Reviews by MathBrush

This game reminded me of Princess Mononoke crossed with Hybras from Sunless Skies.

You are essentially a gig worker trespassing in a national park to scavenge various psychotropic mushrooms which have properties far beyond the ones we have in real life. Normal mushrooms give you 1 cent a cap (fairly consistent with real gig jobs like Amazon Turk), while the King's Breakfast could pay off your rent.

It seems that worldbuilding by far is the biggest part of gameplay. More than half of my play time was spent reading the guide book, and it could have served just as well in static form, but it made finding mushrooms later on more fun.

It's weird to say, but I think that later gameplay reminded me of nothing more than the original Zork. I remember playing Zork as a kid and finding some weird stuff and thinking "I have no idea how this all connects", and getting the idea that there was way more out there. I later went and looked at the code of this game and found that there was way more out there, but the effect still persisted.

I don't know if that particular combination of deep lore dive + unpredictable trip in the woods worked for me interaction-wise, but I appreciated the polish, descriptivenes, emotional impact and replayability of the game.

This is a charming short parser game in which you read a text in Latin in your room at night, translating each line as you go (provided with a dictionary and grammar that you can LOOK UP things in). You must frequently match adjectives with nouns that share their declension, so for language fans this is heaven.

The atmosphere in the game was quite nice as well.

+Polish: This kind of thing is pretty tricky to program; I'm impressed!
+Descriptiveness: The Latin itself provides most of the flavor
+Interactivity: As a language fan, it's great.
-Emotional impact: It was fun, but I didn't get creeped out as much as I might have.
+Would I play again? I think I definitely will come back to this at some point for fun.

Like Will Not Let Me Go, this story is a well-written long Twine game about the effects of old age and Alzheimer's/dementia on an elderly man and those around him.

It plays out over ten days and ten nights. You struggle as a young at-home attendant for an elderly man named Carl who wavers between lucidity and violent forgetfulness.

At night, you have 4 tasks, the same every night. On the fast version, you do these once, but miss out on some important plot points. On the slow version, you do them 10 times every night, but they're tricky and shift around in very plot-relevant ways.

The 10-times version is hard but rewarding the first night. By the third night, though, I misclicked five times in a row (which restarts the night) and had to stop. It's hard because the image pushes all the text below the screen, so I had to scroll down for each image on a trackpad laptop.

The images are gorgeous and really contribute to the game. I wonder if, for the nights at least, it could have helped to put the image to one side and the text to another.

In any case, the story was meaningful to me, especially talking about divorce and changing relationships with one's spouse. I loved it, and appreciate the author writing it.

This is a Choicescript game made for the Grand Guignol division of Ectocomp. It's a bloody and violent game about a confrontation in a forest.

I think that every game has different elements that contribute to the overall strength of it. Here's my take on five elements I usually look at in games:

-Polish. This is where the game struggles the most. There are numerous typos and misstatements scattered throughout the text. As an author, and especially as a Choicescript author, I am no stranger to making a ton of typos (I think I had to fix 'its' vs 'it's' 1000 times in my Choicescript game). But websites like grammarly can really help out here, which is what I use, or asking people to look over the text.

+Descriptiveness. This is the game's strongest point. The writing is detailed and vivid. For me, I found it violent and gory in an unpleasant way, but it was only unpleasant because it was so detailed.

-Interactivity: I personally like Choicescript best when it lets you customize who are you in detail or lets you plan out strategies. In this game, choices can be completely arbitrary (like 'go left, go right, go straight') or represent a forced choice where all options are essentially the same (that's not always bad, but in this case you get the same forced choice over and over again).

+Emotional impact: I felt disturbed by the game, which is not an emotion I like or seek out but which succeeds in its goal.

-Would I play again? Due to the content and the polish, I wouldn't do so right now.

Contains strong profanity and gore.

This game in the Grand Guignol part of Ectocomp 2020 was pleasant to play and looked good. It's written in Twine (I assume), but it's been heavily styled with colors and background graphics.

The design is tight and there are real choices with long-lasting effects. You have a specific deadline and a lot of options.

In this game, you're a werewolf that is at a college-type party trying to fit in, have fun and leave before you transform in an hour and a half.

The lycanthropy can easily be read as anxiety (especially given the name of the piece), and I've had the feeling many times of being at a party and trying to stay just long enough to feel comfortable leaving.

