Reviews by MathBrush

This is a short anthology of 7 poems.

Each poem consists of a few lines, each of which has cycling text.

You can either read the poem straight through and then cycle each line, or cycle through one line at a time. Or anything else you like! So it essentially is a collection of two-dimensional poems, which I like.

The poems are all about aliens, and saucers, and changes, and doubt. With its combination of obscure meanings and occasional goofy lines it reminded me a bit of Subterranean Homesick Alien or Decks Dark by Radiohead.

I appreciated this anthology intellectually, especially its polish and design, but didn't feel emotionally engaged for some reason or another.

This is a short parser game set in space. It has neat little pixelart graphics at the top.

Like another reviewer, I had a bit of trouble realizing I had to hit enter to start the game (might be worth adding a 'hit enter to continue' text on the title screen).

The game has you floating in space. There's not much to do besides cry, it seems at first, but fortunately the game has implemented a lot of little actions to add character. But then the real puzzles start (for me, I started by (Spoiler - click to show)examining my suit, if anyone's stuck).

Besides being longer, the best thing the game could do is get more transcripts from players and responding to even more actions than are in the game (for instance, I think TURN ME should give a different response).

It also might be worth splitting up some of the complex actions into more parts; I typed in one command and the game had a big, complex scenario where I tried things over and over again until I figured it out. It might have been more fun to do that myself instead of having it described to me.

This game has plenty of potential but is still in the early stages.

Right now, it's a completely linear intro with some nice music and some placeholder images with a charming feel. You are a young witch ready to profess your love, but when you arrive at your sweetheart's door, she's gone, and only a fragment of a spell is left to give evidence.

And that's it. Would play the full thing, when it comes out.

There is a genre of game in Twine which is massive, sprawling, and focuses on stream-of-consciousness style text. Furkle's early games were the trendsetter, especially SPY INTRIGUE, and other games like Charlie the Robot and Dr Sourpuss have branched the genre out into many areas.

This game is unusual in that it employs the fever-dream word-flood format but is also an epic fantasy story.

It is difficult to piece together storyline in this genre of writing. In this specific story, sentences can sound like this:

"Azalea ersatz lunars crackled glowing over semitranslucent ambient films this headache brutally pounds out in stechschritt to a buzzing id blockage"

One sentence I measured was almost 600 words long.

Attempted plot summary:
(Spoiler - click to show)Other sentences have more coherence. As far as I can tell, the main thrust of the storyline (told over 27 chapters, some much shorter than others) is that you are a person in a water world who has made a theft or bad business deal, and ends up killing someone over it. You enlist at sea on a quest to visit the submergence. On the way, you fight a sea monster. Then you must ascend a type of tower, which wasn't an original stop. As you do so, you seek out the Vedas, who are either Gods or nobles or something else. You request to become a Veda, or something else more than you are, which comes with a name change. Your mother was a Veda. As part of the transformation you cut off your finger? Then you visit the submergence, and someone activates a world-breaking device.

At times it seems you are someone else, or maybe it just focuses on two members of the crew, but there are two people or gods or something with very similar names (like imimnemo and emimnemo), but this is also confusing because the main character of the main story has two names (like Leinur Emimnu) and different characters use different names.

Overall, there is an emphasis on pain or emptiness of life or the quest to escape existence. It ties into Eastern traditions with statements like:

"There is one question to which I do know the answer: who we are when they wish we were not:"

but also Western ideas like sin.

Overall, it's wearying to get through; the game says so itself and describes itself like a migraine. I had to rest several times while reading it, even though I was speedreading after the first 4-5 chapters. But I'm trying to build up tolerance for Finnegan's Wake some day (I made it through 30 pages once before giving up), so I felt like this was a good practice run.

Edit: At some point, characters are making up monsters and fights like a D&D game, narrating them to each other. It's possible this is the entire story, and it's possible it was just a side diversion among the crew.

I've seen a few interactive fiction adaptations of RPG systems before (such as the Choicescript Vampire: the Masquerade games). The ones I usually see let you use your stats but generally have pre-written scenes and a constrained set of options to choose from.

This game, instead, provides you a framework to guide you while you set everything up on your own character-wise. For instance, in combat, you are provided with a little map to move your character around, and a way to take turns, and a monster manual entry for the monsters, but instead of rolling dice for you or giving you a set of options, it just asks you to keep track of your actions and the enemies and just let it know when someone is incapacitated, ending the fight.

So this is less a self-contained game than a tool for someone who wishes to try out the DnD experience and is willing to invest the time into making a character. Due to this framework nature, it fits with any kind of expansion or adaptation to the game, any character class.

