Reviews by MathBrush

I need to preface this review by saying that I'm giving this game 5 stars only because it specifically fits some very niche interests of mine. I think if I was just giving recommendations for general audience it would likely be 3 stars due to being short.

This game starts with you inside a school looking out on a courtyard, seeing some people arguing. You approach them, wanting to learn more, but you realize you have nothing to offer them.

The plot then swerves in several ways. The rest of the review is in spoilers:
(Spoiler - click to show)
It becomes clear this is a post-apocalyptic world. There are few enough humans that the group you've found just calls themselves One, Two, and Three.

The big twist is that you forget everything every 30 minutes or so. You've established a routine for yourself to stay alive, but you weren't aware of the forgetting fact. You discover that someone stayed with you previously and took care of you, but also manipulated you.


The game is definitely short, which is why I hedge my recommendation, but I love the concept and the combination and it inspires me to think of the possibilities. I'd love to write a game with similar mechanics (it used to be very popular in parser games twenty years ago but I think it died out).

This game was entered into the back garden of Spring Thing.

It is game written using bitsy, which uses minimalist graphics and is typically used to make interactive fiction through text boxes which can pop up with different interactions.

This game only has a single word of text in it, though. You simply progress through the same screen multiple times, that screen becoming somewhat of a maze. Eventually you discover a bit more, and have a musical ending. Throughout, music plays.

Overall, I found the piece was very successful at setting a mood and communicating an expression. I found the maze repetitive and would have enjoyed more written words.

I found this game by searching for the games with the highest standard deviation.

This game is just a Warhammer quote fed into Inform 7 (with one extra line, I think). It's amusing because it compiles, thus creating the crux of the Warhammer setting but...that's it.

Pretty funny as an April Fool's joke.

I used an Internet Archive backup to play this game.

In it, you start with a one-sentence story, and then expand on it. After three or four rounds of expansion, you get a full-fledged story.

There is quite a variety; I found a cheating king who broke his wife's heart, an evil witch who sucked the life force from her husband, and a mysterious assassin who married the king and left her old life behind only to be forced to return to her old habits.

The structure seems to be completely branching, which makes sense as Inklewriter isn't an exceptionally powerful engine. There may be some state tracking, though I'm not sure.

Overall, the stories were each high quality, but this overall feels slight in terms of its interactive structure.

This is a choice-based game written using a parser. At the time it came out, 2008, choice-based games had a long history already but they had never been popular in the IFComp or r*if usenet communities. The reviews from that time indicate that people found its choice-based nature unappealing.

The game is based on a writing prompt, and that prompt is essential to understanding the game. You begin in a cafe with three people around you called B, C, and D, and an American couple, one with a lisp and one with a stutter.

The speech impediments are part of the prompt; it can be difficult to write impediments in a way that doesn't come of as either condescending or mocking, but I think this pulls it off well.

For a choice-based game, this is actually quite complex. Time progresses no matter what you do, but you can focus on talking to each of the three people with you, or Wait. Each person you're talking to has a variety of options on what you can ask them about. I found that the game could recognize even small parts of the prompt, so if a question started with 'ask whether...', then typing ASK WHETHER was enough to solve it.

I remember trying this in the past and thinking it didn't go much beyond the prompt, so I was surprised this time that there was a major twist in the story. I had to reread to make sure I was understanding right. I'm surprised the other reviews don't mention that.

I genuinely liked this game; I liked the twist, the parser added a little 'crunchiness' to the choice interactivity, and it was well-written. The only thing that seemed 'off' was that choosing to just 'WAIT' ends up with an interaction that doesn't seem to fit the story as written.

This is an example of dynamic fiction, where you have no interactivity (although there is one instance of cycling text) and the entire purpose of the links is to pace the reading.

I’m not really against dynamic fiction. It’s useful in shorter stories to hide the total length of the story and keep you guessing where the end will come. It’s less useful in longer stories, as players get frustrated. Thankfully this is pretty short.

This game is about wormholes opening up and taking away things and people, with the reasons for it slowly revealed. I liked it, and I appreciated the sentiment it was trying to impart.

