Reviews by MathBrush

This is an Ink game entered into several competitions; I saw it in the Grand Guignol ectocomp competition.

This game is fairly long and has some nice, rich structure. There are parts where you can walk around a house, examining different things.

The plot is mysterious and frightening. You follow a friend to a town, hearing vague rumors about his past, until you enter his family home and discover his awful secrets.

The setting and concept were, I thought good, and much of the writing is good. However, I felt for the first third of the game like I was constantly grasping for threads of plot or action. So much was vague, it was difficult to see what direction things were going in.

That's a recurring theme with the writing, that it becomes so descriptive it almost becomes undescriptive. For instance, in a library, it says 'You wonder if the hallway's actual walls are the most-likely peeling drywall or columns of thick tomes covering them.' I get what it's going for here, with rich figurative language, but I think that hedging the metaphor with 'I wonder' and 'most likely' lessens its impact.

However, there are also very strong moments; I especially liked the arrival of the Brother, which was a tense scene and written very dramatically and descriptively. So this isn’t badly written, it just has highs and lows.

Overall, I like this story and would like to see what happens next.

Edit: I didn't realize this was intentionally dreamlike, so I'm increasing my score from 3 to 4.

This game was entered in the 2023 Spanish ectocomp.

This game has you sitting at a computer, typing away, when your computer program ruptures reality!

As a strange figure announces to you, you must try to restore this timeline.

This game managed to hit all of the things I like. I enjoyed the fantasy style setting, I didn't encounter any bugs or typos, I liked the polish of the different presentations of text (computer, tile, etc), and I enjoyed the small puzzles.

It's a small game overall, but I enjoyed it while it lasted. I may have enjoyed it more because it's in Spanish, with translation adding to the fun.

This short Petite Mort ectocomp game features a branching narrative written in 4 hours.

Despite its short creation time, it manages to be interesting. You are at a party where things are getting pretty dangerous.

As you explore more, you discover a dangerous group of individuals who have taken over the building. If you can only figure out a good path, you can survive!

This game mostly is a kind of gauntlet structure where there are dead ends at each stage (although it's not totally a gauntlet because you get multiple chances for some things). It can be thrilling at times or disturbing at others. Overall, I found the story effective, but would enjoy if more time was spent adding different connections between paths and variable tracking (which would obviously take more than 4 hours!) Great work for the time it was written in.

This is one of two games entered in the Spanish Ectocomp Grand Guignol that use a ZX Spectrum emulator to make CYOA games controlled by the Q and A keys and Enter. I thought they were both by the same author, but apparently not.

This game is actually an adaptation of the Legend of the Mountain of Spirits, an older short story. However, it has been substantially expanded. In the original, a girl and her cousin get lost on a haunted mountain, with disastrous results.

In my playthrough, we left the mountain almost immediately, and had an adventure late at night in the city, although there were symbolic elements similar to the original story.

Overall, I found the writing good and the quality high. I don't really like playing ZX spectrum on an emulator (I use FUSE and it's tiny and can't be expanded), but as a game this was enjoyable.

Last year, when I played El Virulé (part one), I had a lot of trouble understanding it. It was written in what I would consider advanced Spanish, with very rich descriptions and realistic dialogue, about a guy with an ill-looking eye who sang for money but concealed more.

I rated it lower, but it ended up winning the Outstanding Spanish game award in the IFDB awards. So I reconsidered it.

I approached this sequel with new eyes. It has a lot of neat features, like a food bar you slowly fill up, but the real draw here is the relationship between the child protagonist and his father. Every aspect of the game shows how this child (the past version of the first game's protagonist) is influenced by his father's choices. Left alone, locked in the house, forced to feed himself, getting threatened, handling dangerous items...

I really liked this game. It's not too long, and while I had to think hard at times, most actions were natural and most commands made sense for me as a foreigner.

I especially liked the ending scene, and found it powerful. I didn't get to see the full ending poem because I was hitting enter too fast, but I liked this overall.

I played this game in Spanish.

It's made for the Spectrum platform, and is designed with a ton of retro graphics, many of them consisting of images from the music video to Michael Jackson's Thriller.

You replay the events of that video in choice based form, but with a lot of changes and additions. There are weapons and items to use and the special power of Bollywood.

The story was zany fun, and the images very well done.

The two main problems I had were both related to the game structure. First, the game is 'gauntlet' style, so it's basically 'make the right move or die and start over'. I got very frustrated until someone pointed out that the emulators have a 'save' feature.

The second is that you have to fight Michael a few too many times, it gets a little repetitive.

Other than that, I enjoyed this and found it well done. The trailer is actually even fancier than the game!

This is an excellent Twine game...for a little bit. Then it ends, unfinished.

This game places you in the role of a detective in the 1800s, travelling to a region to try to help solve a series of disappearances.

Children are going missing in a grove of trees, and adults as well. The townfolk are fearful, and there is a too-powerful landlord hovering over everything.

The writing is good, with distinct characters that you can interview. It takes place over several days; unfortunately, it ends after the first day.

Excellent start; it only remains to finish.

This is a bizarre little game.

You are a fetus who is superintelligent and a detective. You have a very low opinion of your mother.

Unfortunately, you cannot move or talk. All you can do is kick your mom and crawl around inside her.

This game has a lot of endings; I found 3 and watched several more on a youtube video.

There is wild stuff in this game, lots of using body parts in inappropriate ways, and for some reason a ton of very advanced talk about ontological things and philosophy...I had to use google translate a lot.

Pretty funny; could use some more synonyms for actions.

This is a pretty complex game entered in Ectocomp Grand Guignol edition. The same game is also entered in Petite Mort, where it was polished less (since Petite Mort has a time limit).

In this game, you are going up to a space station with two others in the shuttle with you. You all are identified by your roles, yours being the Inspector.

You are quizzed on an old case study of law, where an astronaut died on the ISS when their module was released too early.

Interestingly, the game features real life astronauts like Shannon Lucid and Léopold Eyharts, who are still alive, and is essentially fan-fiction about real life people. It's an AU, as the events take place in a fictional 1998.

You read everyone's journal entries then decide on whether the accused is innocent or guilty, and, if guilty, how guilty they are.

Perhaps due to the language barrier, I was confused about one mechanic. Before reading the case studies, you have to decide where the case was tried at. This seems to retroactively make the case have been tried there and limits which journals you have access to. It also changes what the actual verdict was, so it's kind of hard to tell what really happened, although I swear (again, can't be sure because my French is mediocre) that two of the journals literally confess to the crime.

This version has a lot of nice looking links and effects the other version doesn't have.

This is a pretty complex game entered in Ectocomp Petite Mort edition. The same game is also entered in Grand Guignol, where it was polished more (since Petite Mort has a time limit).

In this game, you are going up to a space station with two others in the shuttle with you. You all are identified by your roles, yours being the Inspector.

You are quizzed on an old case study of law, where an astronaut died on the ISS when their module was released too early.

Interestingly, the game features real life astronauts like Shannon Lucid and Léopold Eyharts, who are still alive, and is essentially fan-fiction about real life people. It's an AU, as the events take place in a fictional 1998.

You read everyone's journal entries then decide on whether the accused is innocent or guilty, and, if guilty, how guilty they are.

Perhaps due to the language barrier, I was confused about one mechanic. Before reading the case studies, you have to decide where the case was tried at. This seems to retroactively make the case have been tried there and limits which journals you have access to. It also changes what the actual verdict was, so it's kind of hard to tell what really happened, although I swear (again, can't be sure because my French is mediocre) that two of the journals literally confess to the crime.

This version has a lot of weird issues with whitespace, all of which were fixed in the full version.