Reviews by MathBrush

This is among the larger french parser games I've played.

In it, you play as a doctor in a medieval type town that has left after a dispute with locals. But the mayor comes to beseech you to rescue people who have been consumed by a kind of dancing disease.

You go to investigate, and find a huge world filled with a ton of people, all of whom want help. Your main quest can be found far away in a big city, where four people can give you their idea of how to help the dancers.

In the meantime, you can find the 'true' way to help the dancers, or solve numerous side quests.

The parser has a lot of difficulties; synonyms are missing, 'S' doesn't work as a shortcut for going south, many things have no description, most items are listed both in the room description and as 'you can also see ____', there's no response for 'parler avec...'. Outside of that, the room connections are asymmetrical and it's easy to get lost.

Fighting both the parser and the French, I finally achieved the method of curing the dancers, only to realize I couldn't find them anymore. I ended up finding them all gathered in one spot where I was unable to free any of them, making me suspect the game has a timer of some sort, at which point I definitely stopped playing, as while I enjoyed my playthrough I do not have the desire to repeat all my actions.

This is a collection of poems in French, mostly written with lines of similar length and not much rhyming (which is pretty normal for most French poetry I've read/memorized). Most of it seems self-reflective and analyzing.

I think the line I like best is "...car j'aime peu de choses, pour des raisons que je ne partage avec personne." It means something like '...since I don't like many things, for reasons that I share with no one'. I like the sentiment and the way it sounds in French.

I don't know if I saw the whole amount of content but it looped a couple of times. There were poems with cursive text and blue background about cats, black and white poems about technology (I think), a list of ages and things that happened at each age.

The variety of presentations and uncertainty of the link structure made me feel engaged by the content, more so than if it were a standard collection of printed poetry.

This was a fun, brief parser game I played as part of the 2026 French comp.

In it, you are an undercover agent with a robber gang who has hijacked a train. You pull out your gun, and so do the other three. You can talk, you can shoot, but you have to get out of there alive.

The writing was vibrant and fun, and the characters pretty distinct. (It was fun seeing a distinctly american setting and names like Joe and Jack in a French game).

The game ends after 4 or so turns, and gives you hints on how to fix things. I was able to defeat 2/3 robbers without hints (dying as I shot them), but I couldn't find the right word for what I wanted to do to get the final point, so I looked up the hints, which were pretty comprehensive.

Great for a short, fun, replayable game.

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.