Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This game was educational and fun. In it, you are a ruler of Sumeria and must discover the cause of a plague and pray to the Gods to ensure that it is cured.

Gameplay is fairly simple; you're given a description of the current issue and have to figure out what would most please the Gods about what you do.

It's a little different than 'guess what the author is thinking' since instead we're guessing what people thousands of years ago are thinking, as this is based on historical documents. I found that really fascinating!

This game features a friend who says things that make you feel uncomfortable, or that are otherwise inappropriate.

You can choose to either unfriend them or still be their friend. At each stage it says that the probability of you unfriending them for that specific comment is .1% times the number of times that you've ignored your friend's comment.

If you eventually unfriend them, it will list the cumulative probability that you ever would have unfriended them.

The whole thing is a thought experiment: while minor things can seem too small to end a friendship over, the cumulative weight of many things can be a good reason.

For me, the whole game is centered mechanically around the probability scheme and narratively around the friendship idea. And the probability thing to me isn't as effective as it could be. It does teach the idea of cumulative probability and how even small percentages can grow, but there are three weird things. First, the probability that we'll quit right then has no bearing at all on what we, the players, do. Are we intended to simulate the game and only have a .01% chance of quitting on the first term? It doesn't count what we do and simulate it. It's possible we could be watching someone else's universe where they have a percent chance of quitting, but since we're in control, that percent isn't true.

Second, why does each individual chance of quitting go up linearly?

And third, if we want to demonstrate the snowball effect of independent successive probability choices as an educational lesson, why not fix the probability of 'quitting each turn' and show that even with a low constant probability, the cumulative probability can get large? As it is, it might confuse players into thinking that the large cumulative probability is primarily caused by the increasing individual probability and not by the cumulative effect.

The friendship part is interesting to contemplate and a good thing to ask ourselves. Do we forgive people for their past transgressions? Do we conditionally forgive people as long as they stop doing the thing they shouldn't be doing? How many times do we forgive? So I think leading to that contemplation is the game's highlight.

My view on this game seesawed wildly over time.

I played it while going through the short game showcase in fairly rapid order. I felt dismay at seeing the large chunk of text in the first passage. Then I clicked through as fast as I could without reading to estimate the size of the game (since most choice-based games lack such indications, although this one turned out to be in acts). I found out that it was essentially 'click to move forward', and I sighed; the sigh deepened when I realized each page had many 'aside' links that went to several-page long linear texts.

So this, in the end, is just a long story, with mild nonlinearity. That means that, rather than judging it against all interactive fiction, where bad writing can be made up for by clever mechanics, I would instead be comparing it to all written stories.

And in that vein, it is good, getting better as it goes on, due to its slow buildup. But I feel like the narrators could have been more strongly differentiated in voice (all felt pretty refined, educated, resigned and frank, despite describing very different events) and that more of a plot arc could have been built up; the climax seemed sudden with no denouement.

I do believe this is just a matter of taste; I prefer more pulpy/genre fiction than literary fiction, and I can think of several people I could recommend this to who would deeply enjoy it. For me, I don't think my time was wasted and I'm glad the author has made it, but I missed the things mentioned above and, as a work of IF, I would have loved more involvement.

On a side note, the 'restart' button is in the lower right corner, and the 'move on' button was right next to it, and sometimes the way to move on was clicking a word, so I ended up clicking 'restart' on accident several times, often when the passages were most exciting. I feel like this is more my fault than the author's fault, so I'm only mentioning this so that others can avoid being dumb like me.

I played through this game once and then backed up a choice or two to try a couple more endings.

You're in a pond. Why? Because your one true love has been cursed, of course! He's been turned into a frog!

Unfortunately, it gets a bit more complicated than that. Over the next few screens of gameplay, you have the chance to try to track down what really happened to your love.

Overall, I found this charming (pun intended). The idea could have stood up to more depth. I think there was possibly a bug with frog color, as I was told a certain frog was eaten then got an ending involving that same frog, but I might have misread it. The writing was the highlight in this game for me.

I could identify with this game for sure. It's pretty small and doesn't dig in-depth in its topic, but I'm rating it higher because I see myself in it.

In this brief Choicescript game, the protagonist is constantly late (it doesn't say to what; school? work? church?). Most of the game is about how you feel about that. Are you going to do better? Did you find the cause? Do you just self-recriminate?

For circumstances partially within my control, I've been late to work more than 90% of the time over the last 6 years. Like the protagonist, I know it's possible to be on time because it's happened before, but also like the protagonist I find it pretty difficult (in my case, partially because I transport other people to other places).

So I was glad to find this little piece that was like a self-reflective poem to me (it's not structured as poetry, but it itched the same part of my brain).

This game reminded me of Baby Tree, in a way. Both games are minimalistic with imagery that is means to be anywhere from mildly upsetting to deeply disturbing (depending on your particular phobias).

In this game, a 12-legged box is relentlessly pursuing you. There aren't that many options for directions. As you explore, you find some objects made with ASHII art (which is what I assume the game calls ASCII art, maybe with some modifications).

I got lost a couple of times (in one case not recognizing that something was a room exit), but there's a guidebook. This was written for Neo-Twiny Jam, so it has less than 500 words total.

I think that when going for an unsettling feel, a minimalist, mostly unimplemented game like this can work better than a more polished game. I could see this being the kind of game described in a creepypasta.

I opened and played this brief twine game for the Short Game Showcase for 2024.

It was written in less than 500 words. It is laid out as a web of nodes, making it highly non-linear. The wording is intentionally rich and requires careful reading.

It has a nice background image and overall impressive styling. I didn't like how small the words were, and was going to complain in this review, but then I found the settings option and it changes that, so I thought that was really thoughtful and shows how much work went into this game.

The words in the game made me think of nature a lot. While there are many themes in the poem, the highlighted words tend to revolve around weather, plants, and time, so I thought a lot about the progression of time and of life. It was nice.

This game was entered in the Short Games Showcase. It's a choicescript game and begins with a lengthy opportunity to pick your gender, outfit, romantic interests, strengths, etc. before beginning with the main story.

The setup is that you're in a kind of trashy forest town where the woods are haunted with what the elders call angels. Your town has a lot of rules set up to help you avoid them, but you all are braving them during the school dance.

Your town has its share of bullies, and one of them is on the hunt for you due to events out of your control. All of this comes together at the dance.

I enjoyed the setup/premise and liked the characters and writing. I was a tiny bit disappointed with the ending, as I was hoping more for a survival story while I felt it was leaning more for an urban (or, in this case, rural) fantasy. Overall though this works as a complete whole.

This is a fairly brief game made for the Short Games showcase. In it, you play as a traveller at an airport who is going through a crisis of sorts.

Throughout the game, it shows your mental state as distracted and unsettled. It reveals different details about your life that show it to be unhappy.

In the end, there is a single choice, centered on the main relationship you've had in the last while.

It's not a bad concept, and I liked the individual scenes. My mind didn't tie it all together, though, and the stakes at the end didn't feel as fresh as maybe they could have. I thought the writing was high quality overall.

This is a short story written in Twine that was entered into the Bluebeard Jam.

I was first struck upon playing it by its nice presentation and how well-written it was. I loved the voice of the narrator and the interesting details.

Later on, at the time the protagonist approached (Spoiler - click to show)the basement door, I began to lost the thread of the story, and I quickly became confused. The writing was still effective, I just couldn't picture the plot in my mind.

I thought there might be a choice at the end, like the Single Choice Jam, but it was just a story in the end, with links used only for pacing.