Reviews by MathBrush

This game's tone reads like a game parody of Neil deGrasse Tyson's 'well, actually' twitter posts (like when he pointed out that leap day isn't the earth actually leaping). The tone is very heavy-handed and smug, with the game literally telling you 'you made a wrong choice, make better choices in the future'.

I'm sure it's a parody, but a well-made simulation of an annoying thing is still an annoying thing.

Otherwise the writing is sharp and word choices and images are clever.

Message-wise, I think the concept of humanity eating bugs is just fine; I love shrimp, and shrimp is more revolting-looking than other insects. But it helps that I was fed shrimp at an early age; I got used to it, and I'm not used to bugs.

Overall interesting, but, to me, too successful at imitating an annoying person.

This game is an interesting experiment in involving real-time in text games.

Basically, there are several storylines going one in different motel rooms as well as outside. You have peepholes into 5 motel rooms. Every minute or so of real time, a counter updates the in-game time and you see new things in the different rooms. Occasionally, you can affect things by being in the right place at the right time (the vast majority of these being deaths).

It's an interesting concept, but it was hard to puzzle out in-game, and I only heard it from others and saw it in the code. Without knowing how it works, the game seems oddly repetitive as you see the same scenes over and over, since they don't change until the next 'tick'.

The writing and plot is similar to B-movies, with some strong profanity, a voyeuristic but not explicit sex scene, and violence. Plots are mostly tributes to classic horror movies, although at least one seems non-magical.

Overall, I'm not sure this timed method worked for me, but I'm glad someone did it so I could see how it works. A couple of the stories were effectively creepy for me.

Bitter Karella has been making games for many years now, but I think this is the best one I've played so far, for my tastes.

You play as a cowgirl whose beloved horse has been stolen by a lying, murderous judge, and you have to get it back.

It's set in a wide town with quite a few locations, and even more that get unlocked over time. I say the humor is 'grotesque', but by that I mean that a lot of solutions are amusingly gross.

The characters are vivid and based on tropes and stereotypes, like a snake-oil salesman, a crazy miner/inventor, a brothel owner, etc. A few of them lean heavily into racial and cultural tropes, like an opium-smoking asian man named Lucky Strike or a hispanic saloon owner named La Muerte with a face painted like a sugar skull. I'm not really fond of relying on racial stereotypes, but all those characters are portrayed in a positive light as independent business people respected in their community.

The puzzles were pretty hard, and I had to get help on a couple, especially on finding a bezoar. I played the game over about a week on and off. Most puzzles are 'find an item in one area and use it in a creative way in another'. A lot of the humor is in finding out what item actually solves to problem.

The implementation of the game is a big improvement over all past Karella games, but still has a couple of rough edges here and there. I had trouble finding the right words to use the dynamite, or to use a rope. Fortunately, the game itself will also include the right wording to use as a hint, and has other features designed to help with implementation.

We played part of this in the Seattle IF Meetup, where it seemed well-received, and I finished it on my own later.

This is a short, one-move game from the author of the iterative Locked Door series.

You are alone with a hideous monster on a planet, alone and marooned. Most actions end the game immediately, with some kind of effect, while others give you more info.

A lot of work went into this. Decompiling this, there are a ton of verbs being implemented here.

Many of the results are similar to each other, but at least they're coherent. I got a Sisyphan vibe from the game (maybe projecting; I like Sisyphan things).

I can say I found it pretty funny when I realized what the general theme was. Worth trying out due to its short, easy-to-try length.

This is a very large Twine game. I think of all structures Sam Kabo Ashwell mentioned in his 'Standard patterns in choice-based games', it most resembles the sorting hat, as there are ten or so different paths that, once you pick, is generally linear to an ending.

You play as a person whose identity is stolen, leaving you as a gaping hole in an alternate world.

That world is one where anything can happen. A shop that has a closet can take you to another world, and so can biting a sucker.

Each path allows you the choice to become a 'man', like the Drake Man or the Darin' Man, giving you an awesome and alternate life.

I found the prose to be overall well done, and there were interesting ideas. But after 3 or so paths, I began to feel like there were, if it's even possible, too many good ideas!

Brandon Sanderson has said before that good magic systems are more interesting the more restrictions they have. This isn't a high fantasy novel about complex magic, but I think something similar applies here: if anything is possible, it's almost the same as if nothing is possible. After a while, it all kind of blended together.

