Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This is a Seedcomp game, where people leave inspiration for others who go on to make games based on it.

This game is based on a poem by Sophia de Augustine.

Amanda Walker is one of the most successful authors of the last few years, having won Spring Thing, the XYZZY Awards, the IFDB Awards, and placing very highly in IFComp, Ectocomp, and Parsercomp. She works especially well with adapting poems into games.

This game is a shattered series of vignettes, mostly on rails but that's the way memory is some times. You are driving down a road--or, were driving down a road--with a boyfriend that you have been fighting with for months.

The game jumps around in time, moving simultaneously forwards and backwards. There are pedestrian segments of daily life made beautiful (or terrible) by the emotions present behind them.

I write this as I'm in a bad mood due to feeling a bit ill, but this game really made me think of the past. I had a divorce a few years ago, amicable in the end, but divorce can't happen with some scenes like that shown in the game. And the gory parts, the description of the blood, remind me of the early parts of our marriage, when I was at her c-section; birth is wonderful but it was terrible to see the doctor's hands bathed in her blood pulling out our kid. The memory stuck in my mind for a long time, together with the rest of the day of course. So this game made me think of that a lot.

I had some trouble here and there. I tried things like (Spoiler - click to show)bind wound, compress wound, tie sweater to wound,etc. before I realized I just needed to do what was in the hint. At the end, I somehow messed up the final action and got stuck. Before I tried to (Spoiler - click to show)answer phone, I tried stuff like (Spoiler - click to show)x phone, x message, x tree, run and then it just gave me a generic message whenever I tried (Spoiler - click to show)answer phone. So I restarted and speed ran to get to the end again.

Overall, I found this game polished (the hiccups were minor), had enough interactivity for me to enjoy, and obviously impacted me emotionally. It is lushly descriptive. I could see myself playing it again.

This game takes several TS Eliot poems and combines them with some original poetry (which fits in quite well and is lovely).

It uses a stressful mechanic: a giant countdown clock in the background ticks down one minute's worth of time. Once it's over, something special happens (and is a pretty neat trick).

I like the overall vibe T.S. Elliot's work, having encountered it once in high school and again in Graham Nelson's Curses!. There's a lot of parts of his work I dislike, but this game has great chunks in it that work well. The frantic race to see things leads to quick reading and moments of 'huh, what was that??' that were fun. I guess it was the opposite of timed text; instead of the author telling me how long it will take me to read a passage, I get to go at any rate I want through the game with just the overall experience being timed.

I played through three or four restarts until I saw everything I thought I could see. I don't know if there's a canonical ending, but my game ended with a lengthy race against the clock with a piece of actual timed text that made me feel like I was some person at the end of their life just watching the last bits of daily existence before floating away.

Overall, the game is polished, descriptive, has a nice interactive twist, drew me in, and I played it several times.

This game has you play as a clever bird, a macaw, who is trapped in a cage by a kind of illegal exotic animal dealer and has to escape.

All of this is communicated through minimalistic text that primarily uses adjectives and nouns instead of complete sentences. For instance, examining a bird early on gives the response:

sunken eyes. dry skin. depleted energy.

loose perch.

With the loose perch being a clickable link.

The overall style of gameplay is similar to a single-item-inventory text adventure. You get to pick one thing at a time to hold and can use that item in conjunction with items in the game's world.

This allows for some complex interactions that can be fun to set up.

I encountered a bizarre problem on my end while playing (no other player has found this problem and it wasn't on mobile, so I don't think it's the author's fault) where the game had a missing passage or encountered some other problem where I had to hard restart, about 4 or 5 different times. If anyone else encounters this, switching the platform I was on fixed it immediately (from windows chrome to phone).

Overall, the game is very polished and descriptive. I found the interactivity was interesting, and I could see myself visiting this again.

I didn't feel completely immersed in the game, and found it more of a puzzle box than a bird adventure. But I wonder if I hadn't encountered a bug on my end if I would have been drawn in more. So I'm wavering between a 4 and a 5, but I think I'll go with a 4, because while this game was good, I found the author's other games the Good Ghost and Closure even better, by a significant amount, due to their authentic and engaging dialogue.

This is a Seedcomp game, made with Super Videotome, a branching visual novel/IF engine.

It has a great deal of glitchy graphics that honestly look great and add a lot to the game atmosphere.

You play as someone stuck in a club for hours and hours on end. So long, you can't even remember why you're there.

From there, it branches quite a bit; a feature I really liked is that you can choose to skip a choice rather than choose anything, and that felt really authentic.

Mine ended up in an explicit sexual encounter with a biblically accurate angel. I don't associate explicit sexual content in games with positive feelings, and so it decreased my enjoyment of the game, however it was clearly signalled at the start of the game that it contains such content, together with strong profanity. The profanity use reminded me most strongly of the 14 yr old boys at my high school, so that's how I imagined the protagonist.

