Pretty funny. The choices always felt fresh but the results turned a little stale by the time I finished this burger. Still, I can't deny it was a good meal.

This is a downloadable Unity game. In it, you stand before a firing squad, about to be killed during (I believe) the Mexican Revolution due to being on the opposite side from the soldiers.

There are two components of the game. One is a text component, where you move on to the next message with a right arrow, and options appear in a menu of 3 at a time. The other is 'opening your eyes', revealing a 3d-generated world you can view from a single fixed point, looking at the firing squad, the whole world in stark white lines on black.

You are to be executed, but are given a 10 minute reprieve to consider your last words. Thoughts fly through your mind, and you can pick which ones to remember. At the end, you can choose 3 to say (although my top choice didn't work, for some reason).

The frenzied re-evaluation of an entire life was relatable, and the writing had pathos. The ending was chilling.

This game does use timed text at the start and a timer for the middle portion. Unfortunately, I mostly chose to get into IF because of the ease of pausing and doing other things. My childcare duties called me away from the computer multiple times, so I came back to see the execution had started without knowing if I could have seen more interesting text in the middle and no rewind. What I did see was worthwhile, though. This game led me to look up more about the revolution on Wikipedia.

This is a small Inform game that seems unfinished in some sense. It has a small map with one central area and four spokes. Travelling in each of the spoke directions tells you of a memory, except for one which seems to be your current life.

It seems like it might be setting up something interesting (polishing the fruit was fun, as was wondering why we're wearing a night gown, and decompiling led me to try to BREAK OPEN the fruit), but it doesn't pay off, instead ending abruptly. If it's meant to be short and poetic, it might benefit from more careful attention to detail; if it's meant to be part of something longer, I'd love to see it finished.

This game is a brief, mostly-linear story (with occasional parallel branches) about being Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories and having your mind shunted into different animals, each of which gets attacked in turn.

I love Sherlock Holmes stories, and have often considered Arthur Conan Doyle's writing as the most gripping and interesting to me (but only in Sherlock Holmes; his other stories aren't as interesting to me). Unfortunately, this has almost none of the interesting elements of Sherlock Holmes stories. Dr Watson is here a coroner, for some reason, and does the investigating himself. He discovers the criminal immediately (who for some reason has left the murder weapon in plain view while inviting a doctor to investigate the death and is shocked to get called out). The murderer also has no problem believing animals have sentience or malice and violently murders them and attacks children while a detective is in the house. Sherlock himself doesn't do any kind of fancy deducing of any kind. This is exactly the kind of story AI tends to generate; this story itself might not be AI, but if it is human-made, it doesn't rise above the level of what AI is capable of.

Each page has multiple ai-illustrated images, which, like the story, serve to show exactly what is described without anything greater. The text says parrot, so we see a parrot. The text says cat, so we see a cat. There isn't any deeper theme or connection or symbolism, and the details of the pictures have no relevance to the story text.

This game is a parser game where you end up parked at the end of a lonely road, ready to check into a room. Unfortunately, the airbnb (I think?) host you are working with has sent you poorly-translated instructions. You have to find your way in.

I found two endings, but peeking at the walkthrough shows there are some more including at least one area with a bar that I didn't visit.

I found the house area to be descriptive, with the squeaking gate and the approaching thunderstorm. Like real life, I was mildly panicked about what to do with my draining phone battery.

I liked the puzzles involved. I did have some difficulty fighting with the parser in one part. Specifically, after (Spoiler - click to show)putting the dial on the lockbox, X DIAL and TURN DIAL and TURN DIAL TO 1 didn't work but TURN DIAL TO 123 got me to the menu.

The author states that the text was grammar-corrected with chatgpt. It did feel like fluent English. While I oppose most uses of AI in games, it's mostly for aesthetic rather than ideological purposes; most AI text is boring, all AI stories I've read have incoherent plot, most AI images don't match the story and bloat file sizes, and, for one ideological purpose, if we use AI we can't grow as writers. But the text here is written by the author, just spruced up, and I like the scenario he came up with. Grammar is a fairly mechanical thing, so I don't mind its mechanical improvement here.

Even if you don't use walkthroughs, I recommend checking out the walkthrough once you're done to see the surreal and vibrant art.