The one thing that keeps this from being amazing for me is the signalling of choices. My favorite choice-based games allow either deep characterization of the protagonist or strategizing, and it was hard for me to do either one here. I feel like having more hints about the possible effects of choices could fix that, but it may just be a personal design choice and not something that needs to be 'fixed'. I had fun either way, and played through three or four times.

I beta tested this game briefly.

I usually think of Ectocomp games as being quick and simple, but the Grand Guignol games have been pretty intense the last few years.

This game has several innovative/amazing features:
1. It's in a custom parser that's brand new but so good that it felt like Dialog or Inform for me
2. It has excellent javascript integration with smooth scrolling image sidebars
3. It has an optimization puzzle that requires in-depth strategy and a lot of spatial thinking.

So it's pretty cool. You're breaking into a tomb (like Infidel) and need to grab a scarab amulet as well as as much treasure as you can carry (which is rough, given you can only carry 4 things at a time in your hands).

The puzzles are harder than most optimization games I've seen. Just getting a successful ending at all will likely take several tries. There's enough complexity here that I probably saw <1/2 of the game when I beta tested it and still there are things I don't understand (like the purpose of the (Spoiler - click to show)map and cursed disk).

The only drawback I found is, like the other optimization games, the puzzle itself detracted somewhat from the emotional impact of the story, as the story is mostly a frame for the puzzles and is repeated over and over each time. Otherwise, for fans of optimised treasure runs, this is a great game.

Ryan Veeder's playing a completely different ball game than most authors. It's almost like he just has fun making up things with weird ideas and then polishing them intensely before releasing them. Who does that?

There are four mini-games that I encountered, like the other Balderstone games (with each game serving just fine as a release on their own). They are:

-A complex combat game (Spoiler - click to show)This one reminded me of Kerkerkruip. You have a large map filled to the brim with weapons. You have to fight a lot of different people, but each weapon is destroyed upon use. This was fun but difficult, it took me a while to solve some of the cool sub-puzzles.
-A small game that is more interactive than most interactive fiction. (Spoiler - click to show)This is a mad-lib game where you are asked for a series of words, then you play a game involving that series of words, and it's implemented very well.
-A story told by children.(Spoiler - click to show)This has some surprises in design. Like usual. Ryan seems to think 'What if the players tried something weird and I just ran with it?
-A more traditional game at an abandoned gas station with some narrative surprises.

I thought as I played these games is that one thing Ryan does well is making sure the player encounters every story beat on every playthrough. It's so easy, due to the non-linear nature of games, for players to miss important backstory or details, but all of these games incorporate that into the gameplay itself, which is wonderful.

This was an odd game for me. It's very possible that it being in Spanish affected my interpretation of it, because I found it difficult to read due its large number of obscure words (you're essentially a grisly warrior fighting heretics in a fantasy world).

This is a short parser game, probably a speed-IF. You're in a room with a few clothes and some empty containers, and...that's it. There's a door, but it's locked. If you look close enough, you find that key. But the door has no keyhole! But again, that's all there is, right?

I looked at the source (very happy the author provided it!) and it seems that progression through the game involves doing specific actions several times, including (Spoiler - click to show)dropping the key and some actions that I've never really done in an IF (like (Spoiler - click to show)peeing in a jar).

So for me, I liked the descriptiveness and it felt spooky, but the interactivity and polish felt lacking. If this was a speed-IF or first game, it's actually pretty good! But it doesn't measure up to longer parser games.

I went back and forth on this story. At first, I thought it was one of the best stories I've read in a long time, but I think the second half isn't quite as good as the first, and there were a few minor errors (like an uncapitalized 'la' at the beginning of a sentence).

This game is set in the 1936 Spanish Civil War, and you're ordered to bombard a city that is supposedly harboring refugees. Chaos ensues, as well as supernatural shenanigans.

The characterization was amazingly good, and the detail made me feel like I was there. For me, the realistic parts were the strongest, while the supernatural elements, while polished and well-done, were less compelling to me. Definitely felt happy to read this.

This game was entered in Ectocomp 2020.

This is a Texture game, and it presented a double language barrier to me, as it is in Spanish and contains numerous Japanese words as well. So I may have missed out on some of the nuances, but I found it charming and well-written.

The story is about a scholar who is seeking inspiration for a story and so engages in Japanese calligraphy. There are several objects around that can serve as inspiration, each inspiring a sort of reverie or dream that always ends up disturbed by a yokai or Japanese spirit.

I laughed at some parts of it, and was intrigued by others. Parts reminded me of Alice and Wonderland. The multimedia use was lovely. Definitely worth checking out for a chill, relaxing time.