Reviews by MathBrush

I am absolutely not a fan of visual novels usually, as they're harder to pick up and put down due to timed text and the graphics usually take up most of the screen making it harder to multitask.

Despite that, I found this game great. It's an entry in the French comp for 2021. The gameplay is spread over 4 days and several locations, each with their own theme music.

While art isn't usually part of my review criteria, they really nailed it here, and the art is very responsive, with parallalax movement following your mouse, different animations at key points, etc.

The characters are all unique and I definitely had favorites early on.

There's not many choices compared to a typical Twine or Choicescript game, but they seemed to have some kind of longer-term effect. There is one huge choice at the end. I translated it for my son who was walking by, and we cried a little at our ending.

Great game. I thought of giving it a 4 right after playing it, but after several hours I definitely think this is a 5 game.

This game is just straight-up a 'you are piloting a giant robot, go out there and fight' choicescript game. And it does really well.

The plotline is exciting. You are one of the best ace pilots in a resistance movement, and there is a hotshot pilot on the other side who keeps challenging you while both sides work on superweapons. The game is set at the culmination of a 5-year war.

Characters are varied, each with a couple of strong traits. I didn't romance anyone in my playthrough, but that's because I played a completely aggressive jerk.

The stats are simple and easy to understand. Difficulty comes not from guessing which stat to use, but about weighing your decisions, with some decisions and plotlines better motivated by different stats. So, for instance, you might have to choose between being cautious and saving civilians or being bold and striking the enemy while they strike you, with different stats helping different strategies.

I ended up with what I'd consider a 'bad' ending, but the game is smooth and varied enough that replay wouldn't be bad. I wouldn't say the game is short at at all, but it went by faster for me than most games of its size due to my interest in the plot and the lack of obstacles in terms of stat confusion.

I believe this one was very popular in past years and probably popular now. It makes sense; it's fun.

I've noticed that most Choicescript games' quality matches up pretty well with the total and number of ratings on the omnibus app, with most of the lower-scored ones ending up being confusing or dissappointing.

This game proved the exception for me. While it had problems, especially near the start, I ended up enjoying it quite a bit especially the ending.

In this game, you play as a monk/scholar in 1000 AD who is entrusted with a book of marvelous prophecy called the Chronicon Apocalypticon. At the same time, you discover a disembodied hand running around. You embark on a quest to save (or destroy) England, meeting many weird characters and discovering the magical side of the world (with undead, elves, dragons, etc.)

The NPCs all are very different from each other and creative. They include a beekeeper and his special bee helper, a Joan-of-Arc type woman, a conflicted nun, a bard, and others.

I enjoyed the fact that 'being good at reading' is a superpower in this game. At least, it's a skill that can be used to save the world.

Overall, the main characteristics it has with other less popular CoG titles is its weaker/confusing stats and it's lack of flexibility when it comes to romances (there are romances, but gender of ROs is fixed and many will only specific types of romance or none at all).

By 'weak stats' I mean that I ended the game with almost all skills at 50%, one in the 60's and two in the 50's. This can cause a lot of problems, such as trying to figure out if you just screwed up your stats royally, or figuring out what's enough to pass challenges. My personal analogy for stat growth is that it's like walking speed in a 3d game: really low stat boosts are like having a character move at 1/10 of normal speed.

By 'confusing' stats, I mean that it can be really hard to figure out which stats are which; for instance, the game frequently asked me if I would do things myself or work as a team, but I cannot identify any skill that that corresponds to. On the other hand, there are many tracked stats that I can't for the life of me tell how they apply in the game.

Many people in reviews for this game mention difficulty with stat checks, which I think is a result of the above issues.

So that's a lot of time spent on the weaknesses. The good thing is that the game is at its worst at the beginning and only gets better with time. The final chapter was great, on par (in my opinion) with Heroes of Myth, another excellent Choicescript game. The actual last page was one of the best I've seen (in my playthrough).

As the game progresses, you can figure out the author's signposts for the stats. It's usually the simplest possible: he mentions the name of the stat in the choice.

As the game goes on, there are many factions you can choose between and many ways to influence the world. The choices are great. The whole game story was really compelling for me, better than most of the games I've played in the last few weeks.

I think this game most appealed to me because of my love for reading and my enjoyment of monastical, historical, and/or fae-based narratives with a bizarre cast of characters, as well as my patience for puzzling stats. If that sounds like you, you'll probably enjoy this game.

Jim Dattilo is a good interactive fiction author. He's great at creating a variety of characters.

The power to affect time is a fun subject in IF, and has a lot of potential.

However, I think this game misses at its aims a bit.

You play as an insurance salesman who one days realizes they can stop time. You can use this to enrich yourself or help others, and you can attract the attention of many might people or romantic interests.

