Reviews by MathBrush

This game is really ambitious for a Petite Mort game: many superhero characters, an expansive map, and actual game mechanics rather than individual parser rules. This is pretty hard to do!

And it manages to mostly pull it off. There are a few rough edges here and there (mostly with necessarily repeated text due to the short time frame and difficulty finding a path forward sometimes that several reviewers noted), so I would look forward to a post-comp release, because this already-good game deserves even more imo).

The game itself is about carrying concepts around as physical objects and gaining them and losing them in various situations. You have to carefully manipulate the order you get the concepts and learn the map to get it all to work. This reminded me of Delightful Wallpaper, a two part game where the second part involves taking concepts from people and placing them in others.

The writing is enthusiastic and creative, and the mechanic was enjoyable.

This was a choice-based mostly linear game that was longer than most of the Petite Mort games. It builds up background and has one choice at the end. I didn’t encounter any bugs and the style/polish looked good.

The story is about a girl in your college class with eyes like black pools. She unsettles you, and seems to be aware of that fact. Soon, you end up meeting with her, and learning more about her.

To avoid spoiling the game’s twists, I’ll put the rest of my impressions in spoilers:

Overall, pretty thought-provoking. I even sketched a doodle of the main NPC. The prose was the highlight.

This is the last of the Slovakian student games, I believe, and a good one to end on, with a larger structure than many of the others.

You are a player in a cruel game run by a wizard, and you have to pass through three mini-games. You have a couple of options each time, some of which lead to death, but you can always retry each world.

There are some typos and I feel like the narrative plot arc could be structured better (with more rising action and a little bit longer denouement) but otherwise this seems pretty good.

This is a tiny game, written by a Slovakian student. It describes itself well, as it's one room in a Twine game where all exits lead either to the same room or an identical place. The only choice is when to stop.

It's a funny idea, but the title kind of gives away the big twist, and the game itself is small, so I would have hoped for something a bit more. That doesn't mean it's bad, though; it feels similar to games like Uninteractive Fiction 1 and 2, made by a skilled author who wanted to convey a specific message/feeling etc. through a tiny or unfulfilling work. Experimentation like this is a great sign (to me) in a young author.

This is the shortest of Andrew Schultz’s trilogy of Petite Mort games based on pairs of two-word pairs that sound alike.

This one has characters that follow you around and bonus points, which are nice, and the art remains frun and fresh, but there are less puzzles overall (which isn’t always bad, since I like these smaller games, but I think the 12-13 point games hit the sweet spot more), and I found a couple of minor typos.

I still, after playing all three games, think the pixel art really contributes a lot. They help ground the abstract gameplay really well, and show the effect the player has on changing the environment. For me, they provide nostalgia for 80’s and 90’s edutainment games, some of which had similar pixel art.

This is a short atmospheric game with great styling choices. You are in a house and you have some difficulty remembering how you got to where you are. You can turn around or keep going but everything you do has some problem.

The ending was, for me, unexpected, and I actually got two different endings when I replayed, which was also unexpected. I liked the creepy feeling that the beginning of the game had the most.

I don't know of any other games by this author but I would play them if they released more.

This is a brief parser game that appears mundane before throwing a twist at the player.

You are in an apartment and can hear trick or treaters outside. But you're not dressed! A pile of clothes lie on the floor, which you must assemble in the correct order.

The game felt well-implemented and the twist was quickly resolved. This was a delight to play, especially in a large competition with tons of long games: just a short burst of concentrated playtime with a big punch.

This was an interesting short game that could be open to several interpretations. It's a short Chapbook game.

In it, you play as a young person in the heat of summer who is kind of bumming around. You live with a few friends but you spend a lot of time on your own. In particular, out in the woods, you come across an empty well. You have a habit of tossing things in, but for some reason, you never seem to hear it hit the bottom...

The game felt introspective and meaningful. I don't want to say too much more, not because of any big twists, but because I think it would just make the experience stronger overall to play through without prior interpretation given by others.

This is another ectocomp speed-IF game by a Slovakian student. This one feels like a take on the Saw franchise, waking up in a room with puzzles and traps.

This is a highly branching game, with almost every choice giving you a completely new branch instead of continuing along the same pathway. Many of these paths are deaths. Some of them were quite amusing, some were surprising.

It's nice to see younger people learning IF tools and experimenting!

I said in my review of Dusk, Airy, Does Carry, I said that I would welcome more games in the same vein. Glad I asked! This game has similar puzzles and structure, and similar pixel art, including animals.

It's an Adventuron game with a central hub from which several other rooms branch, each room with 1-2 puzzles involving pairs word pairs that sound similar when spoken aloud.

This one shook things up a bit by focusing more on room connections that don't appear until later. But like I said with Chez Dark, I just like the fundamental design so was glad to play more.