I generally like Bez’s work, as my view on creative writing is that it’s a way to share parts of our experiences and feelings with others, and Bez’s work is generally very effective at communicating how they feel.

This is a shorter game, drawing on some of the cozier seeds. It uses a warm color palette and a background sound of (I think) a fire crackling.

It has you sitting and thinking about all the bad things in your life, picking over the negative thoughts with a fine tooth comb. I remember playing it for the first time, feeling like it was going to be a downer game, but then I was pleasantly surprised to see things turned on their heads.

Overall, a good game and one that had a positive impact on me. I do think I slightly prefer Bez’s longer games, but that’s about it.

This was a nice game to end the comp on. It’s a relatively brief and poetic Twine game that uses sound (which I believe comes from the seed being used) as well as line drawings to convey a story.

The idea is that you’ve found a journal that talks about someone missing someone else, and the journey it’s taken them on. I can’t tell if it’s metaphorical or literal, but either way it’s interesting.

The game is very short, but it serves its purpose well.

This choice-based game is inspired by Shakespeare’s Sonnet 128, as well as the Reverse a Poem prompt (and the surprisingly popular Color Palettes prompt, which has been used in at least 3 of the games I’ve seen.)

I enjoy Shakespeare (although his sonnets and other poems are the works of his I’ve studied least), so I was interested to see where this goes.

It’s split into 4 pieces, each reflecting part of the sonnet, and inviting you to compare the storyline with the sonnet itself as you go.

You show up at a Valentine’s party for older singles, some of whom your friendly with and others less so. Interaction comes from choosing who to talk to and how to interact with them.

I tend to immerse myself in characters as I play and to suspend disbelief, imagining me to be the character myself. Obviously characters sometimes do things that I wouldn’t do, like theft and murder. But I had to pull myself out of immersion in this game, as I was presented with a woman, told that she is married but separated, and given a chance to put my hand on her thigh. An extramarital affair is something I’ve seen happen multiple times in real time and they have cause the majority of pain I’ve experience in my life, so I had to eject my immersion and puppet the character like an astral projection the rest of the game. I don’t think that was the author’s intent at all, and they certainly can’t anticipate every person’s reaction to different themes!

Fortunately, I could simply just not click on certain options and the game came to a satisfying conclusion. I found myself intrigued by the drama and drawn into the action.

The best parts of the game to me were the characters who are painted in vivid detail. I felt like I already knew Jack and Henry and Aline, like I had met them before and could picture them in my eye (I saw Henry as a younger Robert Redford).

A few times I felt like the pacing could have slowed down a bit to explore some of the more interesting moments, like a certain violent moment with a bottle. This is an author who I think would do equally well with long form fiction as with short form fiction.

The styling was well done and the overall presentation looked great.

This game is about someone experiencing the worst the world has to offer: isolation, hunger, infection, homophobia, perpetuating cycles of abuse, and, worst of all: cryptocurrency.

It’s a short game, well-designed with animated background transitions and varying fonts and colors.

You play as a recluse without stable unemployment who has recently fled a discord server where they were picked on and called various slurs. They find hope in a new discord for a cryptocurrency.

While all of this is happening, their house becomes increasingly moldy.

I didn’t put it together until now, because while playing I thought these two storylines were disjoint, but the spread of mold and the cycle of crypto’s crash and boom have a lot in common and those parallels must be what the other was on about.

There are several kinds of creepy moments here, from strange questions to plenty of physical horror. The slurs made me most uncomfortable; it was clear, though, that their use was not positive and was reflective of the ill mental state of the character.

Overall, a thoughtful game. Reminded me a lot of when crypto first got really big; I looked up how it worked and couldn’t figure out how it would be sustainable due to the need to keep long lists of past transactions in each interaction, so I tried to code up my own and got it to work, and my dean decided to use it as fake currency for his econ class (we made proof of work really easy so that it wouldn’t destroy the environment). I thought it would make it clear to the students how silly crypto was, but they got really into it. But the mining was annoying so they eventually abandoned the crypto part and made it fiat by putting it on the dean’s spreadsheet, which pretty much sums up the usefulness of crypto in real life (it’s not).

Anyway, a good horror game but definitely check the trigger warnings.