Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

I beta tested this game so I saved it for last.

This is a puzzle-filled comedic parser game about recovering your car keys from a bunch of monkeys in the jungle.

Notably, this is one of many games in this competition that involve translating a language. In this case, the language is: monkey language!

By searching around the compact starting area, you can find ways to understand that language better. Once you do, you can get involved with some shenanigans in order to get back your stuff.

I'd say this is one of the harder games in the competition. Even having tested it a couple of times I couldn't remember how to solve one especially complex puzzle. Examining everything and exploring everywhere are important, and it's good to save if you think you're near the end, as the endgame has a few 'bad' endings.

This game reminds me of a more HD version of Baby Tree, one of the games I most frequently show to people to tell them what interactive fiction is. It's also a minimalist game prominently featuring a bed and a child and some agonizing decisions.

In this game you play a single parent, on a bed, with your child interminably crying. All you can do is crawl around your bed, not enough energy to do more. It's a multiple-location bed, something I haven't seen much before. After finding some appropriate reading material (which is coincidentally something I've been discussing with my students a lot recently since it's assigned reading), you have some parent-to-baby discourse on your hopes and dreams and fears.

It was easy for me to vividly imagine this game because in some non-zero measure I was there. The day we took my son home from the hospital, I helped my exhausted and injured wife into bed in a dark bedroom, took a look at my son, and panicked.

For the first time, I realized that our life as we knew it was over. We couldn't just stroll out of the house to get Taco Bell or whatever. I couldn't just hop into the car to go see parents without planning. There was a helpless human being in our car and from now until the (it felt like) rest of our lives, one of us will have to be with that person at all times.

It was daunting, especially after the painful c-section. It didn't help that I both forgot the baby in the car when stopping at CVS that day (for five minutes, and panicked that I would get arrested) and that I let him roll off the bed and hit the ground after rushing outside to grab a credit card for my wife when an aggressive and convincing scammer called.

So this game really hit home. Our protagonist has to deal with all of that, but also alone. There are also concerns about whether they can relate to each other in terms of gender and orientation. I hope that all parents out there know that things can work out well, that there can be many good times mixed in with the bad (although for some people it really is hard all the time so take that with a grain of salt!)

This game reminds me of a more HD version of Baby Tree, one of the games I most frequently show to people to tell them what interactive fiction is. It's also a minimalist game prominently featuring a bed and a child and some agonizing decisions.

In this game you play a single parent, on a bed, with your child interminably crying. All you can do is crawl around your bed, not enough energy to do more. It's a multiple-location bed, something I haven't seen much before. After finding some appropriate reading material (which is coincidentally something I've been discussing with my students a lot recently since it's assigned reading), you have some parent-to-baby discourse on your hopes and dreams and fears.

It was easy for me to vividly imagine this game because in some non-zero measure I was there. The day we took my son home from the hospital, I helped my exhausted and injured wife into bed in a dark bedroom, took a look at my son, and panicked.

For the first time, I realized that our life as we knew it was over. We couldn't just stroll out of the house to get Taco Bell or whatever. I couldn't just hop into the car to go see parents without planning. There was a helpless human being in our car and from now until the (it felt like) rest of our lives, one of us will have to be with that person at all times.

It was daunting, especially after the painful c-section. It didn't help that I both forgot the baby in the car when stopping at CVS that day (for five minutes, and panicked that I would get arrested) and that I let him roll off the bed and hit the ground after rushing outside to grab a credit card for my wife when an aggressive and convincing scammer called.

So this game really hit home. Our protagonist has to deal with all of that, but also alone. There are also concerns about whether they can relate to each other in terms of gender and orientation. I hope that all parents out there know that things can work out well, that there can be many good times mixed in with the bad (although for some people it really is hard all the time so take that with a grain of salt!)

Presentation-wise, the game has a lot of rough-edges. Here is a sample:

Top of the bed
You have dragged yourself up, digging your nails into the bedcovers, to the top of the bed. Here you can reach what is on your bedside table.

You can see your phone and a glass of water here.

The baby looks tired. You are tired too.

>x table
You can't see any such thing.

>drink water
There's nothing suitable to drink here.

The baby takes a quick and wheezing breath, only to continue crying.

>take water
Taken.

The baby's high pitched crying turns even more high pitched.

>drink it
There's nothing suitable to drink here.

