Reviews by MathBrush

I enjoyed this poem-based choicescript game that was entered in Ectocomp, and was made in 4 hours or less.

The poem is written in verses of 4 lines each, with the 2nd and 4th lines rhyming.

The topic is a haunted wood with a deep and evil pond. You can get various achievements by delving into the pond's mysteries or exploring the woods.

I found deciphering the meaning of the poetry added an extra layer of interaction with the game, which I liked. A lot of poem IF games are very obtuse, but here the meanings were clear enough to understand.

The meter of the poem kept throwing me off; at times it seemed like it had a pattern, so my brain would set it up, but then it'd go off pattern. The number of syllables and the emphasis of syllables varies a lot. Here's an example:

Deep must the pool be,
For its exterior to be black as pitch
Strange the wind does not disturb,
The mirror smooth surface that seems to bewitch.

And another:

What lies 'neath the water,
Where the wind fitfully blows,
Undisturbed and dark with an algae scudded facade,
Surface unreflective in the sun's dawn glow.

There aren't any rules in poetry, of course, and I liked this quite a bit. But I wonder if it might have been good to either lean in harder to a rhyme scheme or meter or to just toss out the rules and go full free verse. But, given that I liked the game, I'm not sure either of those are necessary. Pretty fun!

This is an Ink game entered into Ectocomp, written in 4 hours or less.

It's story-focused, with a well-written tale about a father who has to get up in the middle of the night to help his son get to sleep.

The emphasis in this story is on details and emotions. Little reactions from people, the way that your mind picks out different things, the emotions that don't quite match up with what you'd expect.

There are multiple endings, which is interesting, but I didn't replay because I found mine satisfactory.

A sad game, but a good game.

This game was entered in Ectocomp.

It's essentially a long villain diatribe, first discussing how Christianity justifies cannibalism, then going off on a very long message with slow timed text that explains how they use traditional Vietnamese recipes to cook what is implied to be human meat.

The game has some great music in the background, and a cool (albeit somewhat busy) visual background.

It's hard to identify with straight-up villain stuff like this. When something is one-note, it's hard to feel invested. There is some variation in emotion; it swings between sadness, gruesomeness, and mundanity, but I think having a spark of light or hope, or some indication of true happiness, could have increased the contrast with the horror.

I didn't get frustrated by the timed text because I downloaded the file and edited it out.

The Vietnamese food and culture were the best aspects of the game, for sure, along with the music. Also I'd love to have this quote framed in my kitchen:

ANYTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING RESEMBLING "BREAD" IS BEYOND MY CAPACITY, NOT AS A CHEF BUT AS A "HUMAN BEING" WITH "LIMITED PATIENCE" and "THINGS TO DO, VASSALS TO KILL."

This is a brief but replayable Twine game. To me, it felt like a speed-IF that was polished up and made nice, and from the About page that's exactly what it was.

The styling is really nice, with a dark textured background and legible light grey serif text.

The writing has a thoughtfulness to it I appreciated. You play as a non-believer exploring an abandoned church, and a lot of people would just put random thoughts in about how the person hates religion and so on, but this game provides a more balanced approach; the narrator is an interested outsider, looking in but aware they will not ever take part.

Storywise, the game is brief, so much so that its narrative arc felt underdeveloped, which is the main drawback I found; I liked the story, there just wasn't much of it. You are investigating the church with a loved one, and things go wrong in a bad way.

The interactivity has quite a bit of depth, with many endings and achievements despite its short length. I wondered how they could fit so many results into such a short game, until I realized that the game underneath is tracking more variables than you'd think.

Overall, an impressive effort, but one I'd have liked more of.

This is a brief Texture game about falling in an infinite void. The setting gives me fond memories of the Magnus Archives, but the tone is very different; rather than using the infinite fall to provoke horror or terror, its used here as a sort of metaphor, although a vague one.

You have a companion in this falling, a mysterious person dressed as a rockstar whom you can learn more about.

There were a lot of real choices in the game, as most options disappeared after choosing one. I didn’t choose to replay because I found my one playthrough satisfying.

This is a short branching Twine game with links to other websites and multimedia about a lion.

I don’t have much to say about this one. It’s pretty chaotic; each branch does something really different and then returns. I found a death ending but no other ending.

Parts of it were sweet and parts of it were funny. The writing is a little weird; not in a ‘bad spelling/grammar’ kind of way necessarily, but in a logical flow kind of way. It jumps from idea to idea, kind of like listening to someone spitball ideas about a game.

It had some interesting links about lion diet and a girl hypnotizing a frog, so that was cool. Interesting game.

This is a Texture game, where you drag actions onto nouns.

It also seems to be incomplete, or possible part of a series, as it includes ‘TO BE CONTINUED’ at the end.

You play as a famous and talented musician who has had one of the best years of their life. Leading up to their biggest performance yet, a deal they made comes due.

Overall the characters were interesting and the story a timeless one that has been retold in many ways in many ages. It felt a bit slight; there is a complete narrative arc, though. I almost wonder if it would have been stronger without the ‘to be continued’.

This is a Texture game, one of several in IFComp. It’s a game system where you drag actions onto nouns, with different actions having different nouns. Hovering over the nouns can add more info, as well. It’s a character study of the main character, a sculptor who has given up everything to buy one final marble block and carve a sculpture.

The man is deeply invested in this. He focuses on his work despite the loss of things like family, friends, and good health. The writing is highly dramatic, with unusual positioning across the screen and extensive use of metaphor. Here’s a sample sentence: ‘Her words were cascaded venom, and you, their subject.’

It also changes between tenses from time to time, in a way that’s hard to know if it’s intentional or not. I found at least one important typo. In general, the text is ambitious but I was confused from time to time.

What works best for me here is the effort put into descriptiveness. I can feel the author’s enthusiasm for the story and that gives me enthusiasm for the story. But for me, it was hard to sustain that emotion; the whole story was at the peak of intensity, but I think it could have benefitted from having more contrast between high-intensity and low-intensity. But that’s a personal choice.

There is some intermittent strong profanity in the story that, for me, doesn’t fit the abstract and metaphorical text very much, but it may be intended as an earthy contrast to the heights of the rest of the game.

This is a twine game that uses some simple branching and rejoining to tell a short story. In the absence of state tracking and styling, its stripped down to just the essentials of twine. Such a story can be amazing or awful, depending mostly on the storytelling.

This game has 2 main paths and four different endings. I played through once, backed up and tried another path, and then looked at the code. The code gave me a much deeper appreciation for the game, as I hadn’t checked out the other 2 paths. They strongly complement the other paths, so I highly recommend playing through at least three paths to see how things go.

It’s a shorter game, and all the paths tell of a cycle of rebirth and of timelines in a universe that has gone wrong. It also focuses on love.

Overall, it’s pretty slight and small, but I loved the storytelling trick with the different paths. The game could benefit a bit from more work; for instance, there were numerous typos in the early game, around 1 per screen that I noticed. Other than that, it seems like a complete story as envisioned by the author.

This is a choose your own adventure pdf. The last one of these in IFComp I’d heard of was Simon Christiansen’s Trapped in Time, which was a long pdf and included a system for maintaining inventory through loops.

This game is different. It’s a bit shorter, and focuses on a real-life situation: psychosis. It describes different episodes that can happen in the life of someone with psychosis and ways that it can be treated.

It also has very well-done drawings that add significantly to the game.

Overall, I found it small but interesting and would definitely check out future work by this team!