Reviews by MathBrush

This game features you as a crew member on a ship that has undergone a catastrophe. You have to race against time to survive and to save others!

Gameplay revolves around physics and physicality: pushing, pulling, using forces, temperature, gas, etc. There is a great deal of attention to physical details of things, such as inventory limit and 'recipes' requiring specific objects in specific orders. Everything about the game demands doing things precisely and in the proper way, like following shipboard directions only; even the proper way to name a spanner is provided!

The game starts under a timer, and I had to restart many times before finding the solution. After that, it opens up more.

It contains a cryptography puzzle, using standard codebreaking techniques and even with a provided password. I found that I preferred doing that with online software rather than working through it directly.

Overall, I didn't really find any bugs. The game's atmosphere reminds me of 70's to 80's action novels that my dad had lying around the house by some guy that was kind of like Tom Clancy but not (less military stories, more stuff like boat crashes).

This game was very funny, and pretty short and simple. It's Hawaiian shirt day at work, but you've forgotten to wear one! And, in fact, anything else but underwear!

You have to grab anything and everything you can to make clothes, starting from the most primitive to the less.

I only encountered a couple of minor bugs (no paragraph breaks sometimes where it seems like there might be some, and Mo is improper named so is referred to as 'the Mo' sometimes).

This is honestly a very funny game to me. I enjoyed every action I took.

This game has a clever meta concept: you have to switch between different versions of the game, installing and uninstalling upgrades to progress.

In early versions of the game, you can see things like objects with can't be interacted with or placeholder text. In later versions, you get more advanced things like NPC conversation.

This idea of being able to switch back and forth between the two modes and explore outside the bounds of the game is brilliant!

It just doesn't last very long, and it can be hard to figure out when you can use these abilities or why. So the concept has great promise, and this version is okay, but I didn't feel that it filled out the measure of its promise.

I had a great time with this game, then a bad time, then a pretty good time.

This is a PunyJam game, written using PunyInform, a variant of Inform designed to fit onto small devices.

It has one of my favorite game tropes, multiple worlds that all play off of each other. You start in one, but the game shifts you every few minutes into another, and you have to solve pieces of each one to figure out what's going on overall.

It uses nice color changes.

Where I had less enjoyment was a puzzle I got very stuck on in the CPU world. I turned out that there was one object I had overlooked in a paragraph, and so I spent over an hour trying over and over again to figure out what was wrong. I decompiled the game, used all in-game hints, got help online but had to ask for multiple hints. I don't know why I got so stuck! Most of it is my fault, but I think having some gentle nudges on what to focus on could help. And there were a few items that didn't have any descriptions.

So, overall started out loving it, got frustrated, but I still like the concept and most of the gameplay. Very fun.

This was a fun treat of a game to experience. You are a violent death machine, used as a pawn in an interplanetary war.

And you love slime prince, one of many duplicates of a true prince. The duplicates are made of slime, mere imitations designed as fodder for assassins like yourself.

The game is a limited parser game, and consists of slowly gaining capabilities over a map of around 20 (?) locations. Most capabilities are motion based.

The worldbuilding is both extensive and light; it's clear that a great deal of thought has gone into developing this world, but we mostly get hints and light touches of it, through the window of the slime prince's thoughts.

I did get stuck at one point, but the HINT command is gentle and helpful. I didn't use it at first, and ended up 'lawnmowering' for a long time. I wish I had turned to help sooner!

Overall, the writing is strong, the game is enjoyable. This is something that can be picked up and played relatively quickly, but is long enough to be substantial.

This game always shows up on lists when I'm searching alphabetically, due to its use of parentheses, so I wanted to review it.

It's a Twine game that makes heavy use of 3d isometric perspectives. You play as a little rabbit whose world has suddenly gotten a lot larger.

The game has a kind of mix of cynical and dadaist worldviews. The characters make rape jokes and use strong profanity, drug use is mentioned frequently, and there is a long quest to see the color of the sky, which can break your mind.

The visuals were very nice. The overall philosophy reminded me of late stage Beatles. I think the game is well put together, but it didn't move me emotionally.

This game takes place in the same universe as Pageant and New Year's Eve, 2019.

This has one of the best mechanics I've seen used in the Single Choice Jam, which requires that players can only make one choice of any important.

What this game does is have many choices in a short-but-not-inconsequential game, but almost all of the options are greyed out (something I've seen in games like Depression Quest, but not recently). So you get lots of 'choices', and can see what you could have tried, but can only make one choice. This is great at giving the illusion of choice in a positive way.

The story is messy, like a lot of real-life relationships are. You have someone you mutually confessed attraction for months ago, but covid has happened and you haven't seen each other. Now you're isolated and it's so lonely. You contact your person and...well, the rest is what the game is about.

Some strong profanity, which seemed to fit the characters and situation. Overall well-written.

This parser game was written for Ectocomp.

In this game, you have been abducted by aliens for 3.5 years and are currently being held prisoner by them. They require you to do 2 tests: one with yes/no questions about historical views on morality, and then a practical test.

The yes/no questions are about scenarios from Cicero and Nietzsche, with a fictional viewpoint thrown in.

The practical involves a tense conversation between four characters pitted against each other.

The conversation in this game uses ASK/TELL, but I had trouble knowing what topics could be asked or told, and mainly just asked people about themselves.

Apparently it is possible to win, but I had difficulty doing so.

Interesting concept. It is a speed-IF, and could use more polish, and it is a little depressing, but it's also thoughtful.

This is a neat little Adventuron game that is highly constrained but manages to fit a real puzzle in.

You are at a campfire with three friends, and you are about to tell spooky tales. One camper tells the tale, and everyone else participates, including you.

The other campers and a book serve to add complexity to the game, each giving you more options to edit the final tale. Only one tale gives a good ending...

This was highly polished (bug-free as far as I can see) and, thought slight, was enjoyable, especially seeing the effects of your actions on the story.

This game was an attempt to make a dungeon crawler in 4 hours, and I think it did a pretty good job in that timeframe. I used UNDO a lot, and had to peek at the string dump to get the tiny key, but it might be fun to go back through without UNDO at some point.

You have weapons and armor, and you fight enemies in randomized combat, with damage and hit/miss chances affected by your weapons and armor. Defeating enemies gets gold (which doesn't seem to have an in-game use) and more weapons or armor. There's one puzzle that doesn't involve fighting.

As a game, it's okay, but as a prototype, it seems you could build something fun out of this. In a larger game I'd like some way to heal and more to do with the gold. But it can be fun to prototype systems in Ectocomp; I did that my conversation system and have used it for years, so hopefully the author got something out of this game.