Reviews by MathBrush

This is a 10K word prologue to a longer planned game, entered into the French IF competition.

It has a compelling story: your uncle whom you've rarely spoken to writes to you, asking you to come quickly. Much of this prologue is occupied with travelling there while simultaneously making choices that define your background (I made myself a poor unemployed person who brought nothing along with the journey).

You soon discover that (through a series of events I won't spoil) you owe a massive debt. You encounter a few interesting people (I thought the neighbor and the ruler of the town were well-written), and then the prologue stops dead in its tracks.

This has a lot of good in it now and could become great one day.

This game is the author's first experience with programming ever, which is pretty impressive given how nice it is.

It's a twine game where your character finds a box of documents on his doorstop dropped off by his mother.

Inside is a blank family tree and envelopes with different names on them. You open yours first, finding a lot of documents about your birth and upbringing.

The family tree can be filled out via a kind of quiz where you select from dropdown boxes, and if you get the information correct you unlock new envelopes.

The author didn't complete their full vision, but there is a lot here. I like epistolary storytelling (is that you you say it? Epistolic? something else) and there is a lot of variety in tone and structure here.

I didn't receive a dramatic ending; I just unlocked the whole tree and didn't see any new links. It felt satisfying though.

This is a choice-based French game that has, I think, 20 or so songs that play in the background (which I didn't realize until afterwards, as I play on a device with quiet speakers).

You are tasked with carrying a cadaver through a dark and twisted land where people live in fear and much destruction has occurred.

Gameplay consists of binary choices, like whether to go north or south or whether to follow fireflies or not.

The writing was great; even as a non-native speaker, I could imagine a lot of the cool scenarios and things that were written about. I had more trouble with the choices, as it was difficult to make any sort of overall strategy, and often (but not always) felt like one had to just guess. There is an undo button which is nice, and other players report there being at least 3 very distinct paths.

This is a short French game in Ink. There are always two choices: "nous" [us] and "je" [we].

It tells the story of a burgeoning civilization, learning to find food and learn language. Choosing 'nous' gives communal results, while 'je' gives individual results.

It's a fairly short game, with two endings which the author says are meant to lead us to reflection. I thought it was pretty interesting, but I felt like the plot was a little generic, and it would have been nice to have some effect of mixing the two options or some other effect of the choices.

It was pretty fun though!

This was a fun game with a short playtime but some replay value.

You are in a village in a post-apocalyptic, bucolic life. Unfortunately, looking out the window, you discover that a zombie, a monster of legend, is coming to attack you!

You have to run (or, if you die, your neighbor runs) to the nearby houses to try to recruit more villagers to help you survive against the zombies.

It's a kind of optimization puzzle, where some people only respond if you already have a large group, or if you've talked to the right person, etc.

I played 3 times, and managed to save everyone the third time. Parts of the story felt a bit thin on replay, but the puzzle and seeing the network of relationships was fun.

I intended on playing all of the FrenchComp 25 (or, more properly, the Concours de Fiction Interactive Francophone) games in a week or two, and then I found this game.

Altogether, it took me over a week to finish. This is quite a big game, with the unusual feature that almost every part of it is illustrated with beautiful ASCII art, including the inventory screen (showing our heroine and the things she carries), a map, and all of the NPCs and several important items.

The source code is huge (partly due to the art), currently the second-largest file I've personally ever opened in terms of words and the longest in terms of lines (in Inform 7).

But is it well-made and fun?

I think so. The idea is that you are a spy sent to pose as a laundrywoman in the mansion of a count rumored to be a Russian general in disguise. You have to infiltrate the mansion, gain everyone's trust, and do everything you can to promote the communist cause, with missions of increasing importance.

Gameplay is almost entirely choice-based, with numbered and lettered menu options. Occasionally it was fiddly; if you want to look at something you're holding, you must open the inventory before looking at it. Similarly, if you want to use an item you're holding, you have to open the inventory. Making the wrong choice can take a few turns to get back on track as you have to opt out of the menu you're in.

But once you get practice with the system, it works well.

I didn't encounter any major bugs. After 5 days of making progress on my own (real life days; in the game I was on night 3) I asked for hints from the author, who obliged. Following the hints got me stuck twice due to not doing the things that I should have done first ((Spoiler - click to show)I didn't find the elevator before getting the photographic kit, and I didn't open the crates before sabotaging them). However, I found cheat codes in the source text which let me skip exactly those parts.

There is a great deal of text in the game, most of it very interesting. The characters are nuanced and there is a lot of tension, especially with our spy handler who is also likely our lover.

