Reviews by MathBrush

This is an Adventuron game set in the plains of Manitoba. It involves research about local plants and wildlife and about Ukrainians who emigrated to Canada.

It also contains a jumpscare, so fair warning! Scared me quite a bit. Just the one scare, though.

Overall, it's a well-done horror story that is elevated by the obvious research and care into the background details. It has 10 different achievements, of which I found 8.

Overall:
*Polish: I didn't run into any parser problems, the art is well-done and the prose is smooth.
*Descriptiveness: A lot of vivid imagery and attention to detail.
*Interactivity: I liked the open-endedness of the achievements but also always had something to do.
*Emotional impact: Pretty scary, although 80% of it was the jumpscare.
*Would I play again? Yeah, I think I could.

This game uses the Strand engine, which is the same engine (or a related one) used to put the Magnetic Scrolls games on the web. It features a parser but most interactions are through choices. The majority of non-choice interactions are typing the name of an object to give or WAITing. It features numerous images as well. For me, the images were larger than the screen size, requiring some scrolling that obscured some of the text.

This game reminds me of Steve Meretzky games, like Leather Goddesses of Phobos or his later graphical games. You play as a nerdy programmer who runs into tons of women, all of whom look like 'sexy' Halloween costumes (sexy pirate, sexy robot, etc.). There are references to sexbots and wanting to kiss the nerdy programmer, so it has a lot of that 'nerd gets the girls' vibe from 80's and 90's films and games. It has a shop called '9/11'instead of '7/11', which, I thought, 'Is that a September 11 reference?', but I thought probably not. But then the clerk there is named Abdul, which could be a pretty weird Sep. 11 reference, a stereotype about shop owners, or just a coincidence.

Gameplay consists of warping to different time periods and solving puzzles that are mostly about puzzling out patterns through trial and error. There are a lot of combinations and the puzzles seem designed to take some time, and I ended up using the walkthrough fairly soon.

The themes and messages didn't really gel with me, and I would have preferred a little smaller pictures to give the text more room. I appreciate the technical design that went into the game and can imagine several people who I think would enjoy it significantly.

I always enjoy a good story about a strange house that changes over time; I haven't read House of Leaves, but I've seen many games and stories cite it as an inspiration. Others I've seen include Map by Ade McTavish, Aaron Reed's novel Subcutaneous and the Backrooms urban legend.

This novel focuses on the 'house grows larger' largely as a metaphor for relationships, shown in individual vignettes (I'm sorry for making constant comparisons, but the vignette system reminds me of Spoon River Anthology, a story told entirely through gravestones).

People come into the house and find themselves changed, some losing friends, some losing each other, some arguing, some finding friendship, but the house always grows.

Overall, I found it polished and satisfying. The only thing I had trouble with was occasionally not really knowing what to do next (especially around the orange juice), and not knowing when the game would end. The narrative arc kind of meanders around, like the house itself. Otherwise, I found this to be a solid and thoughtful story.

This is a thoughtful game, a mostly-linear ghost story about a roommate that haunts the place and about relationships and our dealings with the others.

I liked the writing in this, it's really about turning an inner eye on ourselves and seeing the bad habits and unhealthy relationships that we have let become so natural that we can't even see them anymore.

It also has an interesting take on ghosts, similar to but slightly different from most representations I've seen in media.

This a a very well-written but overall unstrusctured short, linear twine story about a funeral home late at night, and a cat.

It cites influences like House of Leaves, and has a bilingual protagonist, with the game including vivid details of a Hispanic family's life and culture. The protagonist is relatable and there's some great scene-by-scene writing.

This setup gave me huge expectations, but the story ends with a very quick infodump and sudden ending with nothing but a 'start over' link. It felt like it was missing a third of it; the ending could have worked with more middle exposition, or it could have worked with a longer denouement, but I was left feeling unsatisfied. But I would love to read more by this author, as I love the style.

This is a weird game.

It's a unity-based visual novel with some video title cards, jazz music (or maybe ragtime?) and static cut-outs of animals.

You play as what I can only describe as a deeply disturbed squirrel, one out of touch both with the thoughts and emotions of others but also with physical reality itself.