I opened up the game in Twinery to see how much I missed, and realized that after an hour or so I had only seen about 20-30% of the game. I used the code to read the 'ultimate' ending, which I thought was roughly as fulfilling as the other endings, but had some cool descriptions of things.

Taste is subjective, but for me personally, I think I would have enjoyed it more if there were more structure in terms of themes or some other kind of rhythm to the game. Outside of that, the game is coded in a smooth and complex fashion and the writing is vivid and descriptive.

Whew! This game brought back a lot of memories.

It's a game that doesn't take too long to play. You are a person with an abusive significant other, Alex (I read the protagonist as coded female and the antagonist as coded male, but the game is purposely ambiguous and uses they/them pronouns for Alex).

Alex does things that are expressed as being for your best interest, but really they are for their own selfish interest. Keeping your away from your friends and family on social media , moving to be closer to their family but away from your friends and family, constantly worried that you will cheat (yep), shaming you for interests they're not into. All of which I've experienced in real life.

Actually, contemplating this game made me zone out for about an hour, thinking about things, and I wrote a big personal essay about it and realized I never finished this review. I guess I'll have to give this game points for emotional impact, that's sure. I found the choice structure not as compelling, but I can't think of any recommendations for it. It has real interactivity and limited options, but I feel it could be somehow pushed a little more. Overall, a game that has unsettled me to my core.

This is an intricate Dendry game where you spend New Year's Eve at a party with your parents, friends and acquaintances. You've burned a lot of bridges in the past, and it's all coming back to get you know.

I was surprised at the end to see that Depression Quest was not on the list of inspirations, as it has a lot of similarity with this game. Options that are selected are denied due to your bad feelings, or greyed out in the first place. Things you'd like to say can't be said, etc.

The New Year's Eve setting provides a good backdrop for the time limit, which is until 12:00. Just like a real party, it first feels like there's too much to do and then too little. This game directly reminded me of all the reasons I don't enjoy big parties with people outside my own family, especially parties where romance is possible but unlikely.

Romance is a theme in the game, but not in a positive way; there are numerous former crushes running around. Edit: (there actually are some positive romantic elements, but I found more negative options due to my choices)

The game has excellent attention to detail, especially in Chinese-heritage culture. Characters are provided, usually with translation, and the game describes food, drinks, Mah Jong, etc., together with westernized/globalized additions like Marvel movies and pumpkin pie.

Overall, this is a strong game. I appreciated its meta-commentary at one point about how it feels like interaction with human beings is an optimization puzzle, and I've felt like that before. The only thing for me that I didn't click with was the waiting around aimlessly that happened a little more than I would have preferred. Perhaps it was due to my own actions, though.

I played this as part of the Seattle IF meetup, and then played on my own later.

There is a long tradition in IF of space games where you start alone in or near a damaged space station and have to make it out alive or at least figure out what's happened. It's a genre I enjoy.

This one goes out of its way to focus on realistic aspects, something I haven't seen much before. A lot of images directly from NASA are used, as well as a variety of free images online that have been modified, with accompanying music.

Using airlocks requires a variety of processes, including exercising! Hadn't known that was a thing with pressure changes before.

I ran into a couple of issues with lists not lining up (numbers and text was mismatched) but I think that might just be my Chrome browser, as the same thing happened with a website my son was working on, so I don't think it's the author's fault.

The only thing I felt really lacking here was emotional engagement. The processes were interesting and clinical, and there were definitely places I could have hooked in emotionally (a picture of family, the loss of Commander Rico), but for whatever reason I just didn't feel that connection. Overall, well done scientific space adventure.

This game/narrative is one that references the IF world directly, something I'm always interested to see. I've played Bez's games since 2015 and been listening a lot on Twitter, so I was interested to see how things coalesce.

The result is a complex narrative similar in structure to last year's The Dead Account, but with very different content. Both games put you in the role of a moderator closing down the account of someone who's passed on, a kind of in-memoriam/Citizen Kane/Spoon River anthology review of someone's life and whether they are of worth.

What makes this game unusual is in its complex rewriting of reality and the IF world. It's a difficult feat to call out an entire community without calling out the individual people in it; to do so, Bez has created an entire false community replete with echoes of shadows of real people but which is so entirely different as to render it impossible to point fingers. This is a real feat; I feel like I've been embedded in the community under question here and played a role in many of these events but I couldn't point a finger at any person and say 'I know who that is!

For instance, the Jot Archive Volunteer Project is strongly reminiscent of both IFDB, the intfiction forums, twitter, and the old rec.arts.int-fiction forums and IFMUD. MrDear makes me thing of Ryan Veeder, Mr Patient/Sean Shore, Graham Nelson, etc.

