Reviews by MathBrush

This is a pdf that gives the rules for a collaborative storytelling game.

The basic idea is that you need an antagonist who ultimately loses and a protagonist who ultimately wins. People can add details at any time to the game but important details like character names have to be nominated and approved.

The game also includes some base ideas you can work with, including a list of character names. I thought "Johnald Pregnant" was the most amusing antagonist game.

This whole game is thoroughly described, but there's not really a lot to it. I'd imagine that someone focused on storytelling wouldn't need all the rules, and someone really into rules would want more meat. The people I see benefitting from this the most are a mid-sized group of people on a vacation trip where there's not much to do and they want to do storytelling but have a couple of obnoxious people in the group so they lay some rules down on how to proceed.

I like this game, and I've played it more than any other Ectocomp game, but it's designed in a way that fully exploring it is very difficult.

It's a timed game, where you have to get 30 different trinkets in a constrained amount of moves. You can still end the game without all 30, 30 is just the max. While playing, you discover a large number of amulets and eyestones. Each combination of amulets and eyestones results in different powers, ranging from faster movement to power over plants to time travel.

The map is large, as well. Without the time constraint, it would be a substantially hard game; with the time constraint, it throws optimization into the mix, especially since some amulets affect the time it takes to perform actions.

So, this game seems to me to be in the vein of Ryan Veeder's Fly Fishing, a game where you chip away at it over a long period of time rather than rushing to a conclusion. I never wrote a review for Fly Fishing because I never finished it (because I have difficulty sustaining focus if I move to other hobbies between play sessions), and I almost did the same thing for this game. But I think I've seen enough of it to say that it's enjoyable and well-written. I know at least one person has gotten 28/30 trinkets in a single go, which is very impressive.

I helped test this game. This is a brief one-room parser game with a well-written atmosphere. You are in a carriage with your father who has come to a grim decision regarding your future.

The game lets you talk and look around as well as several other actions. The issue with parser games with puzzles in ectocomp is that it can be hard to correctly clue things in a way that people can naturally follow the puzzles; fortunately, while the main game isn't too hard, the author managed to fit in Story Mode, which you can activate by typing STORY and which basically types in a walkthrough for you. I found it to be useful even after completing the story itself since it helped me key in on important things.

I definitely like the setting and the nuances here, the focus on the details of the wood and cloth and expressions.

This game is a lovely metaphor for many things in life. In this game, you die every single day, and it's very inconvenient. You have to find ways of arranging your life around this fact. No one else really seems to notice, or if they do notice, it gets downplayed. Giving into it completely can ruin your income and friendships, but overdoing it can kill you faster or make you feel hopeless.

This metaphor seems a lot like the 'spoons' metaphor, where someone who has low energy (such as from chronic illness or depression) uses spoons to measure how many activities they can partake in during a day.

So you could see this game as being about chemotherapy, depression, anxiety, fibromyalgia, endometriosis, losing your faith, etc.

I played through to two bad endings first. I wondered if the game would show that there really is no good solution, or if it offered the hope of their being a solution of some kind. If you want to know which type of ending it has, I guess you'll have to play it.

I definitely think there's a lot of value in its overall messages. I have mild to moderate depression and am a single dad, so there are some things I struggled with for years that now I take shortcuts on, like using paper plates to cut down on dishes. Overall, I think this game will resonate with many people and I expect it to place highly in the Petite Mort competition.

(I also liked the self-referential part of the game about making a game. Is this the long version or the short version, or is it mostly ficitional and not self-referential at all?)

This is a puzzle-centered choice-based game about an operative at a water treatment plant who receives a haunting visit on Halloween.

Your goal is to take care of the plant and to deal with your unwanted (or wanted?) guest. At your disposal is the plant itself, which is modelled in surprising detail: multiple spaces to represent one room, multiple levels, machinery that can connect and disconnect, several short sub-games.

Story-wise, I found the overall concept of ‘the legend about an old employee’ neat and well-done. The antagonist felt a bit one-dimensional, so it could have been fun to find out more lore or learn more about them (although maybe I missed some areas).

