Reviews by MathBrush

This is a potato-based game.

In it, you play as a detective who is ostracized for failing to discover the person who stole the Potato Peace statue years ago. But soon the thief contacts you, telling you to get credit for it. But what are his motives?

This is a mostly linear twine game with, I believe, AI potato art which can be very (intentionally) amusing, especially the smug potato mayor.

The story seems very inconsistent--even your own character, who seems to be a human woman in pictures, but is called a guy at one point and has a potato father in another picture. The plot is random and whacky and motivations seem to change all over the place.

There are a few options in the middle of the game but most come at the end.

My local representative is Beth van Dyne. She came to my school and talked to the students about passing bills.

She mentioned how thousands of bills were put forth in the last year, but only some really small number (like 50 or 15 or something) actually made it to a vote. Everyone was too deadlocked and there were a lot of committees to go through. It was disheartening.

This game takes a look at passing a bill and it is similarly disheartening, although it goes in a more hyperbolic direction. In this game everyone is directly corrupt, adding wildly inappropriate measures to your bill or literally threatening your life.

Parts of it were funny, one puzzle was clever, and overall I see a lot of good parts in the game. But I feel like it ended a bit abruptly, and could have included some committees, and overall I just don't agree with the vision (although that doesn't directly affect my rating).

This Spring Thing 2024 game features colorful background with sprites of different animals along with the main NPC, a long-eared elf who others mock for being fat.

The elf goes through the forest and meets different animals. Each one gives you the choice to do a good deed or a bad deed. At the end of the game, it tells you how good or bad you were.

There are several puzzles in the middle where you have to pick the right object to help someone, sometimes with a bit more complexity (like making a map).

There is background music that is pretty repetitive, there are some typos, and the text is pretty slow to be displayed.

All in all, it's clear the author put a lot of effort into making this; I think with the feedback from the other reviews and with some time their next game could be something truly special. This one had some fun moments (like seeing a normal hedgehog dressed like Sonic) but I think could have used some more pizzazz in either story or choices.

This is basically a 'deafeat Hitler government simulation', which is a pretty fun concept.

You have a deck of cards and can hold a hand of 3 at any time, each card use counting as a month of in-game time, as well as special 'advisor' hand of up to 3 people, which can be used more rarely (every 6 months, I think).

Gameplay is complex; you need to balance funding, the demographics of the people you appeal to, keeping your allies placated to maintain government strength, and opposing the rise of the Nazis.

The writing is good, and the commitment to historical accuracy (or at least the appearance of historical accuracy, as I am not educated enough to tell the difference) is really cool.

Overall, I think the game is telling both in what it says about the 1930s and what it says about today. A lot of the game felt very similar to modern political events I've lived through.

Overall, it was a bit too complex for me to want a second go around after I lost. I kept getting tripped up because I didn't know things like the difference between Leftist and Labour. If I learn more one day, I will return!

This is the second time that students from Senica in Slovakia have written an anthology of short Twine stories for inclusion into Spring Thing.

This year there are 7 games, all of which start in a dark forest.

Most have a 'time cave' structure, where, instead of state tracking or having paths converge, all choices split the game into separate paths. Some do have a little bit of converging. Most end after 2-4 choices, often evaluating how good your ending is.

I enjoyed the small jokes, like linking an ellipsis to a 'why are you still here?' message, and the funny endings like dying of boredom and low trust while hiding behind a rock.

It could be fun next year to have a little more color; maybe letting students pick some of the CSS.

This game has a heady, dreamlike feel. In it, you explore a kind of abandoned zoo or city or something, and interact with a lot of people and things, especially birds.

I didn't see until afterwards that it is explicitly framed as a purgatory, but that makes sense. It's kind of like a text version of What Dreams May Come, but stripped of all explicit moralizing.

I encountered a lot of mysterious and compelling scenes, some making the use of delayed text in a surprisingly effective way, such as in the luggage carousel full of masks. Birds are a recurring theme.

This doesn't feel like a pleasant world to be in. Statues are ugly, people are cruel or crass, decay is everywhere. But it feels like a place to move on from, a place that shapes and refines you for good or for bad.

Very compelling game. Due to its overall grimness, not one I think I'd revisit, but one that I could recommend to others.

This is an interesting puzzlebox of a game with some cute 'characters'.

