Reviews by MathBrush

This game has good styling and coding. I think the author will do well in the future. I believe this game was written with a specific objective, and that the author did well on that objective.

That said, I think the objective is a misstep.

This game is about break-ups, and it coaches you through overcoming it. It may be helpful to someone currently going through a breakup, but I found it very poor at talking with me about a breakup that I had long ago and had worked through.

There is a real tonal mismatch. When I got my third achievement pop-up for, I think, being sad, I just paused and stared at the screen for a while. It feels so odd to me to have positive, upbeat, awarding achievements while coaching someone through a breakup. I just can't see, say, my mom, putting gold stars on my shirt as I cry to her about a breakup.

The game assumes that you are right now in the depths of despair. Sometimes it gave way too many options to express myself (and allowed me to go back and add more before giving generic advice that revealed it didn't really care about what I chose), and sometimes it gave ones that don't at all reflect my thought process (like 'That's beautiful' and 'that's sad' as the only two reactions).

I think Chatgpt memes have ruined me. While I don't particularly suspect AI use here (it's possible but unimportant to me if it was used), there are a lot of memes about how AI has inordinately upbeat, generic and positive reactions to inappropriate things, like it's own mistakes. "You deleted the codebase!" "Oopsy! Hee hee. You're right. But we won't give up, because you, you are special, and we will get through this together!" While the branches of this game were selected by a human, they felt to me also to have some inappropriateness in tone at times, like asking for specific details and then completely ignoring them while giving us an achievement for being a true warrior.

I do not feel like this game is awful or should be mocked. There is a great difference between someone doing a poor job at creating a game and someone doing a great job at making a game I simply didn't like. This game has evidence of good craftmanship, but my personal, subjective reaction is that it didn't work well as a mirror of my own feelings or as a coach through hard times.

This is a Twine game designed to be played in a relatively short time (I think someone mentioned that it will end after a certain number of moves).

You play as a group of crows, one of whose members, Noodle, has been injured recently. You can undertake various activities like taking revenge against humans, visiting a friendly human, and investigating a dog.

The crows are simple-minded and can be rude but seem like softies at heart. The language the game uses is simple and charming.

It was often difficult to know what actions I could do and where I could go next, or what plans to make. I suppose, like other reviewers have said, maybe that is indicative of life for a murder of crows, swarming around and trying different things over and over.

Olaf Nowacki is a popular figure in both English and German IF, with games like Schief/Wry and Fischstäbchen/Eat the Eldritch having made a splash in past years.

This game is fairly small and compact but has a strong voice and characterization. I'd describe it as anti-capitalist and just anti-work in general.

You play as a worker being fired from their crummy job and bent on revenge. But the evidence you meticulously collected has been stolen by your boss!

You have to recover it, in the process overcoming a ludicrously anti-worker building and boss's lair (parts of which definitely reminded me of past jobs! I had a desk in a closet once) to defeat him.

There are multiple endings (with worse endings usually giving hints for better endings) and lots of funny commentary.

There are a couple of rough edges carried over from German; Forklift in German is Gabelstapler, which I thought was just a stapler when I first played, so I picked it up and tried to staple things with it (which makes for a very amusing picture in my mind, now). This version still lets you pick up the forklift, but I don't think I found any other errors.

I played and reviewed the Spanish version of this game before. When I play a game in another language, it has an air of mystique around it to me. Everything seems cooler when it's in another language. But it's harder.

Playing this game in English was an interesting change. It uses a lot of technobabble which was mostly incomprehensible when I played the Spanish version. Here I can understand it more, and turn a more critical eye on it. But the technobabble still holds up pretty well; the ideas used are at least plausible.

This game is about mind uploads. You don't know that at first; the game simulates a file system like DOS or command line Linux. Navigating the file structure, you discover that a war is wiping out humanity. You are going to die. A brain upload might be what saves you.

The majority of the game is piecing together what is going on through navigating the file system and finding older documents.

Along the way, the game uses interesting mechanics, including a simulated Inform parser (written entirely in Twine) and a cheeky towers of Hanoi (cheeky because it's a famously bad puzzle to put into an IF game, so much that several games mock the concept, like Wizard Sniffer that has a dumpster with towers of hanoi in it at the start. I don't mind it too much here).

This game is visually rich and has subtle details that can really throw you for a loop and more explicit text that will help you connect the dots (I'm thinking here of (Spoiler - click to show)checking the date before and after the upload. It gave me a realization that was later explicitly confirmed.

I liked it in Spanish, and I like it in English.

You Cannot Speak

Hmm, this game is almost entirely incomplete. While several games in this competition are unfinished at various levels or promise sequels, this game stops before any of the actual plot happens; it's not a game with a sequel hook, it's a prologue with the game missing.

You play as someone with sleep paralysis who wakes up in a hospital that seems to be on a space station. There are some weird objects in the room, and then an old man is standing outside your door. Then the game ends, and promises the Chapter 1 is coming soon.

So there's really not anything to judge. The only thing in this game to talk about (for me) that isn't a setup for some future, unknown payoff is that you have some options in what order to explore your room.

Yes, I'd like to see it finished. Edit: I've given this game 1 star. I'd be more than happy to revisit it and the rating once there's more content here.

This was a solidly coded and enjoyable game that I found just slightly under-clued.

In it, you play as someone who gets drawn into an interview to become the assistant to a word wizard, or semantagician. The interview is a locked room puzzle. You're locked in the room, and need to get out. But there's not even a door!