Some puzzles were a bit hard to figure out, but it's hard to know whether that's due to me not knowing French or because the game is hard. Playing in a foreign language casts a rosy glow over a game for me, so a native speaker may find it less fun or more fun than I did, I suppose. I don't know!

The text presented in-game is thoroughly pro-communist, extolling the virtues of the worker and decrying the capitalist system. Growing up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I've read many texts by church leaders in the 1910's to 1980's that warned of communism as one of the greatest threats in the world, a godless conspiracy that killed millions and had the goal to destroy religion, abolish the nuclear family (since kids are raised communally in traditional communism) and so on. So it's interesting to hear full-throated explanations on both sides for why essentially the same actions are either a great evil or the greatest good.

Overall, puzzle highlights include using a wartime code-sender and operating (Spoiler - click to show)a tank and various old-fashioned tools.

A fun game. A long game; it takes place over 5 days and each day is basically a complete game. I thought that the first day would be about it (getting into the basement) and was shocked there was more; in fact, there was a lot more, I hadn't even seen half the map and seeing the whole map isn't even half the game! I'd say it's similar in size to Counterfeit Monkey and Anchorhead (maybe a bit smaller than Anchorhead, it's hard to tell. More dialogue, certainly).

This game is structured like a linear visual story, with black and white hand-drawn images. It won the Short Game Showcase.

Here are the criteria I use to judge things with:

-Polish: The game is both polished and Polish (the author is from Poland), so it doubly fits here. More seriously, the game uses a variety of textual techniques to vary the appearance and the writing had no typos that I saw.
-Descriptiveness: The writing was vivid and I was able to picture what was going on.
-Interactivity/Use of medium: While there was little interactivity, I also use this category for the artwork and structure of visual novels. The art definitely contributed to the overall feeling here, expressing disinterested observation, alienation, fear, isolation, and determination.
-Emotional impact: I actually originally played this game for the first few pages a while ago and stopped because I didn't like what it was about. Finishing it later, it was not what I had originally expected. Both times I felt a strong emotional reaction.
-Would I play again?: Yes, I think I would, there's a lot here that is of interest.

Naarel is a prolific author who has a great back-catalogue. Because of that, I think I've been spoiled a bit with their back-catalogue. This particular game, while it has a compelling narrative, lacks some of the awesome interactions or beautiful styling/images I've seen in their other games.

What's this one about? A train is passing by (in fact, it will always pass you by!) which causes you to reflect on your place in life, your hopes, your dreams, your constraints.

Choices are one per page, with a little bit of fancy choice-usage near the end. The story is neatly divided into chunks of relatively similar size to each other.

The style of writing is evocative and emotional. It uses different sense, mentions concrete details, and has a nice plot arc in a short space.

Exceptional stories are extra bits of bonus content in Fallen London that tell their own stories.

This is one of the earliest ever put in the game. It introduces some great lore that gets used a lot later on (and which I'm glad I finally got the origin story of) and has an awesome benefit (you can buy mirrorcatch boxes any time you want), but it's a lot shorter and mechanically a bit less interesting than later stories.

The idea is that people are selling sunlight in illegal mirrored boxes, and you can end up interacting with the people doing the selling. Sunlight can be illegal; living in Fallen London can make sunlight deadly to you, so this is very dangerous contraband.

The issue is that it's also making people see things. Because, as the title says, it's been cut with Moonlight. And moonlight makes you see things in a very different way.

The best part is exploring the 'alternate london' that occurs when you've consumed the moonlight. Very fun.

Fallen London has a large number (one a month for years) of 'Exceptional Stories' that you can pay extra for to get more of a self-contained narrative than the usual plotline.

Over the years, this has consistently been one of the more popular ones. In Fallen London, there are 4 'menaces' that, if they grow to big, take you to a penalty area you have to hang out in for a while. They are jail, an asylum, social exile, and, lastly, death, represented by a dark river where a boatman is rowing to the other side, and you have to persuade him to turn back.

This story is about the boatman. Three revolutionaries have blown themselves up. Since death is temporary in this game, you could just wait for them to come back, but the damage is severe. So you are tasked by the police with going to the river of the dead and investigating them there.

While there, Death lets you take a turn at the oars, letting you become the ferryman of the dead. It becomes your task to find the three criminals, row them across, listen to their story, and decide whether they should return to life or not.

There's a lot of lore here, with connections to Parabola, the Masters, the Calendar Council, parts of the Nemesis ambition, and others. A great story for those looking to get into Exceptional Stories in general.