The content of the game is several years worth of tweets or posts, describing a journey through games that is clearly (even mentioned as such in the author's note) Bez's own journey through the IF world, even if it doesn't always meet up one to one. Sometimes, the parallels are obvious (Bez's Queer in Public vs Algie's "Queer As F*** Because F*** You"), and other times its harder (there doesn't seem a clear parallel to the real 2020's Lore Distance Relationship, Bez's most popular game).

Points made about the community include:
-Twine is often overshadowed in big competitions by parser; even though there are clear outliers it remains the reality for most entrants
-Cis white males often have more success in IF with what seems to be less effort
-Due to the prominent position of some women in IF (which I'd assume would refer to both cis women like Emily Short and trans women like Porpentine), the marginalization of most people who aren't white cis men goes unnoticed

It's hard to disagree with those points.

Beyond that, there's some excellent quotes about writing games in general which I copied down:

"Making games is about giving somebody a hidey-hole to see my heart through if that makes sense? And nobody seems to really care about that imho."

I've often thought that IF and writing in general is a way of sharing a piece of your soul with someone. So I agree with that. But then he presents a new thought which hadn't occurred to me:

"But it is also only the version of me that was preserved at that time. AND does not mean you 100% know me or what I’m thinking. Unless I say it is all me in there, don’t assume that ffs."

I've never really thought about how media takes a snapshot of our current selves and saves it for the future, whether we want it to or not. I think that explains a lot of older authors wanting to remove things they wrote in the past that were objectionable or cringe.

And this is the last thing I copied down:
"I feel like my need for external approval is an ouroboros that will never EVER be fulfilled. Either I seek it and don't get it (often) or I seek it and do get the level I wanted (rare) but it ain't enough. My goal is so far away, and it keeps moving, so maybe I gotta lower my damn expectations—towards myself and in the IF world."

The end of the game concludes with Bez's current reality and deepest fears brought together to their possible end: the death of an author after a forgetting mind disease, followed by a second death when the community forgets him.

As a side note, I found it emotionally jarring when the game started with you helping an older IF figure to prune and delete people's old stuff, because that's what I'm actually doing in real life right now, working on a project where I close out people's old stuff that's no longer relevant. Fortunately, it's just bug reports, so no one's hard work or creative labor is being lost.

Assigning a rating to a game like this is behaving exactly like the narrative actors it contains, who judge and rank and sort and gatekeep. However, I am going to do so anyway:
+Polish: The game is thoroughly polished
+Descriptiveness: The writing is vivid and detailed.
+Emotional impact: clearly the game resonated with me
+Would I play again? I think so.
?Interacivity: On one hand, there's not much to do besides run through the list of things and then make a decision. On the other hand, the game itself talks about how stories don't have to be approached as systems first and stories later. On the other hand, I don't think I should give a high rating in a category just because the game calls it out. On the final hand, though, I wanted to rethink my decision at the end and spent a while reloading the page because there was no immediate reload, so it seems clear the interactivity worked for me at some level.

This is a quite long Twine game about preparing for and fighting in a cyborg boxing tournament.

It comes with custom images, styling and animations, mostly health bars moving up and down and some neater tricks near the end. It has music as well by a person called gigakoops which is pretty good.

The story is about a down-and-out boxer with a loved one needing medical attention. You, the boxer, get some aid from an old man in a run-down gym. Together you train for the big day when the tournament will begin.

Writing-wise, it's a competent and engaging blend of inspiration boxing movie and cyberpunk.

Choice-wise, I was a bit frustrated at first because so many choices were like 'yes', 'yes, but phrased differently', and 'yes, but even another way', with no 'no' in sight. I felt railroaded quite a bit at different times.

There is one major choice, which is which of three stats to focus on. This primarily comes into play late in the game, where high stats unlocking different paths.

The game has some nice narrative swerves, although one of the biggest ones was a double-swerve I didn't see coming. Also, norse mythology ties into the game more and more as the game continues.

Overall, here's what I think:

+Polish: The game is smooth and polished. There were a couple of bugs (my mom was referred to as 'he', and I almost clicked the 'restart' button because the menu moves up and down) but otherwise quite good for such a complex game.
+Descriptiveness: The descriptions were vivid.
-Interactivity: It pulled together at the end, but I felt confined for too much of the game.
+Emotional impact: I was into the story.
+Would I play again? Yeah, I'd like to see other paths.