Reviews by MathBrush

This game puts you in the roles of a corporate office jockey in a soulless dystopia where all art, including poetry, must be removed.

You sort things into 'facts' and 'poetry' and delete the poetry.

A strange messenger appears and lets you save some words of the poetry, which you can rearrange into your own poems. The deletion process proceeds in real time, so you have to click fast to save them.

The whole game lasts about 9 in-game days.

I found the setting interesting, and liked the poem making mechanic. The real-time event wasn't my favorite (I like IF precisely because it doesn't have real time events) but it was pretty forgiving and adjustable.

Overall, a fun concept, and I liked the Shakespeare quotes. I feel like a lot of the game was spoken in generalities, when I might have preferred more specifics, but perhaps a blank canvas was intended.


These are the poems I made (although I copped out on the last line of the last one):
(Spoiler - click to show)
their den in the light smells Like a gray shadow of the night

Assignment 646: Lanirian
cry lightning
Some Verses inspire,
Some Verses blind
may I become blind
may the day become knives.

Assignment 655: Mol'ztor'lorian
Hope is the sweetest thing heard on coldest wind.

Assignment 665: Olkuts-pons
first Swelling,
sweet and joy
it might be joy
what joy and sweet times

Assignment 671: Marvumheonackolin
Again
Every pulse
half awake blessed comfort
He thinks Every secret
When fairy numbers didn't pulse

This game is a Twine game with extensive use of images, audio, animations or video, etc. It couldn't be hosted by Spring Thing directly due to its large size.

It's a story about someone who has really messed up sleep patterns, due to waking up early for high school, using acid, and just enjoying the night, among other reasons. You constantly have the choice to sleep or to wake.

Does that choice make a difference? It's hard to tell. I tried all waking for a bit then all sleeping, and ended up spiraling out of control.

I like surreal imagery, and the images and music were evocative. But I didn't feel a need to revisit the game afterwards.

This is a brief parser game about a samurai preparing to commit seppuku. You are given food, alcohol, and writing implements to write your death poem.

However, events intervene, and the game goes on to several action sequences.

It was generally fairly easy to figure out what to do next. I found the events interesting, and enjoyed following along. I did figure out what was going on partway through, which was nice, but the ending was heavy-handed enough and out of tone with the rest that I took off a point. It's a good story as is; why not just leave the self-deprecation and message in an author's note?

The writing was a little nondescriptive but makes up for it with fun action scenes that are uncommon in parser games.

This was a pleasant game to try out. You play as an expy of Captain Kirk, although your ship is now called The Marigold and your enemies are the Glexx.

Like the games 4x4 Archipelago and 4x4 Galaxy, you are on a 4x4 grid with the contents of most of the grid randomly generated. You can encounter planets, asteroids, aliens, and enemies.

You have fuel, weapons, and crew, and you can make a wide variety of choices, like killing everything you see or being peaceful, taking time to study nature or exploring.

I had pretty different experiences on two playthroughs, although some events were of course the same. Overall, a fun game to while the time away. It did take me a while to notice that the star map showed me which ways I would be able to exit.

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.