Reviews by MathBrush

This game took me quite a while to finish (a couple weeks!).

It's pretty different than earlier games in the series. The first two games focused heavily on anime tropes, while the third one had a great murder mystery plus some 'training villagers' montages.

This one takes an entirely different tack. Judging from online reviews and ratings, it is very popular. To me, it appeared well-made, but didn't appeal to my personal sensibilities. It is a story of unhappiness and mutual mistreatment and of broken, toxic love, which while I have enjoyed stories that include elements of this, the persistent nature of it throughout the game wasn't my favorite.

Basically, in the other games you have an ex who is a psychopath that threatens to kill anyone who likes you, maims people, and almost kills you by carving words into your stomach, which hurts you for a long time. In this game, you end up together with them the entire time.

This includes physically being put on a leash (well actually it's a spiritual leash but she pulls you along). Also, you lost all your powers and your spirit animal, and you have no friends. Your leashholder physically gropes you and makes advances on you, which your character always has at least something of a positive reaction to (you have some choice but not all). You ex belittles you, forces you to do things you don't want, uses you, is emotionally unavailable, etc.

And that's 90% of the game. There's also a fetish dungeon, an election and a big supernatural climax to the story, but most is being dogwalked by a controlling ex who uses physical intimacy as a weapon.

I see people all the time on reddit asking for stories with controlling or toxic exes or really messy/bad romances, and this definitely fits the ticket.

The game decides a lot of your own choices and reactions. Like most of the series, most choices have a 'right' or 'wrong' answer (usually choosing what is most in line with your pre-existing character traits) rather than having significant branching. This makes for much longer gameplay; the game has 25 substantial chapters.

Overall, a lot of craftmanship was on display, but relationships are messy messy. It's more like Wuthering Heights or Chainsawman style of messy relationship than Jane Eyre or the Odyssey style messy relationships.

(I wrote a review for this before but now can't find it anywhere)

This game takes place in the afterlife. You are a train enthusiast at a stop, and you can take the train anywhere (using text entry).

You are intended to type in the names of some big French cities at first, after which you can narrow it down. I started with Paris (of course) and used a Wikipedia page of the largest French cities, going down them.

As it goes on, you get more unusual choices that you can't get from a list of French cities. The final one is quite difficult, requiring some general googling beyond city names.

I liked the writing in this a lot. Some parts of it were very meaningful, and all the characters were interesting and rounded-out.

This game is fast-paced, with different difficulty levels. You are running after a train and you have to choose between three cards (whose order can change): Left, Right, and one that varies.

You have to click out a pattern of Left, Right, Left, Right smoothly or risk losing time. The shifting cards can make it hard to get things right. Each move you make, a crumb of the story progresses, which I liked.

At one point, the cards flipped over completely to the other side, showing only the backs. I couldn't tell if I was intended to memorize a pattern, to randomly guess, to replay and learn the exact pattern, but I was able to beat the game with just random guesses.

It reminded me of the game QWOP a bit, controlling individual body parts to run.

This is a French game set on a train where you wake up with your memories somewhat befuddled. Then your phone rings.

In general, the game loops and you have multiple tries to fix things. The game also includes some combinatorics, which was nice for me as I was teaching this just a few weeks ago.

Overall it was very short; I only did 2 loops and solved two puzzles in the second loop (it may be worth taking notes). I had a good time.

This choice-based game puts you on a train where you are forced to participate in a series of challenges to earn points. These are randomly chosen from two groups: conversation (with dice rolls) and combat (with dice rolls). I could have sworn there were actually 3 kinds of challenge but replaying just now I only saw those two.

These are pretty much the same each time, so I pretty quickly found some strategies that worked and spammed them. I was nervous about the time limit. The first time I played I won after button mashing, and it felt pretty good. I had some trouble with sound resources loading, but it didn't really detract from gameplay.

Interesting concept but the sameness was a mild letdown.

I'm not sure I quite understood the rules of this game, but it was fun.

