Reviews by MathBrush

This author has been making solid parser games for decades now. This game is an adaptation of a Kafka work, one I had not read before, and is one of the more successful prose adaptations I've seen. Adaptations are very hard to get right in a parser game, since you have to match your text to the original author's and allowing things 'out of sequence' requires inventing new storylines or tightly curtailing the player's freedom. This game takes the latter approach but it makes sense in-world, as you are a stranger and not permitted to enter wherever you like or do whatever you want. And the text matches altogether very well, I think.

I like much of Kafka's work, although on a recent vacation I stayed in an airbnb paid for by my school that had a huge library. I found a book by Kafka which was exciting, but all I read was a very long and kind of dull story written from the perspective of a dog. I got the impression that Kafka really, really enjoys thinking from a dog's perspective.

Anyway, this game has you play the role of a stranger entering a village, trying to find a place to stay. There follows a series of innocuous happenings that seem normal but which leave you feeling embarrassed or unwelcome. Parts of it are really evocative, like the couple you never see that sit in the dark at a table in dim light, barely talking, lit glinting off something on the man's chest.

The game is short and simple, but effective. This was a nice treat to play as I near the end of the games of the 2025 comp.

This is a meaningful game written about a Jewish person escaping persecution from the Eastern Europe/Russian part of the world (in the early 1900s, I think, maybe late 1800s).

Most of the game is very bare-bones. I'm not sure what system it is; it might just be custom javascript. You select a number and then push SUBMIT to move on.

Gameplay is almost entirely buying items at a low price, going to a nearby city, and selling them at a high price. Each city only has a few its next to, so you can either map it out as a graph, or (what I did) just memorize the cities with the worst prices and don't pick them. Near the end I got comfortable enough to travel 3 or 4 cities at a time to get a good price.

Behind its dour aesthetic, the game hides emotional moments written in terse text. Accidentally going beyond the 'pale' was terrifying, and my companion Ephraim didn't make it in the end.

The starkness of the game contributes to its overall feeling, emphasizing the numbness you could feel in that scenario. On the other hand, it feels at times like it fights against the player. Having just a map connecting the stations might be nice, or more indication of the story to come. I guess it all depends on what effects the author is most interested in having on the audience.

This is a surreal game set in the desert where you examine eight different objects and make various choices concerning them, which are then sealed in. At times the game mentions connections between two items; for me they were the last two I had chosen each time, but I don't know if that changes on different playthroughs.

It has lovely looking sand art that looked really hard to make but visually appealing.

When I say surreal I mean very surreal, like between The Wasteland and Finnegan's Wake surreal. Here's an excerpt:

What horizons can we reach with twining? The process is strict but has an end. She comes up with a new weave for her tale. It goes like this: sand. The weaving proceeds from absence to absence. This happens every Thursday. A kiosk is so very far from her. Oh, didn’t you know, she says? It is a strange affair.

It's writing that willfully impedes understanding for effect, with just enough connections between sentences to trick your brain into thinking it knows what's going on but an overall effect of something unfamiliar. It's like the text equivalent of a Dali painting.

This beautiful and hard-wrought story that defies categories and quantification is, unfortunately, entered in to the 'categorization and hard quantification of games by group vote' competition, and so is subjected to numerical evaluation. But I think that the ranking of this particular game won't really matter; what matters more imo is what people feel or experience while playing it.

This is a ZX spectrum game that I played on an online emulator. It worked great; the only issue I had was that I have the habit of typing L for LOOK whenever I want to see if a room changed, but typing L in this game randomly scrambles your game by putting you in a random room with random objects.

Because of that, I used a walkthrough for everything after the first area.

You play as someone trying to help find some lost children. To your dismay, you soon find evidence that they were kidnapped, and you have to go on a dangerous easter egg hunt to find them.

The game has a helpful vocabulary list to help you get around, and has some classic tricky puzzles (like an object floating in a nearly-empty barrel that you just can't quite reach). Some of the puzzles rely on things like examining objects twice and waiting for events to happen, and quite a few have adventure-game logic where you know you have to do something but couldn't really predict the result (like the use of the ice cream, for instance).

Overall a solid, shorter adventure thoroughly grounded in Spectrum and Spectrum-era gaming nostalgia. For fans of the era, it will be a real treat. For people used to recent parser games, it may be less guided or player-friendly then what they're accustomed to.

I enjoyed this game. Its intentionally minimalistic, with simple styling, short sentences, and brief paragraphs. I thought for a bit there that might be some consistent poetic meter or a syllable thing like haiku, but I don’t think there was.

You explore an afterlife with melancholic and strange characters. They have desires ranging from finding release from the pain of the loss of their loved ones to a desire for orange fanta (relatable).

The game progresses in different stages, each unlocked by crossing some barrier, like a guard who must be bribed or a river that must be crossed. While barriers are the bread and butter of location-based interactive fiction, I felt like they were good symbolism for stages of the afterlife (like ‘crossing over’); not that I identified any clearly distinct and symbolic stages, just that crossing over repeatedly felt symbolic.

There are multiple endings, some shorter than others. I got one named ‘true ending’ but was able to get into the lighthouse after that, but I couldn’t find any ending after that ending.

Gameplay revolves around picking up items (with a limited inventory) and then using them in different spots. One location has numeric codes.

