Reviews by MathBrush

This was a short, lovely game. Your deceased father was a prolific painter, and he left you a choice of 7 paintings in his will. You can sift through the paintings and choose the 7 you want the most.

Each painting has a different style and emotion. The game intuits what you’re going for in your collection, and a segment at the end is based on that, with a series of illustrations (but not of the seven paintings you choose).

This game is like an eclair to me: small, simple, but exquisite in taste. The CSS was nice, the background music pleasant, and the writing such that I enjoyed each sentence.

There’s not much to do outside of selecting the paintings, but this is the kind of game that I don’t think would be served well by expansion; it seems complete in itself. I had a good time (maybe because I chose the happier paintings and it reminded me of good times with both my father and son, and because I’ve gotten into art this year and loved getting new ideas). I do think it would be neat to have the drawings of the paintings in-game, but I understand why they’re not there (hard to make, especially since they’re described as high-quality, and our imagination can perhaps produce a stronger effect).

This was a pleasant game. It has a goal it sets out to achieve and does it in a descriptive, polished, and entertaining way.

This game is a simulated bird-watching expedition in Pope Lick Park in Kentucky. It looks quite a bit like the parks near me in Dallas.

The highlight of the game for me is the high-quality photography of birds and other parts of nature. The framing of the photos, the resolution, and the colors were all really appealing to me. The description of the trails and woods occasionally felt a bit repetitive but had enough variety to keep my attention for a while.

Overall, a great game for encouraging people to get into birding. Makes me want to rememeber to take pictures when I see something cool in nature!

This game is one of those wildly-branching many-ending Twine games, kind of like For the Cats from last year (or was that Ink?)

The main gameplay is choosing some form of transit, having it fail, then switching to another.

I’m kind of torn on this. One the one hand, I think part of this game demonstrates my thesis I’ve had for a while that ‘simulating something boring/frustrating is usually itself boring or frustrating’. On the other hand, it has some pretty funny parts. Both of my two endings were genuinely funny. And it’s organized in a way that allows fun replay with repeating the same segment over and over.

This game is graphics-and-sound heavy, with a lot of images of casinos and creepy houses. You play as a thief in a casino who suddenly finds himself tasked with escaping a house of horrors.

Gameplay involves exploration and collecting clues, as well as emotional reaction options in the past.

There are some inconsistencies, like some links being capitalized and others not. But the puzzles all seemed to work out all right, with everything becoming useful at some point and the game solvable by clicking every option.

Overall, I think it would have been fun to have more challenges after the first set, as the game felt like it was setting up for some really heavy-duty stuff, and that could have made the ending more powerful. But there are many good things here.

I don't really worry about spoilers very much, as I find most games and movies are just as fun if you go into them knowing what happens as they are when you come in blind.

But this is one game that I accidentally got spoiled on, which is a bummer, as that's a lot of the fun. Fortunately, only half of it was spoiled, and the rest was still a mystery.

In this game, the names of everything have disappeared. All you see around you is 'something' and an 'other thing'.

The whole game is about experimenting and trying to figure out what those things are. Once you have an idea, the game is pretty short.

Overall, fun and well-done.

This Twine game depicts the fall of a great empire. We play as the emperor, a being with complete control over the the people. Excess and corruption are rife.

But then, a famine strikes the land, and the old way of life begins to disappear.

The writing is descriptive and evocative, and the story is good in itself and can be applied to almost anything in life where a group has grown powerful and complacent.

It reminded me of something I saw in China earlier this year. At the Summer Palace, there were some older buildings that had been destroyed, and I heard the story about how it had been burned down by Europeans. Our tour guide said that her mother used to bring her there in her youth, tell her the story of the burning, and say, 'That's why you have to study for school, that's why you have to work hard, because if China isn't strong it will be burned down again."

Obviously this game is different as there is no invading force, just nature itself, but the two tied together in my mind.

This is a neat idea I hadn't seen before this competition: an interactive comic strip.