You feel your own vocal cords contracting and stinging, asif you are the one who has been crying all this time.

>x it
You take a sip of water from your glass.

Your baby's cries become even louder.

So the implementation could definitely use some work, but the message resonates.

I thought this was a touching game. I have listened with anxiety to news reports of famine and destruction of homes in Palestine over the summer, and fervently hope and pray for peace.

In this game, you are an olive tree that needs to be nourished in order to produce. You add more water and leaves to balance your growth, and then use it up to produce. Expending some energy to survive, and more to create the next 'generation'.

Simultaneously, outside of your control, a story plays out of a Palestinian farmer helping you grow and passing you on to his daughter. Like him, you experience hard times and lack of the resources you need to live. Each 'season' is actually a large amount of years.

Like the olive tree in the name, being a symbol of peace, I hope for peace for both Palestinians and Israelis.

I remember the Fascism: Off Topic intfiction thread from earlier this year and I had heard about this game cooking up for a long time so I somehow imagined that it would be a twine game with a fake model of intficiton where you participate in a thread but you have to argue with increasingly irrational people. I had such a strong imagination of what I thought this game was that I thought it was real.

Instead, I was shocked to open it and find a well-implemented (well, that part wasn't surprising) parser game set in a grungy subway with graffiti on the wall and an arguing couple. Where was the thread? What was the reference?

Playing around and examining things, seeing some well-written descriptions, I tried talking to people, and that's when I discovered the mechanic:

You can talk, but if you do, the game ends. You only have one thing to say, a one-note parrot's catchphrase. It might be relevant to the current conversation; it might not. It doesn't matter.

It reminds me of the Introcomp game Gallery Gal, where you have the superpower to turn into an art gallery, but only once, and permanently. You go through a normal game and choose to end it whenever you want to, crushing all those around you as you assume your true art gallery form.

Similarly, you can at any time interrupt the conversation of those around you with your irrelevant comment.

Because of my pre-conceived notions, it's taking me a bit to suss out the message. I had imagined (in my fake mental version) that the game was originally pro-discussion of fascism, and that we would be playing the role of someone who was pointing out the rise of nationalism in the world and that others would poo-poo our notions and shut us down. This game seems to be the opposite, where it paints out the discussion of fascism as an obnoxious interruption to others' conversation.

Whatever the true meaning of the game, it's well-put-together. My apologies to the author for fabricating a fake game from whole cloth and spending half of my review discussing it, and thanks for entering!

Well, it was fun to load up this game and see the font adjust itself slightly. "Bisquixe does that too," I thought. And it turns out this game uses Bisquixe! And a lot of the features, too, like hyperlinks and CSS adjustments. So it was fun to see someone use my extension, it made my day.

The coding of the hyperlinks lets you examine different objects and try out various interactions with them (some of it reminds me of some sample code Drew Cook posted a while back with a list of sense you could use; that example crashed in one interpreter but that interpreter bug has been fixed since then). There are also some more tricky hyperlinks where the linked text is very different from the action that you end up doing.

So overall I'm very happy with the technical side of this game. On the other hand, the story is pretty thin; most of the game is either a sudden bird poop-induced ending or walking past several almost-identical rooms. There are some kind family moments near the end but there's not a big build up. So I'd see (from my obviously biased perspective) this game as a successful tech demo that could be the foundation of an even stronger future story, but it would likely take a while to develop such a story.

This is the third and last Sophia Zhao game I'm playing this competition. The other two were fantastic, and this is now an author I'll keep an eye out for in the future.

This is the shortest game, and while it has a great gut-punch ending, it's the weakest of the group to me (but it has some very strong competition, so that's not saying much).

You play as someone grabbing some groceries in a store. Money's tight; I thought this was a reference to recent tariffs in the US at first, what with poor quality onions for $2.

Things descend a bit from there, and there's a lot of strong profanity (which matches the strong, bitter taste of the onion, I suppose). It's when we got to dairy that I started getting what was going on (despite strong hints earlier).

The ending was a really creative take on the event it described, I'd never seen anyone describe something like it before, so I thought that part was really neat.

The reason I think the other games are stronger is that this game was fairly one-note, while the other two Sophia Zhao games were a great study in using contrasting tones and evoking a variety of emotions.

This is a brief stat-based Twine game where you explore an island that has a civilization on it.

