Reviews by MathBrush

This is a choice-based entry where you play as the recently deceased ghost Victor who visits his friend Guillaume.

It's the day of Victor's funeral, and all his friends come over. You, as Victor, can only be seen by Guillaume, but can influence others. Your goal: to help your Guillaume win the heart of long-time friend Marie.

In the meantime, you discover a lot about your friends: one has come out recently, one has a new boyfriend from Senegal, some siblings are squabbling, one person gets a little too drunk, etc.

It's a little bit like Delightful Wallpaper (the second half), where you influence others subtly, and a bit like Blue Chairs, with its substance-using, young-people-talking parties.

It's a very long game, maybe too long, but the story it paints is beautiful. It does require (like another reviewer said) a lot of clicking, so I got in the habit of just clicking really fast until it stopped and going back to read over the text.

I really liked this world. It reminded me of the work of Katherine Morayati, of being in 'the scene'. This had more 'youth slang' than any of the other games; I learned a lot. It also has tons of cultural references; my search history has a lot of stuff like Science Po, Francoise Hollande, Knife Party, etc. now.

I like this culture because I was never a part of it. I've never drank, never tried marijuana. I had a lot of siblings and cousins and never hung out with other kids after school, so the idea of a big friend group you spend all your time with is something I saw my siblings do but never tried as a kid. As an adult, now I have a lot of nice friends, but there's not that same element of risk and danger that impressionable young people have when it comes to things like drugs or alcohol or unsafe sex.

Anyway, the story I found was well-crafted and overall it resonated with me. Interactivity felt great; out of all games in this comp, I felt like both choices were okay each time, that both would produce a meaningful story and that I could choose what I really wanted.

This game was pretty fun and fairly long, though it is unfinished.

In it, you play as the child of a king. Your father has been assassinated and you must flee the city. Once you do so, you join a boat and, if successful, start a city.

I enjoy city-building games like Civ VI and multi-stage games like Spore, so I found this game more fun as I went on. Early on, though, it felt a bit unfair at times, almost like random events happening.

There are some nice mechanics, like a prophetess guiding you with several messages for the future and a collection of what essentially are riddles or knowledge tests about Greek gods.

I liked my ending, with the city growing good. I felt like a lot of times the choice was between 'do something honorable and good that will make everyone like you or do something obviously bad', which made it feel like there was often a 'right choice' to click. But I also feel the game became more complex the longer it went on.

This was a big French Comp game, but worth playing.

This is a fascinating Spanish Twine game that makes excellent use of both Inform 7 and Twine.

You are dying during a radioactive apocalyptic war. You are also a researcher at an advanced quantum computing simulation lab, and you have the capability of uploading your mind to the computer.

Most of the game is navigating a complex computer OS system with a variety of folders and subfolders and apps such as email and the internet.

Once you get through that large portion, there is also a small parser portion that represents setting up societal norms in a simulated society. There is also one Towers of Hanoi section, which I honestly don't generally enjoy, but at least there was significant tie-in with the game itself and it had backstory.

Overall, a very impressive work, one that I think deserves a larger audience. For at least the non-parser parts, I think this plays quite easily using google translate.

I loved the part of this game that is currently complete. It's a well-style gothic horror game involving you and an old acquaintance, Edward Harcourt.

The idea is that you are one of the few people who are acquainted with Edward Harcourt, who has newly come into power and position. He has asked you to join him at his castle, where you have to deal with suspicious servants, dark dreams, and a town filled with unfriendly folk.

The demo has a lot of branches that seems to really affect the game, as I chose one of three backstories and ended up with some lengthy sequences regarding that backstory later.

So far, only the first two chapters are complete. It's still enjoyable, but I'm definitely interested in seeing the final product. One of my favorite Choicescript games was Heart of the House, which has similar vibes, but this one is taking some different directions that make it fresh.

This game is written with Twine and takes place in five acts, each of which is brief but meaningful.

You play as a ghost that finds itself in and out of existence, with the times in existence being important moments in the lives of your surviving family members. At first, there is very little you can do, but over time you develop more abilities. But it's not really a power-based or puzzle-based game; it's more about the story, about how your connection with the family deepens and grows over time.

The five acts vary between light hearted, dangerous, and sentimental. Gameplay mostly consists of navigating through the house, inspecting everything once, and then finding the one thing to return to to make things better. The pacing is excellent, as it does take some effort to finish each act but it never took long enough for me to feel frustrated.

The game does have some twists in it which, even though I saw it coming from some vibes in other reviews and though I've seen it done several times before, I did feel chills/lots of sentiment at the end, which to me means the author(s) executed the overall story with a lot of skill.

Overall, the best feature is the skill in plot and characterization.

This game was made in 4 hours, but has about a dozen beta testers, and it makes sense, as it is very polished.

This is a game where you explore a dark mansion with a lightsource and a helpful notebook. You are trying to find a ghost, and have to navigate around, dealing with blocked passages and places your light can't get through.

The atmosphere is generally creepy, especially since someone died there in the past. The descriptions of the dark areas are especially evocative.

Overall, it's a clever game and has some heartwarming parts.