The best part of this game is the atmosphere and the surreal world.

I thought the atmosphere worked well.

In this game, you play as a military person whose submarine is under attack by poisonous gas. Trapped in the airlock, there's nothing you can do but wait until it subsides and hope your friends and crewmates are okay.

This game is compact and has neat and tidy implementation and puzzles. There are mechanisms and locks and keys and some clever puzzle solutions.

This has a lot more twists and turns and is darker than usual for a Garry Francis game, and I liked it. It was polished, descriptive, and the interactivity worked well.

The only drawback to me was that I kept getting this message after I left the command area and returned:

[PunyInform error: 3]
[PunyInform error: 3]
[PunyInform error: 3]

I did have to use hints once, but the solution was reasonable.

I liked this game, and felt it was a solid improvement over the author's previous game.

Here, you play as a member of the coast guard who is trying to track down a tramp steamer leaving a trail of destruction around the Florida coast.

The game is well-suited for children, with needed commands bracketed to be clear, light puzzles, and a generally positive and happy attitude.

Movement is unusual; a single N command might move you one room forward in a ship or send you dozens of miles through Florida. It reminds me of Victor Ojuel's game Pilgramage in that way.

The conversation system is well-presented, with an extra window popping up, although most conversations for me involved just going down the line one at a time.

I appreciate the game running smoothly and well. There were a couple of minor issues like 'an unsecured items', but overall it worked well. I feel like there could have been a bit more polish like replacing 'you can see Bart here' with something more specific.

So to me, it was descriptive, interactive, and fun, but not completely polished and I don't feel like I would revisit it. If the last game was a 5 or 6 out of 10, this one is a 6 or 7 out of ten.

This is a short Punyinform game made for Puny Jam #3.

In it, you play an astronaut who has to flee because an airlock is leaking. Bizarrely, the door to the space station is a heavy metal door with a key. More strange things appear as you explore the station.

This has some problems (especially uncapitalized room names and generally empty rooms). However, the author clearly was really into their descriptions and the flow of the game worked well with few hiccups (the only part I got stuck was a puzzle that was actually very fair).

So I think this is pretty unpolished and buggy, but I like the idea (I always like surreal/hallucination games). Having the character be (Spoiler - click to show)The Joker is interesting. Is this what the world looks like from his point of view?

This is, I think, the third Johann Berntsson game I have played, and I tend to enjoy his level of implementation. The other games I played (from 20+ years ago) were longer and more complex, but this one shares a lot of the good elements from those games.

You find yourself in a strange airlock, and have to go to another dimension of your choice. And you choose: fantasy!

What follows is a simple and complete fantasy story. Rooms have 2-3 exits, and each room has at most one object of importance in it. The next task to do is usually clearly indicated, making this more of a fun, breezy exercise than a puzzly challenge.

I didn't feel super engaged by the game, but it is quite polished and very descriptive, and the interactivity was smooth.

This game has you go undercover with two different characters in an exciting underwater adventure. First, you have to open an airlock door while floating underwater, and then you have to infiltrate a base using stealth!

There were some problems with implementation. Several actions had no response; I didn't see the control panel in the first room, so I tried stuff like 'turn handle with multitool' (which has a completely blank response) and 'turn handle with me' (which gives a really bizarre error with text from later in the game).

The game does have a couple of cool puzzles and fun descriptions, but overall it really herds you one way and doesn't encourage you to stray off the beaten path. There are a ton of useless rooms, a lot like Planetfall and other Meretzky games.

Overall, I feel like it lacked polish and the interactivity was frustrating, but it was descriptive with fun puzzles. I know this was made for a jam, so the author didn't have much time, but this could be an amazing 4 or 5 star game with enough expansion by the author.

This game was entered in a jam using PunyInform, where the theme was using an airlock.

The author came up with an inventive way to do this, having an underwater experimental brewery that is accessed by an airlock deep under water.

Unfortunately, a lot of the rest of this game was rough. Undo is not supported [Note: the author confirmed that this is because I played the z3 version. The z5 version allows undo, so I've updated my review and increased the star score], and its very easy to lock yourself out of victory during the first puzzle. A lot of interactions just don't make much sense (for instance, why can't we see the (Spoiler - click to show)scuba gear before examining (Spoiler - click to show)the hook? Isn't the first thing far larger than the second?)

I ended up going in and out of the airlock over and over to try things back and forth between the two main locations. That, coupled with the sparseness of the game, ended up with less enjoyment than I'd usually have.

Clearly the author has some good talent for programming things like context-sensitive hints and a complex airlock. But my guess is that because this was a jam they ran out of time to fully test and flesh out the game descriptions. I would be more than happy to raise my score if the game was developed a bit further; it's not a horrible concept, it just needs more care.