Reviews by MathBrush

This was a great game! Both cute and genuinely creepy, with the two facets playing off of each other.

It’s a parser game where you play as a bug, and everyone else around you is a bug in a bug society with jobs, writing, culture, etc. While bug-based media has existed for decades, I pictured everything in the Hollow Knight art style as that’s the bug-based media I’ve seen the most of recently.

Unusually for a parser game, it has multiple paths to progress the story and a variety of achievements. However, it keeps the classic parser game play loop of exploration, grabbing items, and solving puzzles.

You’ve come back from a long trip and you’re just starving. Strangely, some of your fellow bugs are missing. Your goals are to sate your hunger and investigate the disappearances.

I had a lot of fun with this game, and it does get disturbingly creepy later on (more so because the horrors exist in real life).

This game overall reminded me a lot of Slouching Towards Bedlam, both because of the multiple paths and because of the overall plot.

This game is based on a book by the same author.

It’s written in Gruescript, and is one of the better Gruescript games I’ve played; I didn’t encounter any bugs or missing descriptions.

You play as a young man with the ability to read the minds of appliances (or at least communicate with them) and to see the hideous tentacles coming out of those machines. You are convinced that your girlfriend’s TV is out to get her, while she’s convinced that you’re being a paranoid conspiracy theorist.

You have to get advice/help from all the appliances in your apartment and in your girlfriend’s as well, devise a plan, and take down the TV!

The story is amusing, and in general felt paced well. I was surprised by how readily helpful Amanda was given the issues we had at the beginning of the game.

Puzzles are engaging while being fairly straightforward; if you just explore everywhere and carry out requested tasks you can win pretty easily.

This was a tricky game for me! It’s a Spanish-language parser game that uses a lot of wordplay and clever phrases. I also had some trouble with the parser occasionally (which is normal for me when playing a game not in my native tongue). I’ve attached a transcript if anyone wants to see me struggling to get even the bad ending (I also decompiled the game to get some help).

You play as a private detective, but, as you are a ‘detectivo privado’, you can only examine yourself! That’s an example of wordplay that I didn’t quite get as a foreigner; I assume ‘privado’ has a dual meaning between the english word ‘private’ and a meaning of ‘self’ or ‘personal’ or something.

You are alone in a locked room with nothing but a photo of yourself, a pistol, some handcuffs, and a cushion. But, as the game tells you, you can only examine yourself, and you need a crime (in the form of a cuerpo delito), a client to contract you, and a criminal!

I eventually discovered that the key to progressing was to (Spoiler - click to show)sit on the cushion and to look at the photo (possibly needing to meditate first). Once I did that, the game became complex and I was able to interact with a lot more things.

Like I said, I received a bad ending in the end. Some things are on a timer, and it looks like I was caught up in a bad end, but I liked the clever concept of the game and enjoyed playing. It was funny and mind-bending, and I was impressed by the concept and story.

This was the next randomized Grand Guignol game I got. This one is interesting: a smooth and polished, mostly-linear adaptation of a short, sad, romantic movie called Schneckentraum or El Sueño Del Caracol (both meaning Snail Dream). It’s about a girl who is enamored with a boy and follows him to a bookstore, meaning to ask him out, but she’s too embarrassed to do anything but buy a book. Day after day she comes to see him, amassing a small pile of books.

It’s a good story, and I can see why they wanted to adapt it. There are a few branches early on to ‘opt out’ of the story, but it is otherwise a straightforward retelling of a touching story. It reminded me of the song Jueves by the group Oreja de Van Gogh.

I also wanted to add that the styling and images from the movie chosen for the game helped contribute to the atmosphere.

This was a short, well-written game about a horrifying experience being trapped in the darkness.

Most of the game is about your reaction to the things happening to you. The hardest part is the fact that everything is in complete darkness, making you have to react to everything without knowledge of what you’re truly experiencing.