You play as a wizard that has lost all ability to use verbs. However, some of your words have possessed nearby objects, creating automatons!

You can use nouns instead of verbs. Unfortunately, this causes all loose verbs to converge on the given noun! This can cause a lot of problems.

This was a fun game, but also hard. It was hard to know how to start; it was hard figuring out if I had locked myself out of victory or not (spoiler: (Spoiler - click to show)it seems like there are multiple ways of doing this), and it was hard to win, so be aware of that coming in ahead of time! Although it was reasonably short. I think it's just fine being difficult (I think it made me like the game more) but I do think it could be useful to indicate the fact that you may need to restart/undo to win (unless I missed an ending that lets you do that!)

A very clever concept and a fun game.

I played two versions of this game; an Introcomp version a few years back, and this Spring Thing one.

They feel like two different games; the part of the Introcomp version I remembered most was branching paths and a butterfly, while this one is focused on divination symbols. Replaying the introcomp one, though, I found they share a setting.

In this game, you are a day early for a visit with a magic professor, and so you have time to think and contemplate your father's death (?). Gameplay consists of examining descriptions, finding symbols that translate into phrases, and DIVINE-ing a full sentence from these symbols.

The descriptions are lush and complex, giving a richness to the setting but also rendering it difficult to find important clues.

There are some bugs; the biggest one I found was The game saying 'There is a carving here' and X CARVING not working (you need to (Spoiler - click to show)X INITIAL).

I was unable to complete this without significant help from discord. Since discord isn't not publicly available or permanently stored, I want to record what helped:
-The number of symbols you need is (Spoiler - click to show)three
-The specific symbols you need to have found are (Spoiler - click to show)waves, piercing, concealment
-You find that first symbol by examining (Spoiler - click to show)the ocean specifically, not just water
-The final sentence you must type is (Spoiler - click to show)arrows planted in flesh are shrouded by an unaware mind

This game was part of the Back Garden in Spring Thing. In it, you wake up inside a sarcophagus in a tomb, and have to find your way out.

Here's my breakdown:

-Polish: The game could use more synonyms for things. Sometimes to use an item on another item you have to VERB SECOND THING and sometimes USE NOUN, which was a bit confusing.

-Interactivity: The lack of synonyms as above also caused some difficulties with the interactivity. There were mazes, but those weren't too bad and were easy to map mentally.

+Descriptiveness: I felt like some parts of the game had some pretty neat descriptions. I liked the opening in the box, and the ending sequence, and overall I could imagine the whole place (it reminded me of an NES Zelda dungeon).

+Emotional impact: I liked the atmosphere and enjoyed the feel of the game.

-Would I play again? The game was pretty slight and felt like it didn't tell a whole story, but I would play a fuller version.

For a first game, this is good, and I think that with more practice the author could make a truly exceptional game.

This review is for the newer version of the game. I'll mostly be focusing on changes between the versions. The original review can be found below.

The biggest thing that struck me on initial play was the addition of AI-generated graphics and helpful windows on the side. But after completing, the biggest thing that struck me was the overall increase in code smoothness and good programming.

AI art has been controversial recently due to its being trained on artist's content against their will. I've seen it in a lot of games recently, and I find it tends not to contribute much as the art is often inconsistent. However, I definitely think it adds something here. Maybe it's because the well-known nature of the story it's based on has produced a lot of art over the years, or maybe because the writing itself is more utility-focused and so is complimented by art.

I did struggle with the side windows; the inventory one shows up just fine, but on both gargoyle and lectrote, I couldn't get the topics window to show up. Thankfully, typing TOPICS works just fine.

I liked the timing aspect in the new ending and the whole 'future' area in general much more this time around. I definitely feel like this is an overall improvement to the game.

Original review:

I beta tested this game.

This game is an adaptation of a static fiction story. This is something very hard to do well in a parser game; I've tried it myself and more or less failed, and so have many others. This game runs into a lot of the same problems: a faithful adaptation assumes a linear plot, while a parser game is centered around freedom of expression.

This game implements a house with many mentioned details but few which are usable. There are bugs, such as when one attempts to break a window (not needed in the game).

Plot wise, it doesn't follow the book directly, but instead starts after the action of the first one, allowing you to prove to the world that the time machine is real. The whole setup makes it seem like it will be very complex, but in reality there are only 2-3 puzzles and the whole game can be completed in very few steps.