Your twin brother, who is working on a play, is sick, so you have to fill in without anyone realizing it's you.

To do that, you have to use your brother's notes. Unfortunately, they have gaps! You have to fill in those gaps with words from a 'deck'. You get 5 discards. Words can be adjectives, nouns, or verbs, with I think maybe one other category.

I saw people saying it was hard. When I tried it, it felt easy. Sometimes a word got a black line across it for a second, and sometimes not, but it was hard to figure out which of those had a 'bad' effect and which ones didn't.

It all came crumbling down in the third scene when the game said I had one more chance to make things up. Then I failed that and died.

It was fun, overall. Often I only had a single noun, so I had to add it whether it fit or not. So I think it might be down to random chance.

This is a French visual novel. I found the writing very amusing, with great art to boot.

You play as an insurance adjuster during medieval battles (in a fantasy version with mud-creatures and dragons). You are getting the everloving crap beaten out of you but your boss is mad that you're interfering'. You also have the mentor the intern who looks 5 years old.

The art is this nice charcoal-y sketch with very exaggerated and amusing style. The writing is zany and over-the-top.

It does have some tricky puzzles where you have to decide whether to file a claim or not. I'll be honest I opened up the code and looked, otherwise I wouldn't have known what to do.

Overall pretty short and fun.

This is a short, well-made Twine game in French with a few brief choices and at least 2 endings.

You play as someone who missed a train, so is driving on a trip and taking a passenger with them to split gas.

The game sets it up as a long journey, so I was surprised to see it was only a 1-hour trip! It reminded me of the saying, 'In America, 100 years is a long time. In Europe, 100 miles is a long distance'. And that's true; my commute every day is close to an hour both ways, and the same is true for many of my students, and that's just within my city (Dallas). Going to the next city to visit family can take 2 hours. To me a longer trip would be like our school's trips to nearby states that take 8 hours or so of driving.

Anyway, digression aside, there is tension in the game. Our passenger is strange, and his behavior uncertain. It reminds me of college, where two women who were friends of mine got a ride from my tall roommate who was mildly socially awkward. It was late at night and they were driving in a quiet area, and the roommate pulled out leather gloves from the glovebox and put them on. He had no idea that the girls were terrified that he was about to kill him; he just thought the gloves looked nice and were comfortable.

In any case, I enjoyed this story.

It's always hard to rate games in foreign languages, because how much of your complaints are due to game design and how much due to your own ineptness in the language in question?

I felt dumb playing this game. In it, you are a person on a mission, wearing a red scarf, having just come out of a train station. You have a mission you need to complete!

One thing that would have helped a lot would be reading the game's extensive instructions on Itch, which include the command 'think about' (here 'penser a _____'). This is required for many puzzles in the game. I don't think the command is listed in-game; trying AIDE or INFO didn't work.

The game itself is actually pretty polished. The train station is relatively small. Time progresses every turn, and trains come in and out, with different endings happening based on different timings.

I was just replaying the game to see if I got things wrong, and I wonder if I just deeply misunderstood things or if there is a typo. In the walkthrough, it tells you to (Spoiler - click to show)Look at the Bench in the first room. But there's no bench in the room description. Other rooms do have a bench in the room description. Is there some kind of hint that tells you 'there should be a bench here too?'

Overall, I thought the puzzles and execution, once understood through the walkthrough, were cool, but I had great difficulty. If a francophone player wants to comment and explain what I missed I'd be happy to adjust my rating!

I was pleased when going through the competition to see a familiar name I knew and which I associated with quality games, and this game was in fact well put-together.

It's brief and designed for beginners, and as such uses sparse text (which would be great for ESL players or youths). The story is interesting: you are from space and coming down to earth to investigate lifeforms. You explore a diner that seems futuristic from our perspective (but still near-future; it has automated systems for refrigeration and cooking, which probably already exists).

The tutorial was very helpful, giving details not only on the game itself but the genre as a whole. Puzzles were simple but non-trivial, and I enjoyed the environmental storytelling.