I think it could still do with a little more polish, even with the cadre of testers. That's to be expected for most speed-IF, but it would make sense for the author to add on to it, since I could see people liking it in the future. The commands I think would be useful to have responses to include(Spoiler - click to show)POINT POINTER or STACK BOOKS, or X ROD.

I liked this one quite a bit. I used hints 2 or 3 times.

This is an interesting game; there is a large city that is literally part of hell, with tons of streets and cross streets.

Each area either just connects to others or has 2 buildings in it, with each building usually having a single person in it and a sparse description.

Wandering around, your goal is to leave the city. There is a vague air of menace, with hints of a threatening Candy Man and a creepy emptiness around and uncanny valley of NPC interaction.

You can progress pretty far by grabbing everything and combining them. I ran into some difficulty because I didn't realize that some of the random scenery in each room was useful. I've found in the past that it's generally pretty frustrating for players to have a large group of similar rooms and hiding important objects in a small number of them with no special indications; the worst case of this I've seen is the Horror of Rylvania, where there are baseboards in every room and in exactly one room you have to exam them to find a mousehole. This game is much more generous than that, but still it was hard to find the needles in the haystack.

Overall, the big city was cool. It had a similar feel to Winchester's Nightmare, which is also a giant hellscape city with sparse rooms. But this game has it's own character and style and is, I think, worth playing, especially using the source code, which accompanies it and which is organized very neatly.

Andrew Schultz has made many wordplay and chess games which are a lot of fun. There is a series of games now (I think the first was Very Vile Fairy File), where you have to find rhyming pairs of words. This game is the 4th in the series, which is called the "Prime Pro-Rhyme Row".

For me, the quality of these wordplay games specifically (not all games) depends on a couple of things.
1. Is it fair?
2. Is it challenging?
3. Is it coherent?

My favorites in this category are probably Shuffling Around and Threediopolis. In this series of rhyming words, I like Low-Key Learny Jokey Journey in the current IFComp. They do a good job of tying everything together and offering several paths forward.

This one does #2 well but feels a bit weaker with #s 1 and 3. There are less options for progress, both in terms of the map and in terms of words. At least one required solution used a word I hadn't heard marked as 'archaic' by online dictionaries, and a few combos used a feature the game had actively hinted against previously (specifically (Spoiler - click to show) 1-word answers, where the game says that usually those won't be needed).

There are things to help you, like the machine that says if your rhymes are close, and the Jumping Jerk, which tells you the answer once you've tried enough. I used it 5 times in this game. And, of course, there is always the walkthrough.

The other thing I think I miss from the other games is a bigger tying-together of the story.

Overall, I enjoyed this game, but I would only recommend it to people who liked the other rhyming pair games and want to get more of that experience.

This is the second entry in one of the weirdest series of IF games I've ever played.

Last year I played the first game, Fiesta Mortal, which was a bizarre kind of visual novel that used Sims-like 3d models with pre-Toy Story quality and a horrifying uncanny-valley look. There was a bunch of navigation and inventory trying to stop Steisy, the popular girl, from murdering everyone and you.

This game takes everything from the first game and amps it up. Steisy, now a psychiatric ward patient, looks horrifying with an immense grin and shaved head to support the Free Brittney moment (which she later finds out has already succeeded before she shaved her head).

Her brother, Marlon (I think, I can't remember), when he isn't busy spying on his 50-year old female neighbor with a telescope, wants to visit her to triumph over her. In the meantime, Steisy has to put up with rectal inspections by angry nurse Latoya and meetings with her cellmate and doctor.

Every Spanish swear word I ever learned is used a lot, as well as a few more I had to look up. The characters are oversized stereotypes and parodies, like the flat-earther who derails the game for an intense argument about how Nazis are building bases under the earth and made the south pole as a giant wall around the earth to hide the true mega-continent that lies on the edges.

Overall, the game is inappropriate or crass or over-stylized in many ways, but that is its style, and it kind of works, to be honest. It's like watching Trolls 2 or other B-movies. I think I would have backed out if it were in English due to weird content like severed PS1-style heads, but the language barrier helped provide a buffer between me and content. Wild experience.

This game was played at the Seattle IF Meet-up with the author narrating the game and adding her thoughts, and then I played again on my own.

You play as a future trans woman (now known as Lavernean) who has been let go and now has to do basically gig-work to make money. You also have a longterm fatigue-related illness and there's 'nanoplague' going around.

Each day you can decode more dna to make money. You also need to deal with your illness, find food, and deal with your impending eviction.

This game was hard to play because it is very realistic. I've had to do day jobs and night gig work to make food money and/or rent in the last few years, and it's pretty stressful. Three of my closest family members have fatigue-related illnesses, too, so there's a lot that hits home.

Things are pretty rough for our protagonist. It's sad but also accurate for some people I know that (Spoiler - click to show)hitting up and/or sleeping with your married ex-flame is the best way to make money.

There are a ton of endings; the writing is on-point and well-done, the characters distinct and vivid. I did find that the difficulty was (realistically) pretty high, and I kind of felt like I was slowly drowning. It takes a lot of work to be able to impart that feeling, but it was also stressful. The level of craft evident is very high, and I'm glad I played.