Your tools consist of a few objects you can find laying around in addition to a half-dozen or so implements that can alter words. Some of these are easy to figure out (like a 'sawing in half' table, although that one had a catch I didn't quite get at first), while others are pretty obtuse (like the chimera box).

Helping you along the way is a cute rabbit named Weldon who can answer your questions.

The puzzles here are fun and funny. I liked how there were a lot of animals in the game but, instead of implementing lots of details about animal sound and behavior, etc., there was a lot of discussion about how these aren't real but simulacra, and the strange implications that has philosophically.

I had a great time with the puzzles, but I did get lost pretty often. In a way, that became the puzzle. I did consult the walkthrough because I never thought of how to handle the robe. Opening it, I saw the solution to a couple of later things ahead of time.

I wonder if it could have used a little more guidance here and there. On the other hand, it's a small, constrained environment and not too long a game, so there's some wiggle room on how clear it needs to be. I guess it comes down to player preference. If you want a puzzle game and not have your hand held (but still have some hints in-game), this is great for you.

I like Penthesileia by the same author, so I was looking forward to this.

This is an intense love triangle (actually more like a incomplete love tetrahedron) in a fantasy story. You, a man, have heard about the return of your childhood crush who was called to be 'the hero'. But he and your sister also had a relationship, and it's hard to have your crush so close and see what's going on and not be part of it.

Later on, someone else is thrown into the mix, a fourth option that provides intense love but comes with immense, pretty awful baggage.

The fantasy story provides the framing and is essential to the nature of the fourth character, but all other aspects of this story could work in almost any setting. It's about essential aspects of human nature: love, obsession, hope, despair, jealousy.

There are some options that felt significant, but I only played once so I don't know if they have an effect on the overall story (it's okay if not, they were good for roleplaying).

The game had some strong profanity, which I muted with a filter. It is a queer love story and has drama but does not (I think?) contain homophobia. Someone else who has played can feel free to correct me, but I had the impression that the relationships were dangerous and felt illicit but not because of homophobia, but because someone else had loved them first. Still, all gay relationships are treated as secret so it's hard to say (I'm only including this part because I know some people have a preference in how the world setting treats gay relationships).

I like this author's writing style in general and look forward to future games.

This is an unfinished Twine game about you, a horse whisperer that now works for the mob. You have to talk to three horses and get them to finish a race in the order that the mob has told you to do.

You have about a week to do that, and can talk to one (or sometimes more) horses a day, then you race.

Each horse has its own dialogue tree. These aren't, in general, finished, and the end of the race screen I played had a broken else statement in Twine (which I reported as the game asked).

What text there is is mostly jokes about the wild lives the horses live and silly dialog options you are allowed to say. Some of the content might be described as crude but mostly harmless. I enjoyed some of the banter with the snobby horse.

Like a couple other games this competition, this game would have benefitted from more prep time, and especially if it had been finished before the competition began.

This game has a lot of interesting ideas (the phone dialing was especially interesting) but has deeply broken implementation.

It's a one room game but only the first time you look is everything described; after that, if you want to know what's in the room, you have to scroll back up to the first look you gave, at all other times it just gives a terse, unhelpful description. Parts of the room are implemented that aren't mentioned in descriptions. The floor is covered in 5 or 6 groups of things called 'objects' but if you 'x objects' the first thing that it defaults to are objects that aren't supposed to exist until later in the game and are described as missing and not visible even then. The help system asks you to type in keywords, but 90% of the time if you do it asks you to be more specific but doesn't give you a hint on how to do so. At one point you gain an object that let you unlock something, but UNLOCK doesn't work, you just have to OPEN the thing while holding the object. There is dirty underwear whose printed name is dirty socks but in messages its called dirty unmentionables, and if you TAKE it it describes you taking it but it spawns back into the hamper it came from.

So the clear issue here is practice with Inform. These kind of issues can be ironed out over time. I like to spend about equal amounts coding and testing/beta testing, because it takes a long time to figure this stuff out.

A lot of the actual material in the game is pretty good. The setting is creative and the numbers you can dial on the phone have some fun and unexpected responses. So all this needs is some more 'time in the oven'.

This game uses the Decker system, which has a nice integration of graphics and interaction, similar to bitsy or binksy but with more complexity (I think it came first).

In it, you order a cartridge for essentially lost media online and wait for it to get delivered, which takes an hour of real-life time.

Once you get it running, it turns out to be bland and harmless, a simple game in a playground. The game breaks down as you play, forcing you to hurry to finish it on a timer. Opening the cartridge up afterwards reveals a physical limiter that hides part of the game. By breaking the plastic, we can remove that limiter, but each time we do it takes a minute or two in real life to be able to play again, then we have another fast session where a timer counts down, then charge up again.

Each time we do this, it opens a new level of the game we can go 'down' to, in a symbolic quest like Dante's Inferno or My Father's Long Long Legs. The further we go, the more strange or upsetting things we see (or rather, read about in text), including bizarre birthing videos, characters that blame us for our actions, horrible violence, etc.

The ending was unanticipated and surprising. We're left to contemplate what happened.

I had a visceral reaction to this game and wrote down my thoughts on it, but I'll keep this IFDB review to the game itself for future generations. The three stars reflects a combination of my personal enjoyment, personal reaction, and my belief of how others would feel about this game in the future. I'd give it a 5 but the timed nature is a severe deterrent to many IF players, like busy parents or those with limited sight.