It's four panels, each of which remains fixed with the same general background while a character moves between them.

The story itself is that you're an off-duty or retired cop who's trying to uncover a gun shipment. You need to find a way to break into a truck and uncover the truth.

The concept is pretty neat. The game is pretty hard! To fully get it right, you need to replay the same short sequence over and over, getting a little better at it each time. It's hard to guess what effects actions will be ahead of time, so experimentation is a must.

I tried some of the other linked comics, and the idea definitely seems fun. I'd play more games like this in the future (hopefully a bit easier for my own sake!)

I was glad to see the name ‘Carter Gwertzman’ because their (one’s? zher? the pronouns do seem to matter after playing this game, but I don’t see them listed anywhere) games are generally imaginative, creative, and not too hard to complete.

This is perhaps my favorite of this author’s games so far. It uses the idea of fairies or similar creatures stealing names and identities, a very old concept that was popularized in recent years by stories like SCP-4000. I made a game about it this year called Faery: Swapped.

Carter Gwertzman’s game is a color-focused Twine game that makes clever use of CSS styling. You (and the name ‘You’ is important) are someone who has lost their identity in a strange forest. To get help, you have to explore and help others in an attempt to recover your true identity.

There are various mushrooms in the game that can affect your size and color, which directly changes the text in the game. Pronouns can be modified, too.

The game openly operates as well as a metaphor for personal change and growth, where sometimes our self-identity becomes something different than we thought it would be. It reminds me of myself, where I planned for years on becoming a professor at a specific school, and when I didn’t achieve that goal I fell into deep depression (and started reviewing IF as a coping mechanism) and spent the next few years rewriting who I wanted to be in life.

Very glad to have the experience playing this!

This is a game made using, I think, RPG maker, not the first IFComp game with that engine (the same author made Quest for the Sword of Justice).

The idea is that your teacup has been stolen and you want to retrieve it. You can opt not too, getting a bad ending. In fact, there are a lot of bad endings!

Most text games don't have the features found in this game, so when I rate it in ifcomp and on ifdb I'll focus on the features it has in common with text games, which I'll describe next. Then I'll describe the features not common to text games.

The writing is witty, some of the funniest to me in the whole competition. The lampshading of the silliness of the quest, the banter, is just great to me. The characters and settings constantly escalate (I like the 'Swamp of Instant Death' or whatever it's name was). There are enough options to feel like I had at least some freedom, some opportunity to express my personality.

For the non-IF parts:

The ultra-HD tileset used looked weird to me. It was kind of in the uncanny valley.

Having to wait for the character to move between each interaction drove me nuts. I blanked out and five minutes later I had been scrolling through Twitter, and tried to remember what I was doing, and realized I had clicked out of this game a while ago to wait for the animation to finish, and came back to it. I steeled myself to continue, but after accidentally picking the wrong option in Satan's house due to relentlessly hitting the 'skip' button (which for some reason is the same as the 'choose option' button), and running into two long combats in the forest in a row, I quit, since I had already seen 2 or 3 endings. I am completely uninterested in games incorporating long animations between text like this. I don't think that would make the author feel bad, as Damon Wakes is brilliant and has done a lot of different media, often to provoke specific responses from readers or judges, so I think getting a strong reaction to the game's techniques would be a positive thing.

Very funny text though. I would definitely read the rest of the game if I didn't have to watch any more animations.

I didn't actually understand this game, so I'll try to summarize it. It's a twine goal filled with surreal, non-sequitur type descriptions.

An artist named Leben is stuck in a dead end job due to losing inspiration. They hire a detective to find it, using a raven to communicate that message.

Hmm, there was also a part at the beginning about a heist. I'm going to go replay that part...

Yeah, replaying it didn't show anything. There's indication of meta-narrative travel, so maybe the different stories will unite at some point.

Honestly, I've really got no clue here. I wasn't able to construct a mental model of the game's structure, intent, or world. I will try to do better in the future.