I think where the trouble is is that Jim's strengths are a vibrant cast of NPCs and a superhero game's strength is the hero's growth, and they don't mesh well.

Your character in this game has almost no development; all the interesting personal plotlines are pushed on to other people. There is an enemy, but they enter pretty late in the story.

The problem is the NPCs with the interesting plotlines don't have powers, so the game basically alternates between two chunks: interesting, non-supernatural segments with NPC's personal lives, and exciting but aimless explorations of your powers. So, for instance, you might go to a party with someone and learn about their childhood, then go out to a park and decide to steal a bike or help a kid not scrape their knee. And that's the bulk of the game.

The writing is good, though, and over time I found the characters interesting. The workplace subplot is fascinating. I definitely feel like playing this game was not a waste of my time.

The other main problem I had was a 'sudden death' ending in Chapter 12. I don't mind sudden deaths in Choicescript games, but these are essentially 'hardmode' games where a death wipes your whole file and you have to restart. If there was some kind of denouement to your death (like in Mask of the Plague Doctor) or options to restart a given chapter (like Choice of Rebels or Cakes and Ale), it would be a lot less painful.

So I can't strongly recommend this game, but I can recommend it to fans of Dattilo's other work and fans of slice-of-life style superhero works (or corporate drama; honestly, if you're into that, that subplot alone is a pretty good game in and of itself).

This game has an awesome concept. You are a Death Collector. You have an invisibility cloak, pretend to be death to get people's tongues wagging before they die, then harvest the tongues which now contain that person's memories.

There's all sorts of creative worldbuilding, with different houses, abundant hidden secrets, etc. This is a long game with tons of tiny effects on the text due to your stats.

Unfortunately, there were several aspects of the game that I did not enjoy.

First, I was very confused by the stats. It's typical in choicescript games to have fluctuating personality traits represented by 'opposed stats' that add up to 50%, allowing the player to change over time. You also have skills that (generally) only go up, representing your wisdom over time.

In this game, your 'skills' are all things that seem more like personality traits: 'procedural', 'intuitive', 'cunning', and 'charming'.

This wouldn't be that bad, but they overlap in myriad ways with the opposed stats. For instance, if you decide to break rules to sneak into a room, are you being 'cunning', or not 'idealistic', or 'shameless', or 'maverick'?

If you talk kindly to someone who's dying, is that 'charming', 'honorable', 'empathetic', or 'idealistic'?

This makes it almost impossible to guess which choices affect which stat; similarly, it's hard to tell if you're adjusting a stat or testing a stat.

It's like playing a racing game that never explains which keys do what and sometimes randomizes them; it increases difficulty, but not in a rewarding way (for me).

The tone is very negative as well. It's basically choosing 'what kind of loser are you'. For instance, here are the options for one choice:

-I'm horrified this place is riddled with incompetence. Something must be done.
-I don't want to jump to conclusions. It might backfire.
-Pretend I disagree, so I can use the knowledge later for my own ends.
-I have no sympathy for whiners who blame their problems on others.

So you can do snooty, cowardly, sneaky, or haughty. I know some people enjoy playing as 'the bad boy/girl', and I've enjoyed doing that in other games, but it's not as fun when it's forced on you.

Finally, the narrative just kind of drops out at the end. At what feels like a couple of scenes before the climax, the game just stops with one page. It would be like if, in Empire Strikes Back, right after the scene where they meet Darth Vader in the 'dining room', they got on the Millenial Falcon and fly away, with the credits scrolling.

Despite my many troubles, the basic idea behind this game was great, and I encountered very few bugs/typos. The writing was interesting (it was several strong profanities, as a caution), and I thought the scenarios were individually compelling.

It took me (an anglophone with moderate French skills) about two weeks to finish reading this, on and off. I expect a native speaker could finish it in 1-3 hours.

This is a very long twine game about a future earth where we have been visited by aliens and a New World Order is in charge.

It's in several segments that differ quite a bit from each other. The first is working on a space station; the second is engaging in combat and exploring ancient greek ruins underground; and the last is fighting in an arena.

The worldbuilding is intricate and silly (spoiler for midgame): (Spoiler - click to show)the gods you discover are Athena, Ares, and Trollus, who writes in emojis only.

The biggest drawback is the extreme restrictions on freedom. There are only 3-4 'real' options in the game, and those options are just which order to experience content in. The vast majority of choices are 'continue'.

This is listed as just a prologue. Overall, I found it funny, but would have preferred more real (or even pretend) agency.

This entry in the 2021 French Comp is a Twine game where you are in a kind of random loop for most of the game.

So you sail, then you can check your inventory or scrub the deck, then you sail, and you can get drunk or raise the sails, etc.

After a very long time (seeing every scrap of text 4-5 times), a big event with another boat happens, which can have several endings.