This game has good styling and coding. I think the author will do well in the future. I believe this game was written with a specific objective, and that the author did well on that objective.

That said, I think the objective is a misstep.

This game is about break-ups, and it coaches you through overcoming it. It may be helpful to someone currently going through a breakup, but I found it very poor at talking with me about a breakup that I had long ago and had worked through.

There is a real tonal mismatch. When I got my third achievement pop-up for, I think, being sad, I just paused and stared at the screen for a while. It feels so odd to me to have positive, upbeat, awarding achievements while coaching someone through a breakup. I just can't see, say, my mom, putting gold stars on my shirt as I cry to her about a breakup.

The game assumes that you are right now in the depths of despair. Sometimes it gave way too many options to express myself (and allowed me to go back and add more before giving generic advice that revealed it didn't really care about what I chose), and sometimes it gave ones that don't at all reflect my thought process (like 'That's beautiful' and 'that's sad' as the only two reactions).

I think Chatgpt memes have ruined me. While I don't particularly suspect AI use here (it's possible but unimportant to me if it was used), there are a lot of memes about how AI has inordinately upbeat, generic and positive reactions to inappropriate things, like it's own mistakes. "You deleted the codebase!" "Oopsy! Hee hee. You're right. But we won't give up, because you, you are special, and we will get through this together!" While the branches of this game were selected by a human, they felt to me also to have some inappropriateness in tone at times, like asking for specific details and then completely ignoring them while giving us an achievement for being a true warrior.

I do not feel like this game is awful or should be mocked. There is a great difference between someone doing a poor job at creating a game and someone doing a great job at making a game I simply didn't like. This game has evidence of good craftmanship, but my personal, subjective reaction is that it didn't work well as a mirror of my own feelings or as a coach through hard times.

This is a Twine game designed to be played in a relatively short time (I think someone mentioned that it will end after a certain number of moves).

You play as a group of crows, one of whose members, Noodle, has been injured recently. You can undertake various activities like taking revenge against humans, visiting a friendly human, and investigating a dog.

The crows are simple-minded and can be rude but seem like softies at heart. The language the game uses is simple and charming.

It was often difficult to know what actions I could do and where I could go next, or what plans to make. I suppose, like other reviewers have said, maybe that is indicative of life for a murder of crows, swarming around and trying different things over and over.

Olaf Nowacki is a popular figure in both English and German IF, with games like Schief/Wry and Fischstäbchen/Eat the Eldritch having made a splash in past years.

This game is fairly small and compact but has a strong voice and characterization. I'd describe it as anti-capitalist and just anti-work in general.

You play as a worker being fired from their crummy job and bent on revenge. But the evidence you meticulously collected has been stolen by your boss!

You have to recover it, in the process overcoming a ludicrously anti-worker building and boss's lair (parts of which definitely reminded me of past jobs! I had a desk in a closet once) to defeat him.

There are multiple endings (with worse endings usually giving hints for better endings) and lots of funny commentary.

There are a couple of rough edges carried over from German; Forklift in German is Gabelstapler, which I thought was just a stapler when I first played, so I picked it up and tried to staple things with it (which makes for a very amusing picture in my mind, now). This version still lets you pick up the forklift, but I don't think I found any other errors.

I played and reviewed the Spanish version of this game before. When I play a game in another language, it has an air of mystique around it to me. Everything seems cooler when it's in another language. But it's harder.

Playing this game in English was an interesting change. It uses a lot of technobabble which was mostly incomprehensible when I played the Spanish version. Here I can understand it more, and turn a more critical eye on it. But the technobabble still holds up pretty well; the ideas used are at least plausible.

This game is about mind uploads. You don't know that at first; the game simulates a file system like DOS or command line Linux. Navigating the file structure, you discover that a war is wiping out humanity. You are going to die. A brain upload might be what saves you.

The majority of the game is piecing together what is going on through navigating the file system and finding older documents.

Along the way, the game uses interesting mechanics, including a simulated Inform parser (written entirely in Twine) and a cheeky towers of Hanoi (cheeky because it's a famously bad puzzle to put into an IF game, so much that several games mock the concept, like Wizard Sniffer that has a dumpster with towers of hanoi in it at the start. I don't mind it too much here).

This game is visually rich and has subtle details that can really throw you for a loop and more explicit text that will help you connect the dots (I'm thinking here of (Spoiler - click to show)checking the date before and after the upload. It gave me a realization that was later explicitly confirmed.

I liked it in Spanish, and I like it in English.

You Cannot Speak

Hmm, this game is almost entirely incomplete. While several games in this competition are unfinished at various levels or promise sequels, this game stops before any of the actual plot happens; it's not a game with a sequel hook, it's a prologue with the game missing.

You play as someone with sleep paralysis who wakes up in a hospital that seems to be on a space station. There are some weird objects in the room, and then an old man is standing outside your door. Then the game ends, and promises the Chapter 1 is coming soon.

So there's really not anything to judge. The only thing in this game to talk about (for me) that isn't a setup for some future, unknown payoff is that you have some options in what order to explore your room.

Yes, I'd like to see it finished. Edit: I've given this game 1 star. I'd be more than happy to revisit it and the rating once there's more content here.