In a way, it makes it like a virus, not that it's bad or infectious, but in that it can't live on its own and needs other substance to help it grow. Because of that, while I thought it was cool, it felt lacking in the criteria I generally use on this website. The next time I get on a D&D kick, though, and can't find a group, I could definitely see myself pulling this out.

This game was inspired by The Last Night of Alexisgrad, an IFComp multiplayer twine game where the participants passed codes back and forth to each other.

The author of this game goes further by connecting players through a session ID that allows simultaneous communication in-game through choices. There is even a time portion, although it seems designed in a way that many playthroughs of the timed portion would not need collaboration, which is helpful.

The game is set in a somewhat futuristic setting where genetically engineered animals and cybernetically modified humans exist but are uncommon.

The two players take the role of two adopted/foster children of Ma Tiger, a rich woman entangled in shady business who has asked them to meet together with her after many years.

The MCs are a study in contrasts, one a man who is relatively happy and at peace, and a woman who is dangerous and has much to hide.

The game is fairly brief, which is good for a multiplayer game. The roughly 30 minutes play time advertised is generally accurate.

I played through twice, and your fellow player's choices definitely affect the game. That drew me into the storyline more. The plot arc is necessarily contracted; if anything, this feels like a setup to a longer game in the same universe, not in the sense that it leaves a sequel hook, but just that many plot elements seem like they could be developed much further and there doesn't seem to be a significant emotional resolution for either character.

Overall, a solid concept. It was a bit hard to find people to match up with; perhaps one day there will be a massive online server of people just waiting to sign up to play co-op twines, but it hasn't happened yet!

This game has a great deal of potential but unfortunately doesn't pan out yet in many areas. From reading about the game, I wonder if a lot of time was spent trying out different interactive fiction engines.

You play as a young high school student who goes to school and gets stuck in a time loop. You have to replay over and over to progress.

I had a bit of trouble with figuring out how the game worked. A lot of options seem to send you to a fake-death the first time you go to them, but then they are important later.

The formatting uses centered text and no paragraph breaks. I think it would have been a bit easier to read with left-aligned text and paragraph breaks, and using a serif font and colors with less contrast than pure black and pure white.

The writing has grammar that sounds off, especially with comma use or punctuation around quotations.

Overall, I think the underlying idea is solid and there are some funny moments, but I felt unsatisfied.

This is a story about cleaning out your mother's house after she died. As you explore the house, you discover little secrets and memories here and there, piecing together a larger puzzle.

It's a melancholy game, and has some nice voice acting. The pacing of the voice acting is interesting; only the text in quotes is read out loud, but if there is narrative text between quotes then there is a space in the audio, which I can only presume is to give people a time to catch up. So it kind of presupposes the reader's reading speed, but it worked generally well for me.

The story is sad, overall, but in some ways bittersweet. One of the scenes hints at the MC being trans, but I don't believe that's related to the overall sadness.

I don't use headphones and play IF around others, usually, so I had to schedule special times to play this, but I do feel the audio effects were positive and contributed to the story.

It includes a puzzly element at the end that provided some good interaction, and exploring worked well earlier on.

I helped beta-test this game.

This game uses a custom parser first developed in Kidney Kwest, but with a twist: it's intended to be played entirely vocally.

The parser encourages you to use full sentences (so 'open door' might throw a warning that it's better to say 'open the door'). It also is designed from the ground up and seems to involve a lot of built-in systems. So, for instance, asking about the location of a thing will usually tell you what room it's in, what region it's in, etc. Due to this systematic nature, sometimes the game will omit capitalization or punctuation, but this usually not detectable in the voice version. A final issue is saying 'put Time on [anything]' (a phrase I said a lot because in my accent Time sounds like Tom to the computer), the parser says 'a bottom is not on a time'.

The game itself is simple, and gives you a lovely tutorial that shows you how the whole system works. The tutorial is, itself, a small game. The larger game is mostly interacting with things: doors, keys, containers.

When I beta tested, I completed the game, although it seems to have been expanded since then. This time I believe I got locked in an unwinnable state since I (Spoiler - click to show)left the baby in the car and went inside, and the car took off without me. Overall, I think this technology is interesting and must have been very complex to program.

This is a mid-length Twine game where you play as a visitor to some standing stones who is sucked into the ground and deposited in a strange room.

Gameplay is mostly based on exploration, inventory and examination. There is a bizarre, alien world to explore.

Overall, the concept was interesting, but I had friction in random places. There was a ton of profanity for no real reason (the game starts with a few screens of just the F-word over and over again), each page had an animation before the next page which was cool at first but slowly wore out its welcome, and a lot of choices were hard to strategize with (like choosing left or right in a featureless corridor, or only having one option)).

I definitely felt some atmosphere from the writing, and that was to me the biggest success in this story. It gave me Brian David Gilbert vibes so I start listening to some of his songs while playing.