The randomness looks complex and the concept is interesting, but in execution I felt it was too tedious. I would have reduced the main loop to half its size or less so the action could happen earlier.

This game is a bit different than I was expecting. Instead of being a game about, say, Norse gods or Zeus, it's something more like Avatar or similar shows. You are a constructed being in a race that has control over wind and water naturally, and fire and earth through technology.

The weather is out of control, so you have to stop it, along with a kind of sentient bio-organic robot servant and some human friends. You meet a human city controlled by 5 warring, corrupt houses and you also meet others of your kind (and their enemies).

The game opens strongly, with cool scenarios like jumping off a cliff to test your flight abilities.

The issue that I had with the game is that so many things are set up without being followed up on or resolved. Part of that, I believe, is that the author put some very important story beats into only a few of the possible playthroughs, making multiple playthroughs almost a necessity to really understand the game. That's not bad in itself, but it makes each playthrough a little weaker.

I didn't watch Game of Thrones, but I remember a lot of people talking about how the winter badguy had been built up for the whole show then was over in a surprisingly easy way that was disappointing. That happens here in many ways. In fact, your 'climactic battle' between whichever final opponent you choose is almost indistinguishable from every other battle in the game, and if anything seems less momentous and intense than the others (like fighting off an army of hundreds of robots).

Like other reviewers on other platforms have said, the individual writing is good. The worldbuilding was creative, to me, and the types of characters were varied. Like other parts of the stories, each character's arc felt unfinished in ways, but had enjoyable parts. I particularly enjoyed Humil's story arc.

Despite my mixed feelings, I overall enjoyed this game and definitely believe I'll play it again in the future.

I was prepared not to like this game at first. It's title seemed vague, and in the first chapter it almost felt like neutral sci-fi, like The Fleet without managing, or Choice of the Star Captain without weird humor and aliens, or I, Cyborg without all the crime.

But over time it actually really came together. Little hints about characters that would just be slight traits in other people became full-fledged storylines. Macguffins become actually plot-relevant. The people I found least interesting at first all had really well-put-together storylines.

The choices worked well for me later on, too. At first, there were a few annoying choices (like one where the game decides you must answer a distress call, and you pick the reason why, instead of whether you do it). But as you go on, the game becomes a lot more about managing who you spend time with and which of the many factions you support. One of the best things the game does with stats is tying the stats to storylines and people. So instead of 'pick which of these four options is the stat you maxed out at the beginning of the game', it's more like 'spend time with the doctor using your medical training or use your engineering training to make weapons'. Maybe it's just the same as other games under the hood, but I felt like I was making real choices.

I also appreciated the science aspect. Out of all the space games, I felt like this one dealt with realism the most. There are some handwavey aspects (like artificial gravity and the main Macguffin), but a trip across the solar system takes you months, and you have to use magnetic boots in a derelict spacecraft. I thought that was neat.

Overall, I'd say it's a great scifi game with a slow start but a great finish.

This game is one of the best Choicescript games I've given 4 stars to, but some of the interactivity dragged it down a bit for me.

This is a large game, at 330K words. In it, you play as (what felt to me) a cyborg version of Han Solo: you're a smuggler, you can charm, lie, shoot, and fly, you can choose how morally ambiguous you are, etc.

In gameplay, it almost feels like a wild west 'slice of life'. You spend a long time on a space station on the edges of civilization, dealing with 3 criminal syndicates (or 4, if you count the corrupt police), as well as an old flame who represents the more civilized side of life.

The man you were a copy of, though, has left a trail of spurned lovers and slighted enemies behind, causing you a lot of trouble. In addition, your sensory implant (which handles all of your input) is dying and replacements are scarce.

I think this game handles overall coherence pretty well. It's not too hard to get a feel for what the world is like and what you need to do. It can be hard to keep track of all the characters, but you get tons of opportunities to interact with everyone.

Choicewise and statwise, there's some good and some bad, at least the way I see it. What's good is that there are some areas where you get very significant choices, contributing to the game's large wordcount. For instance, there are different jobs you can take, factions you can join, etc.

What's a little rougher is that the main use of stats is pass/fail checks, but made pretty difficult. One chapter in particular involves a long impersonation attempt where you have to keep 4 or 5 factors in mind, and failing even one can get you busted.

In other places, events that could have been written in as outside circumstances are instead made to be player choices that are forced on you. For instance, I didn't like the Sphinx character much, but the game assumed I'd be their buddy at least a little.

Perhaps most distressing is that there are quite a few choices you make where the game immediately says, 'but actually, instead of what you just chose, this happens instead'.

Overall, I'm glad I played it. I can recommend it conditionally for sci-fi fans, especially for those interested in ai questions. If you ever liked a Data-centric or Doctor Hologram-centric episode of Star Trek, you'll probably love this.