It stays mysterious to the end. I did make a silly translation mistake in my head; when the game says you are surrounded by (Spoiler - click to show)miles de patas, I accidentally thought it said (Spoiler - click to show)miles de patos, and pictured the lights going on, revealing that your enemy was thousands of ducks. I laughed and thought that was fun, then later realized my mistake. The actual story was quite grim, and had a fitting ending

This is a Spanish-language parser game which is (thankfully, for this non-native speaker) well-implemented and fairly brief.

It has a framing device of being a text adventure generated by an AI (starting with a ‘sure! I can help you with that’ kind of message), and then starts you off in a jail cell as a captured soldier. It becomes a sort of escape room, but a fairly easy one; the hardest thing for me was remembering/looking up spanish parser verbs (at one point I had to use PULSAR instead of EMPUJAR and I’m not sure why).

After the main game, there is a little meta twist, which I thought was great, and enhanced my appreciation of the game. It made the game about twice as long. Then there was a fun message at the end, and it was over.

While AI is mentioned several times in a meta way, the writing didn’t have the negative aspects I associate with AI, and had many positive aspects I associate with the author, who has written several games I enjoy. So I suspect it’s handwritten, but if it’s not it’s well-done regardless.

I looked it up, and the name has reference to a legend kind of like the Bermuda triangle where ships bearing rice (i.e. humanitarian ships with food) would disappear during the mid-1900s.

This is a Bitsy game, where you have minimalist graphics (only two colors per palette, for instance) and can move around the screen, with text happening when you run into something.

You’re a miserable kind of person who doesn’t get along with anyone, but the only person who can put up with you has invited you onto a boat. Once there, things are normal, for a party, until Ricardo messes everything up.

There are, I believe, multiple endings in the game. I reached one that had me exploring a river and doing a kind of trading quest. I thought it was creative and a lot of fun. Overall, it was short, so replaying shouldn’t be too bad, but I only played once as reading in Spanish takes some effort. Fun game.

This is a Spanish language game with an engine that reminds me of the engine Moiki, but I’m not quite sure what it is. (looking it up, it’s fi.js).

The idea is that your car has broken down in the middle of a forest. The last evidence of civilization that you encountered was a sign saying “Mititz”.

Trying to make it back to town, you encounter a strange and frightening sight in the woods. A chase then ensues, and you have the chance to do an inventory puzzle or two.

I wonder if the game might be unfinished, or if it just ends semi-abruptly. I escaped, and an option to huir down the road. But the game stopped right after that. It feels like it could definitely be an ending, but there might be extra content I didn’t find.

I liked the writing in this and emailed it to my Spanish teacher friend, since she’s been doing a unit on superstitions and myths.

I was glad to get this game in my randomized list, as Ruber is someone who’s consistently produced good games for a decade.

This game taught me a lot. I thought at first it was a fictional story about a pro-Amazon forest activist who is murdered by activists, but apparently her life and death were real.

After your death, you have the option of your spirit spreading out and inhabiting various life-forms. I thought that would result in a short branching game, but instead you occupy all of them in turn: a river, a wolf, a tree.

The writing was poetic and pretty. The themes reminded me of Captain Planet, which I watched enthusiastically as a kid, and Ferngully. But knowing it was real made it way more sad. It’s definitely a topic I’ll research more in the future and talk about with my students (some of which are very into environmental conservation).

I was searching through my wishlist looking for the lowest-rated games and this popped up, an old Ectocomp game from 2013.

This is written in pure, raw html, with the only features beyond bare text being hyperlinks and occasional bullet points.

So it is just a classic CYOA-style story with each choice leading to a different webpage entirely, of which there are nine total.

The story is a kind of surreal absurd one where you hear faint music in a hallway but it can spiral into things like being stuck listening to music for a googolplex seconds.

I checked and by the time this came out numerous twine games and other choice-based games had been released, so I wonder if the author just wanted a challenge to try to code something up entirely from scratch. I googled them and it seems like they still do writing now, so that's pretty cool that they've been trying new stuff out for a decade.