Reviews by MathBrush

This is a short, heartfelt Twine game about a remote student who feels isolation while also being forced to eat slabs of meat every day due to being a wolf.

It's a nice blend of anxious mundanity and stressful metaphor that reminds me a lot of Early Twine.

The story itself is pretty simple, a daily routine of boredom and suffering mixed with longing and hope for something better one day.

The writing is where it shines; I loved the explanation of encapsulation and abstraction (which I constantly have to remind students about for IB exams, since they often forget what it means) and how it ties neatly into the other themes of the story. So I think that's by far the best part of the game, how expressively and neatly it's written.

'She has been a solid and your friend for a long time.'

This is a solid opening for a game about your friend turning liquid in a fatal way.

This game has an utterly unique (to me) presentation, with a kind of game-boy looking feel and collapsible menus made with plus signs.

It's very short, and that shortness adds both urgency and futility to the game. What are you going to do in the precious time that you have?

This kind of game to me feels 'right', like someone's using interactive fiction in a way that it's always been meant to be used. This makes so much more sense as a text game than as a text (where the sense of unfinishedness would be absent) or as an illustrated game (I think the mind's eye is so evocative here).

A while ago I wrote on intfiction talking about a trend of games that followed a similar pattern:

"The text is usually a variant of ‘Oh yes, I am the bonecrusher, and I love crushing bones! The sound my victims make when they squeal is delightful’

and then choices are like:
-BREAK MORE BONES
-DELIGHT IN BONEBREAKING
-LICK THE MARROW"

People were questioning whether such games even exist, but this is another one in that category, almost exactly what's described above (down to being excited about removing body parts) even if (Spoiler - click to show)we find out some of it was an act later on.

The majority of the game is a person who livestreams vivisecting and torturing a criminal while describing how much they enjoy inflicting pain and hurting them. It has some illustrations, but they are very 'clean' and more like an anatomy book and not very realistic (thank heavens!)

This genre continues to be popular among those making games, so I assume it has an audience somewhere who loves it, and I hope they find this game. For me, I don't think I'll ever see the appeal.

The ending twist doesn't make much sense because (Spoiler - click to show)removing someone's liver is already a death sentence measured in hours, there's no reason someone capable of removing a liver and a stomach during a vivisection wouldn't know that. So why react so differently to murder when you've already murdered?

This story is the first in a series about a world where soldiers craft living weapons that take the appearance of humans.

In this story, a man and his male-looking weapon are travelling in a deep snowy region. They love each other, and are searching for something that even they don't know everything about.

The writing and worldbuilding were solid. This is part of the single choice jam, so it wasn't amazingly interactive, but my only choice felt real and led to some pretty different results.

I would definitely play more games in the series.

This is part of the Single Choice Jam, and is inspired by a short Japanese film called Boze.

In it, you are a weakened and forgetful god who is disturbed by the approach of a visitor. Fearful, the visitor has to select between ritual items, each of which reveals more about him and about you.

It's a short game, but handles the 'forgetful god' concept well, and made me interested in looking up its inspirations.

This is a short game that depicts a scenario that is all too human but phrased in fantastical terms: deciding whether to remain home with uncomfortable comforts or to strike out into the unknown and frightening outer world.

More specifically, you a young woman who has run into the woods in the hopes of finding a witch and leaving home behind. But that may be harder than you thought.

The writing is, to my taste, overwrought. This is subjective and not objective, but I think that the elaborate analogies and similes can get confusing. For instance your heartbeat is described as:

Your heart thuds in your chest, the reverberation of an ancient drum that has beat and beat and beat since the beginning of time. It echoes with the cries of a hundred anguished souls, tied by the same thread that follows you from home, stretching across acres of flat, empty land before it becomes a tangled mess in the trees that shield you from view.

I wasn't aware until after I had played and until I was writing this that (Spoiler - click to show)the thread mentioned here is 'real'-ish and story-important, while the ancient drum is not.

Similarly, we meet someone described thus:
(Spoiler - click to show)She smiles and the rows of her sharp teeth—thousands upon thousands of them, lining her palette and receding into her throat—shine and gleam in the total darkness.

Thousands is a lot! I looked up (Spoiler - click to show)how many teeth sharks have, since that's an animal with a lot of teeth, and they only have around 100 or 200, but the whale shark has thousands, and to fit them all in they're really, really tiny.

So I think that for my personal feelings the writing could be toned down a bit, but I did enjoy the setup and the choice, it was one of the better choices I've seen in this jam (the Single Choice Jam).

This is a brief story entered into the Single Choice jam.

It is the climax of a story with no buildup: a queen is in full rage and despair, throwing things and overall suffering because her husband, the king, has caused the death of her brother. She then has a choice on how to react.

As part of a longer work, this would work really well, but for me, in its snippet form, it had less of an effect. It's like seeing a car crash on the side of the road with ambulances; it can be sobering and make you think, but you won't remember it much a day or two later. But for the family of the person involved, it can be traumatic and life changing.

So here, I felt like an event of massive importance was happening, but it wasn't one I had established a connection to yet. The author did use a variety of emotions and offered several paths, and the writing is overall solid.

This visual novel is part of the Single Choice Jam. In it, you play as a researcher on an underwater base where everyone has been slaughtered after a humanoid creature was dragged up out of the abyss.

The highlight here is seeing the beautiful artwork, of which there is quite a lot for the brevity of the game. It has a style that is distinct and fits well with underwater horror.

The storyline is gripping and intense. I did find a couple of typos, and some analogies didn't land for me (specifically a part about 'not an oz' when referring to information). Overall, though, I was glad I played and found it interesting.

This is a brief visual novel entered into the Single Choice Jam.

It has some moody background music and background images that set the tone appropriately for a conversation that has undercurrents of tension. You play as someone eating a meal with a person they haven't seen in a long time. There's a flood going on in town, too, which becomes a metaphor for the emotional story.

In the end, you come down to a single choice. Both options had realistic-feeling effects. The writing on the whole thing is solid, and it generally feels polished.

This game paints you as a character who wants to ask out someone in a market who you've seen before, but you have to settle on the right approach.

Unfortunately, our protagonist does not know that they are in a game entered into the Anti-Romance Jam. How unfortunate!

This is also part of the Single Choice Jam, so we only get one shot. But quite a few of them end pretty bad.


One that made me chuckle was (Spoiler - click to show)"Look, I'm just going to lay it out: I've noticed you here before, and I would really like to kiss you. So... what do you say?" and the reaction that followed.

Overall, the game definitely hit home, and having little choices right at the front made the interactivity work well.