You are a renowned explorer joining an exploration team to check out an island. You can choose things like your weapon, whether to conserve or spend resources, how to deal with strangers, etc.

It has some interesting elements, but many of the mechanics don't make sense and the story relies heavily on pre-existing tropes.

For instance, mechanically, we have the choice to build up our food supplies or rush on ahead. But the game is over in around 20 choices or less, and there's no time to use supplies or not. Many choices are just straight up 'right' (stat boost) or 'wrong' (stat decrease) with no indication of which one is right.

Story-wise, the island has us hunting for food, crossing a decaying bridge, encountering a tribe, etc. There are a couple of twists but overall it could be stronger. There are a lot of plotholes (like the [spoiler]chieftain saying they've been aware of us for quite some time but we just barely arrived on the island[/spoiler]).

I think that with more time the author could develop these ideas into a more compelling narrative, if that is something that they're interested in. The most impressive part was the smooth UI presentation with nice stat indicators.

The first thing that struck me is that the 2 is so bold and red. Then I noticed how jagged it is. Was it, I thought, just drawn in MS Paint?

I looked more closely. No, that doesn't look like MS Paint. Instead, it looks more like a texture brush, like the ones procreate has that are fun to play around with but not really useful (I only use four brushes ever: flat brush, gel pen, round brush, and whatever pencil one I see first).

But no, I thought, something's off. The 2 is really well-done. It wasn't just sketched in a second (or maybe it was, in a moment of serendipity). Could it be--I thought--that this was actually a special font, like a 'display' google font, that was made large, bold, and rotated slightly? But it's not a perfect 2 so the questions still remains: font, or sketch?

I zoomed in closer. The resolution on the 2 isn't as high as the resolution on the other text. It was added later, after all. It could be scaled up from something. But if the author drew on it at full resolution, wouldn't it have more details? A scaled up font makes more sense. But I tried tracing the movement of the 2 with my mouse, and it felt natural. This could be just a sketch drawn with a single gesture.

I tried a font-matching website (does it use AI? Probably a GAN but not an LLM). Nothing came up, but could be rotation.

We may never know.

Also the game just says 'you win' that's it sorry for spoilers.

I felt a strong connection to a lot of the material in this game. You are an alien visiting the Human Resources Administration to sign up for SNAP benefits. In the process, you learn a lot about how human bureaucracy impedes and hurts others.

When I was first married at 26, we got a little government income from a disability program my ex had been on before marriage. There were tons of restrictions; for instance, we weren't allowed to have savings over around $500 or $1000 (so we had financial pressure to not establish any emergency savings and be more irresponsible). After almost a year, the government told us that we hadn't properly reported my income and we had to pay back thousands of dollars. I told them that our bank account didn't even have half of that, and they said, "Are you offering to pay off half of it now? If you do, we'll forgive the rest." So that worked out, but it was a real mess. We messed up reporting, they took forever checking.

Similarly, DMVs have always been old, decaying buildings (not enough tax money?) and hard to figure out. I ended up with a 'Female' marker on my Pennsylvania ID (which got me out of at least one speed trap as the officer found it amusing when I showed him my ID).

It's not all dour out there, though. The low-rated post office in my area had a stand-out clerk who pointed out problems I had with my passport application before a work trip to Spain and saved me about a month of work and hundred dollars.

This mostly-linear game does a great job of showing just how messed up the world is by making the alien go through the whole process. But then it goes through and says all the same things much less effectively and without any subtext by having a ranting human explicitly lay down the moral. I think the first part was so effective by contrasting the cruelty and inhumanity of the system with the placid alien, and the second part just didn't work as well for me. It's kind of like when you're drawing something and it looks good but you flip the mirror and the flaws just jump out at you; the first part was that 'flipped reality' for me.

The author's end note mentioned working in this area, and I salute Jesse for the good work!

This is a brief Twine game about someone who becomes addicted to the use of AI.

It felt pretty realistic (until its turn in later chapters, although that's not too unrealistic). I have some students who rely almost entirely on AI. A lot of the panic when things like the SAT or IB exams approach as its been so long since they did work unassisted that they've forgotten how. Thankfully most of the come to that realization early enough that they can lock in and start studying themselves.

There were occasional grammar mistakes (the only ones I noticed were sentences that had an extra 'be' in them) but they kind of fit with the slow degeneration of the main character's cognitive skills.

I liked the voice of the author and the creativity shown in the presentation.