While the game isn't super long (about 5 or 6 vignettes), each explores a dark facet of the human existence. It feels like the 'depressing half' of Anna Karenina (the one centered on Anna, as opposed to Kitty and Levin).

But in the end, even a narcissistic and untethered-to-reality squirrel deserves to live and has some human worth, and is perhaps deserving of love (although this goes against the squirrels own desires, so maybe not).

All in all, I didn't expect the pieces of this game to fall together for me the way they did, but I think I'll end up contemplating this for a while.

This is a game from the recent 'Running out of Ink' itch anthology.

In this Twine story, you play as a tired author who just moved out of her parents' house and is trying to write a story over 3 days. Your choices during each of the three days affects the resulting story, which you can read at the end.

A lot of it is very relatable; trying to manage your creative output by procrastinating through playing games (something I've been doing myself except with writing reviews), writing for the 'wrong outlet' (where you are verbose) instead of the 'right one' (where you get stuck). I especially related to listening to podcasts while playing grindy games (I can highly recommend mixing the Magnus Archives podcast with Sunless Sea/Sunless Skies).

The character is depicted clearly and the variable story at the end is neat (the code for it is basically a time cave, with three possible first pages, 9 second, 27 third, etc. approximately).

My only caveats are that the game could be tidier. Paragraphs run together; I'd rather see each new paragraph indented or a full line left between them, like the finished story at the end. And there were a couple of noticeable typos (like 'to' for 'two') that could be caught by using Twine's text dump feature and running the result through Grammarly.

This game is part of the Running out of Ink: Limited Spaces anthology recently released on itch.

The story is about you, a youth who discovers a mysterious door in the forest. You are barred from entering, but when you return as an adult, no one can hold you back.

Gameplay is centered on finding journal entries and tapes. The tapes have very nice voice acting, although I was playing around my kid and the first tape started with some loud profanity, so I ended up just reading the thoughtfully-provided transcripts instead lol.

The feel of the game is simultaneously full of terror but also calm. All of the damage is in or from the past. There are lots of spiders, claustrophobic situations, darkness, hints of obsession, etc.

There are some puzzles in play. The first puzzle completely stumped me. I was flabbergasted, not knowing if I had enough info. Then I realized (moderate-to-strong hint)(Spoiler - click to show)certain parts of the documents are highlighted.

Overall, I found the storytelling high-quality, professional tier; this reads like a sci-fi story in an anthology you'd see displayed at a Barnes and Noble table. The design and layout are custom Twine that look very nice, especially the tapes.

Overall, it's a strong game. I don't know if I'd replay it; while every piece was strong, games also some times need a je ne sais quoi that ties it all together, and for me I didn't get that overarching sense of completion that would make a game perfect. But it is a game I can recommend and praise.

This 2022 French IFComp game really reminded me of 60s and 70s science fiction books of my dad's, which often had hard-hitting social issues not as an allegory but as the main feature of the story, with the science fiction only serving to shed light on the bigger issue.

This game is about androids but also about young white men, incel culture, etc.

In 5 short vignettes (and an epilogue), we encounter a growing number of young men who are convinced that they are not human, but are, in fact, androids.

But strangely it is only androids, and not gynoids. No minorities think they are androids either.

It's worth reading. For a non-native speaker, it felt long, but it was around 7K words total in my playthrough, so definitely doable. Gave me a lot of thoughts and taught me a lot about French slang and 'cuisine bretonne'.
Your choices in each story generally are about choosing between making a situation more volatile or making things more calm. The interactivity felt a little weak; occasionally it seemed clear my choices were doing something to the story but often it didn't feel that way. The excellent writing did a lot to mitigate that.

This is an entrant into the 2022 French IFComp. It is a prologue that covers the first scene or so of Mozart's opera Cosi Fan Tutte.

It's very appealing visually, with a detailed backdrop and avatars for speakers.

Overall, I found it solid, but I felt less capable of making decisions that change the story. Most options were about reacting, with a few important actions. I wasn't sure if anything was being tracked, but at the end it listed my stats and showed that I had changed things a bit. It might be good to have a way to check that more often in the finished game!