Reviews by MathBrush

This is a complex story written in Inform. You play as a man who recently experienced a haunting tragedy. Driven to solitude, you take work at a national park working in a lookout.

But things aren't okay out here. Something strange is happening to animals and hikers, and there's little you can do to stop it.

The game is story-driven; puzzles are minimal, and the borders of your little world are enforced strictly, while the game takes most actions for you. I felt like pacing was slightly off, where a little more guidance in some parts and a little less in others could have worked better, but it's hard to put my finger on anything.

I think the story mixed together the threads of isolation, terror, and loss pretty well, and I found to be one of the better short games I've played this year.

This is an excellent creepy short Twine game made for Ectocomp in less than 4 hours.

It features custom CSS styling that nicely represents multiple worlds. You play as someone swimming in a pool that serves as a sort of portal to a darker (or lighter?) world.

There are 3 endings, one of which took me a while to find. The writing is nice and tight, the pacing is good for a short game, and it's visually appealing.

I had to look up the name, as a US resident. Apparently a Lido refers to a public outdoor swimming area, which makes sense since that's what this game is all about.

This game is set in 1500's France. You are a student, with a group of other students, and there are rumours of a witch in the city.

This is a short game made for a speed competition in Choicescript. Despite that, it manages to build up some fun tension in a short time. The main objects of interest are interacting with your fellow witch hunters and trying to decide whether you are really doing what's right or not.

As a caution, this game contains (moderate spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)extreme violence to animals.

I found the ending a bit abrupt, but overall I liked the tension in the game. This was one of the more enjoyable Ectocomp 2021 games for me!

This is a Petite Morte Ectocomp 2021 game, written in 4 hours or less and featuring the custom parser system used in the author's game The Libonotus Cup.

Visually, the game looks good in terms of font and color.

The story and gameplay are that you are going to the bathroom when suddenly you appear as a ghost in front of a tower. There are 8 locations around the tower, arranged in a circle. Unfortunately, you don't have hands that can pick up anything.

So you have to visit different locations and gain different powers. One location had a riddle which was based on a pun, which could be hard for non-native English speakers.

The setting is interesting, and the descriptions are well-developed for a 4-hour game, but the whole thing is somewhat disjointed and nonsensical. It's just a fun, short puzzly game, and there's nothing wrong with that.

This is a fairly short twine game made in 4 hours for Ectocomp 2021 (Petite Morte division).

In it, there is an interesting take on viewpoint as the main text is from the point of view of your (evil) apartment, while your choices are your own.

There is a short part introducing the setup, followed by a puzzle part with limited moves.

I found two endings, but both were pretty depressing, so I'm not sure if I 'won' or not.

-Polish: The game seemed bug free, but had little in the way of styling (which makes sense for a speed-IF!)
+Descriptiveness: The gam isn't heavy on environmental details but has a distinct voice.
+Interactivity: I enjoyed the main puzzle
-Emotional impact: I felt like I didn't have time to really absorb the chillingness, and the two endings weren't strongly differentiated
-Would I play again? I feel like I got the whole message in the first go.

This is a Twine game about a book. The book is said to drive people to madness.

The book is associated with 7 colors, and each of those colors with different (dark) facets of life. You first read about others who took on those colors, then read the book itself, and choose a future, associating yourself with a color/facet.

There's a weird fact in writing that if you use too much darkness, gore, or sexual references, it goes right past being powerful and/or disturbing and goes straight to silliness/camp, and I think that's what's happened here. For instance: (Spoiler - click to show)YoU doN’t knoW True JoY. StiCk youR FiNger in your eYe, put a KniFe throUgh youR TonGue. The writing is so extreme, ranging from insanity to guts to strong profanity to bizarre sexual references, that it loses a lot of its effectiveness. I think it could have benefited from being contrasted with something else, like more specific, concrete details or reactions from the PC that show how a human would feel about this, etc. What we don't see in fiction is often far more effective than what we do.

Of course, reading is completely subjective, and I could easily imagine a review saying 'This was amazing! The variety of voices, the visceral details, I loved it!', so I encourage people to try it for themselves.

I played both versions of this game: the 'basic' 0.5 mb strippd-down version and the full 800 mb version with multimedia. The latter is definitely better, since the contrast of blocky white letters on black background makes the basic version hard to read.

This is a fairly short game, as typical for Ectocomp games, but maximizes its content by being choice-free. This style is sometimes known as Kinetic fiction, which draws its interaction potential from our own self-pacing and choosing to further the story. It doesn't always work for me, but when the writing is good, like here, I like it. Another good example is Polish the Glass.

The story is about a woman whose mother hates fat and pressures her to make a deal with a demon that would keep her skinny forever...until it didn't.

I've seen a lot of discussion of fatphobia online, with camps who are extremely upset with each other. The most extreme on one side get extremely upset at any online posts showing a person who's not skinny, while the most extreme on the other claim that obesity doesn't cause any health problems.

This game focuses on a gentler course than either of those extremes. Instead of telling us whether fatness is good or bad, it asks us to decouple our personal sense of worth from our body size; we can still make plans on decide what to do with our weight, but not to please others or out of shame.

I think that's an important message, since a guilt-fueled obsession with weight can lead to many bad habits that are worse than simply being overweight in the first place, such as eating disorders.

This game is an overflow for ideas that didn't fit into the author's previous Pig Latin-themed game, Under They Thunder.

Like the majority of Andrew Schultz games, this is a world with names based on some linguistic trick (here, Pig Latin) that is surreal and focuses a lot on overcoming bullies using self-confidence.

It's a speed-IF with a small map, and due to the constraints almost all objects are undescribd.

The main gameplay element is that you walk around, but the map is blocked, but occasionally you get an item when you're walking that helps you pass them.

There's a little more to it than that, but I confess that I couldn't grasp the main puzzle at the end without glancing at the walkthrough.

This is a wordplay game centered around the idea of repeated sequences of letters (like how the title, 'psyops, yo' consists of 'psyo' repeated twice).

This is smaller than most Andrew Schultz games, which makes sense for an ectocomp entry. It has 4 puzzles you need to solve.

I found two of them with a little thinking and felt good about it. The other two stumped me; I used an online word solver to figure it out, and both surprised me as I felt they could be hinted a little more.

Overall, a fun concept.

This is the third game in the Crumbs series by Katie Benson, all of which deal with a struggling foodbank and the effects of Brexit. All games in the series are speed-IFs.

In this one, your foodbank is one of many across the UK which are being pressured into closing by HappyHealth, a government-backed private company taking over health care in the nation.

You can call three people to discuss the foodbank, deciding what to share with them, what to ask them about. Then you make the final decision.

Each person seemed real, and the text was interesting. I felt like I had some interesting choices. However, there was a bug where I talked to Trudka and then Mom, but the game thought I had talked to Mika instead, so it looped me in talking to Mom over and over. I solved it by talking to Trudka, then Mika, then mom.

(Edit: In the latest version, this bug has been fixed).