Reviews by MathBrush

This game reminded me of Baby Tree, in a way. Both games are minimalistic with imagery that is means to be anywhere from mildly upsetting to deeply disturbing (depending on your particular phobias).

In this game, a 12-legged box is relentlessly pursuing you. There aren't that many options for directions. As you explore, you find some objects made with ASHII art (which is what I assume the game calls ASCII art, maybe with some modifications).

I got lost a couple of times (in one case not recognizing that something was a room exit), but there's a guidebook. This was written for Neo-Twiny Jam, so it has less than 500 words total.

I think that when going for an unsettling feel, a minimalist, mostly unimplemented game like this can work better than a more polished game. I could see this being the kind of game described in a creepypasta.

I opened and played this brief twine game for the Short Game Showcase for 2024.

It was written in less than 500 words. It is laid out as a web of nodes, making it highly non-linear. The wording is intentionally rich and requires careful reading.

It has a nice background image and overall impressive styling. I didn't like how small the words were, and was going to complain in this review, but then I found the settings option and it changes that, so I thought that was really thoughtful and shows how much work went into this game.

The words in the game made me think of nature a lot. While there are many themes in the poem, the highlighted words tend to revolve around weather, plants, and time, so I thought a lot about the progression of time and of life. It was nice.

This game was entered in the Short Games Showcase. It's a choicescript game and begins with a lengthy opportunity to pick your gender, outfit, romantic interests, strengths, etc. before beginning with the main story.

The setup is that you're in a kind of trashy forest town where the woods are haunted with what the elders call angels. Your town has a lot of rules set up to help you avoid them, but you all are braving them during the school dance.

Your town has its share of bullies, and one of them is on the hunt for you due to events out of your control. All of this comes together at the dance.

I enjoyed the setup/premise and liked the characters and writing. I was a tiny bit disappointed with the ending, as I was hoping more for a survival story while I felt it was leaning more for an urban (or, in this case, rural) fantasy. Overall though this works as a complete whole.

This is a fairly brief game made for the Short Games showcase. In it, you play as a traveller at an airport who is going through a crisis of sorts.

Throughout the game, it shows your mental state as distracted and unsettled. It reveals different details about your life that show it to be unhappy.

In the end, there is a single choice, centered on the main relationship you've had in the last while.

It's not a bad concept, and I liked the individual scenes. My mind didn't tie it all together, though, and the stakes at the end didn't feel as fresh as maybe they could have. I thought the writing was high quality overall.

This is a short story written in Twine that was entered into the Bluebeard Jam.

I was first struck upon playing it by its nice presentation and how well-written it was. I loved the voice of the narrator and the interesting details.

Later on, at the time the protagonist approached (Spoiler - click to show)the basement door, I began to lost the thread of the story, and I quickly became confused. The writing was still effective, I just couldn't picture the plot in my mind.

I thought there might be a choice at the end, like the Single Choice Jam, but it was just a story in the end, with links used only for pacing.

This is a relatively brief game where you simulate life as a Brain Worm.

It was entered into the Neo Twiny Jam, with 500 words or less, so each part of the game is pretty sparse.

You wander around different areas, with options to do things like change aggression of your host, switch hosts, or eat brains.

No matter what you do, you'll likely die soon, with a screen showing what you could have achieved.

There were some funny bits, and I liked the variety on replay. I did find it difficult to tell if my actions were having any real difference or not, though.

This is a relatively brief game about tea with a lot of branches. While some branches converge, many of them lead to wildly differing results, often with different implications for your identity and how the world works.

All of them have to do with tea, which you are carrying in your inventory. I played to a few endings, and don't remember the inventory coming into play much.

The playful and silly endings are the highlight of the game, which pokes fun at overly serious people.

I like surreal creepy games set in modern times (like creepypastas or the game Cannery Vale). This game is in the same kind of vein, and it was fun.

It's a fairly brief choice-based game. In it, you're headed home for the day when you hear a ringing coming from a phone booth.

There're a lot of customization options at the beginning and several branches later on. I first did the 'go along with everything' ending and then tried various non-compliance endings.

Due to the surreal nature I couldn't tell if the 'ignore everything and go straight home ending' had a bug in it or was doing a creepy memory thing. I like the second interpretation more.

A fun game overall.

This long puzzler is an entrant in the 2024 Puny Comp, written in PunyInform and using the comp theme of the years around 1980.

It's basically like 4 games wrapped in one, increasing its length. The idea (which is complex so I may have it wrong) is that you're part of a series of spies who've taken the name Gromov as a way to be anonymous, and you and several other organizations are trying to change the history of the world. There are either 2 or 3 histories at play: one drone-filled world you start in, the normal world we live in, and a future where the US has been largely obliterated by nuclear weapons.

Most of the game is in the latter world. You explore three regions, each with their own themes, like clocks, music, and machinery. Then there is a final endgame.

The puzzles are quite difficult, and I was often stuck and reached out for help multiple times. You have to use intuition and experimentation, and it's not always clear what you should do. So this is great if you like carefully detailing notes and chewing on things for a long time, and less fun for casual players who just want to experience the story.

There were a lot of testers and implementation and writing were mostly smooth. I found a few small typos I passed onto the author, who has taken care of them. Outside of that, it's significantly polished.

Like it warns at the beginning, this game follows traditional viewpoints on WWII and the cold war, with the British as heroes and Nazi Germany (and later Soviet Russia) as the bad guys.

Jacic is a well-known (to me) choicescript author that has done some cool mythological games in the past.

This pair of games has a similar high concept and some complex, interesting writing, but fails to due either of those justice in its short time frame. Each half-game is just a few choices; the second one is actually just a single choice.

The concept is fun, though. You are an unnatural being, and you don't know if you'll live to see the next day. Walking the streets of a city, you have a dangerous encounter that makes your powers known.

Fun idea, nice writing, but it felt like it could be more.