Reviews by MathBrush

This is a ren’py game with an anthropomorphic animal character. It features pretty strong language, so I wasn’t going to play it, but I found the script file and searched and replaced it and it was just fine.

This game has you play as a cat-like human who wakes up a little later than they’d like and has to make some cookies for an event later.

The character is self deprecating and funny, and their life is filled with both good things and challenges like an annoyingly broken phone.

As others have mentioned, it does cut off suddenly, which is why I marked it with less stars. It’s a pretty good story already; just adding a short conclusion to it would make the whole package pretty satisfying.

I genuinely don't like most RPG maker games, as I enjoy reading text more than seeing game cutscenes or walking around mostly non-interactive worlds. Fortunately, this game keeps most of the annoying parts of RPG-Maker to a minimum, with well-controlled text, relatively fast walking speed, and plenty of options.

You play as a scammer coming to an island to steal sea eggs. You can pick what to explore on the island. As you do so, you can change your character's sprite, and you find out more about what is happening on the island.

The game has multiple paths, with at least 3 endings and a few buildings I never had a chance to explore.

The story is short and a bit quick, but I prefer that in RPG maker over something drawn out agonizingly long.

This game features the same story in three languages (Italian, English, and Slovak).

The story has a strong environmental message. It seems to branch at several spots, so I may have only seen part of the story, but in my version, I received a message warning me about devastating environmental impacts of current human activity, and was able to visit Atlantis to see what happened to them in the past.

The game is primarily focused on a sense of wonder and on hammering in the importance of keeping the environment safe.

The game uses a variety of colors and background images as decorations. I found these to be a little distracting, as sometimes they were so detailed or bright that it was a little hard to read.

I think this might be the author's first effort, in which case it is impressively polished.

This game was fun to play in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam.

It's a wordplay game based on shifting rhymes, and written with Adventuron. I really appreciated the extensive explanations and help early on, the colored text and the little hints really helped me navigate the game.

The images went perfectly with the game as well, having the same whimsical vibe as the rest.

Gameplay was simple in a pleasing way, good for the context the Literacy Jam, but there are a ton of accomplishments that I didn't achieve which diligent players could search for.

I liked the game overall, but I don't see myself revisiting it; it felt like a one-time satisfying play.

While I may have given this game a lower score, I think it shows markable progression in the author's skill over time. This the fourth Text Adventure Literacy Jam game by this author, and while it has some flaws, it is a complete game with hints and help and is reasonably completable.

You play as a witch with a sick kid, and you have to make a potion to heal them. You go around to different rooms, each with 1-2 items, and you get the three ingredients necessary to make what you need.

The parser is, I think, a two-word parser, as most of my attempts at PUT ___ ON ___ and PUT ____ IN ____ didn't work but 'drop' did in most areas.

There are some fun little twists here and there. The writing is minimalistic, and I struggled with the parser several times. I definitely appreciate the hints and the HELP text.

In this German choice-based game, you play as someone who recently died and has to prepare for the afterlife.

To do so, since the IT system is down, you have to talk to a case manager about hypothetical scenarios, and you're awarded points for choosing good actions or bad.

The points are meant to determine what happens to you after you die. I got 30 points and declined going back to get more.

They didn't really seem to come up again, though. I then went to an area with a Kafka-esque gag about waiting in a vast, empty DMV-style place waiting for my number to be called. I then walked through a door and the game ended.

The game uses AI art and ends with AI music. At times the art worked (several pictures had a consistent stylistic choice of shading using parallel lines) while other times it provided details that would be really important in a normal game but not here (like the first picture, which looks kind of like a subway and has a grim reaper in it), or had distractingly wrong details (like two burning windows where flames came from the crack around the window but none inside).

The funniest part to me was choosing to wait over and over in the empty waiting room. But the interactivity in the first area wasn't very exciting, because a lot of it was like 'do you go left or right' with no indication of what that entailed.

In this twine game, you play as the Administrator at a mining complex (I think) run by a conglomerate. You are the bourgeoisie here, barricaded in your room as you contemplate your sins. Your company is out of contact. The workers are coming to kill you, as far as you know.

There are a variety of apparent paths, though I only took one. You have three or four different people or groups of people you can interact with and you can choose how to do so. No matter what, many choices require you to be an arrogant blowhard, which makes sense.

I ended up becoming a communist and ending the game with an Adam Smith quote.

It was a little one-note, but enjoyable, and had me really thinking about who to believe and how to strategize.

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.