Reviews by MathBrush

This is an unfinished TADS game with some good content and promise.

You get isekai'd by two weirdos into a purple portal. The world you enter has lots of pipes and knobs and rust (feels kind of mystlike) as well as a critter (doesn't feel Mystlike).

The cool thing about the game is all the mushrooms (which you can take multiple chunks of for each fungus). Through experimentation and consultation you can determine the unique properties of each, which are quite complex. The game models liquids, multiple objects, movable 'door'-like objects, and NPCs.

A more full version would definitely benefit from hints and from a general pass of bugfixes and better implementation. I had to read two people's transcripts to see how to progress. Overall though I had a good time, it feels like fun interaction.

I helped a bit in the creation of this game and am mentioned in the credits, so this is not an objective review.

I gave a higher score than I had anticipated doing when rating this game, considering I had played it before. That's because I've been moderately burnt out on IF for a few months or a year, but somehow playing this unfolded the old magic and made me think, 'oh yeah, this is why I like IF'. So anything that can do that to my brain ought to be rated highly, I think.

This game is tiny, and very polished, like a .01 carat diamond in an elaborate setting. You basically are in a room and look at 4 things and the game ends. But, other responses for attempted actions are handled well, and there's a nice custom actions bar, and a very complex credits section that almost has more structure and words than the rest of the game.

The content is a malicious narrator talking in 2nd person, like the narrator in Eat Me. The implication is that the character has passed on and a narcissistic parent has remained, making everything about them and revealing some of the possible burdens the person had in life.

I like stuff like this because it feels real and personal, as opposed to being manufactured for mass appeal (which most of my own work is).

I started playing through all Spring Thing 2026 games in reverse order by IFDB rating. I saw this one had a 2.5 rating, and so I had low expectations going in. The first screen really surprised me: fun, inspired text, nice layout, a comprehensive help system. How could this be rated low?

Then I tried the game itself, and now I can see. There's little to no connection between individual events, and almost no wrap-up at the end. You are placed in a variety of class villain situations and act against the protagonists, but they retain no memory of events, there is no plot arc, the characters are different every time, etc.

Love the writing in this but not the mechanics so much. I'm glad that what is there is polished. I've liked work by this author before, who's done some fun forum games.

This is a very short twine game that serves as the first act of a larger game.

You can play as two characters. There is a rich businessman involved in a memory transfer exchange, putting his mind on a hard drive. You can play both as the businessman and as the doctor.

There's a lot of promise here; in fact, if the ending was left as-is, it could be seen as a complete 'lady or the tiger' type story where the ending is implied.

But it's labelled as incomplete, thus my lower rating. If this gets finished I'd love to play it, there's a lot of nice sensory details and the perspective switch completely changed my mind on what the right choices are.

This is a Twine game where you pick from 8 or so characters to form a team of 4, then investigate rooms in a house one at a time to get a key and experience an attack plus some backstory, followed by a final finish.

Each character has different thoughts and reactions to the events. On my first playthrough, I was a time travelling powerful wizard lord. On the second, I was a cyborg assassin.

One character is just a regular woman, which was a surprise. She related a lot of things she saw to romance films (which reminded me of my mom, who watches Hallmark all the time and who I've started to consult about romance tropes when I write to see what's popular these days).

A lot of the writing was funny. Much of it was also a non-sequitur. The rewards at the end made me chuckle a bit.

Overall the story didn't have much cohesion, but the concept is a fun one. Extending it further could possibly result in combinatorial explosion.

This game feels more like an unfinished prototype than a fully-intentioned game. I have no doubt it could be completed into an enjoyable game, but it has yet to be so completed.

You start with no explanation in a room in a building that has 4 floors and a basement. Items are listed in each room in the default 'you can see' listing, and most have no description. Some items are not implemented at all (like the desk in the office whose description is 'This is an office with a desk').

I am so grateful for David Welbourn's walkthrough. Most of his work is with more polished games but there is real value in a polished and complete walkthrough for an incomplete/rough game like this.

If this is ever updated I'll update the score for sure.

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.