This was a neat game overall.

This was a clever game. I was nervous at first at how much text per page there was, so I clicked random links without reading to see how long the game was. I was surprised to see it end after one choice and two linear links.

But I was wrong.

This is a gauntlet-style game, where you have to make the right choice to proceed, or the wrong choice and fail. There are three choices.

The overall concept is one from old folklore (the kind recently popularized by SCP-4000) [actually, that was 6 years ago. So not that recent]: faery creatures must be spoken to very carefully to avoid shenanigans.

In this case, you have made a deal with a supernatural being for money. And to receive it, you have to be exceptionally careful in what you say; the exact kind of care you need to take is revealed as you play.

Overall, this was lots of fun, with a cool ending transition.

Making a conversation-based parser game in 4 hours is dicey, but can be rewarding. I made Halloween Dance in 4 hours, an ectocomp conversation game. It wasn't really very good, but I adapted its system into later games.

This game is even harder than Halloween Dance was, because I was doing an topics inventory-based conversation system. This game is more like a chatbot, where it picks up on words you type.

So it makes sense that, despite its remarkable achievements, the game still has some rough boundaries. It also doesn't have an ending; that, combined with unimplemented topics, makes it hard to tell if you've hit a roadblock because you can't guess what to type or if there's nothing left at all.

The story as far as I can find it is that something has been watching you and wants you to die and has mingled love and hate for you. I wasn't able to find any further distinguishing characteristics, besides it not being a ghost. The line-by-line writing was good; characterization-wise, it was rather one-noted.

So for me, as a game, this seems average. As a tech accomplishment, it seems above average. It's like how lifting a 20 lb weight isn't too impressive, but doing a one-handed backspring with a 20 lb weight is impressive. Writing a keyword-based conversation game in 4 hours is impressive.

This is a twine game with visual novel-style controls. The game focuses more on story than branching, with one very important choice at the end.

The story is written in a way that is grounded in reality (with a lot of description of physical sensations) but also very disconnected from reality as it's difficult to sift out what is actually happening, what the narrator thinks is happening, and what the underlying meaning is. As the story goes on, details make more and more sense.

Visually, the game uses fixed-width fonts and (I'm only now realizing this) varies between left-justification and right-justification, with just a hint of center.

The story is about a woman who's pulled in different directions, between a new and exciting life and a life of respectable office work (these characterizations may not be those intended by the author). In this story, this difference physically manifests in two sides of the body fighting for control.

I thought the imagery in the game was unique, a blend of old folklore and modern technology.

Parts of it were confusing, but I think that's the intention. Noticing the text justification thing made a reread a lot easier!

This was a pleasant, compact Adventuron game. It had a feature I'm not used to seeing, where right-clicking on yellow words brought up possible actions. I don't think it was all possible actions, because in both cases I tried it it only brought up 'Examine', but I thought it was cool!

The idea is that you've accidentally released the ghosts of your ancestors and you have to capture them back into the box you got them from.

There are two main ghosts to catch, each with a couple of puzzles. These puzzles were well-thought out; it looks like this Petite Mort game went for polishing a smaller-scope game rather than pushing out a bigger untested game. I think that was a smart choice! This setup would easily allow expansion if the author ever desired to do so, and I would look forward to that. Still, it's pretty good as-is.

I liked the way this game was structured a lot. It has two major branch points, and at the end it lets you revisit them right away.

The game is about 9 archetypal people who land on an island in search of an archaeological treasure. Each is referred to by their profession, with you being The Linguist (like the game Clue, I guess).

In classic creepy story fashion, a curse appears that kills one and lures in others unless they can truly trust each other.

So the rest of the game is about talking with your crewmates and deciding who to trust.

I got one choice wrong the first time but replay was easy. I found the storytelling easy to read and clear in plot structure, and the countdown-days format sidesteps one of the biggest problems in choice-based IF: setting expectations for play-time. Quite of a few of the most popular Twine games are split into days with recurring patterns.

Overall, I did struggle a bit with understanding what clues were important in the choices, but this is honestly quite good for a 4-hour game and bug-free as far as I saw.