Reviews by MathBrush

This game emulates the Clickhole type of games, which I haven't played very much, but they are generally very over the top, the kind of writing you'd see in Mad Magazine twenty years ago.

You are a hard-bitten detective trying to solve the mystery of the mayor's death. You have three suspects to investigate to discover the murder.

This game and the clickhole games borrow more from CYOA books than from the overall Twine genre. This means a moderate amount of instant deaths, encouragement to back up an option, and one right path hidden among many others. It's not my favorite organizational style, but at least it does it well.

The writing is funny. It's very wink-wink fourth-wall-breaking stuff, so I found it amusing but difficult to become invested in.

This game has two parts: a simple introduction and more complicated sci-fi portion.

Both parts are related to the infamous Stanley Milgram experiments, where participants were asked to administer what they thought were increasingly strong electrical shocks to strangers.

This game is moralizing strongly, which isn't bad in and of itself. It offers some nuance: what if we misunderstand the situation? What if we don't really have free will?

But it's slight, overall, and not strong enough, in my mind, to bear up the heavy moral implications it communicates. I think this would be more appropriate as a longer story where we could identify more with the characters.

I would definitely play another game by this author!

The concept of this game is clever. You're having a conversation with a friend, and every emotion of the NPC is expressed by a photo of eyes. It's the same person, same pose, but with anger, happiness, sadness, etc. in the eyes.

It's very effective, kind of how emojis help express emotion in texts.

The one drawback in the interactivity and emotion of it is that it all seems a bit shallow. The story is toothless, a frivolous problem with hints at relationship issues. This same technique with a deeper story (not necessarily longer) would be splendid. As it is, it's presented in a very polished and well-done manner.

This is a conversational game, a difficult genre to do well. I was pleased at how this game handled the difficulties.

The game puts you in the role of a 'dependency evaulator' who must decide if people are unhealthily addicted to VR or not.

Each of the three people you discuss has strong opinions on political issues that are important to us and exacerbated in their future. Climate change, privatization of police and military, and war have made their mark on this world.

You are not required to feel any particular way yourself. If you hear someone go off on an opinion you don't think is justified, you can put their file in the 'bad' bin. The game doesn't judge you. It doesn't comment.

I liked it. Parser needed some touching up, especially dealing with names and their possessives (for instance, "Brian" wouldn't be a synonym of "Brian's file").

Conversation is usually hard because its either too linear or the state space grows too quickly. This game restricts the state space by telling you what to start with and that all new topics will be nouns in previous replies. Wonderful! Similar to Galatea in that respect.

This game is a crime game where you assemble a team to pull off a heist. Absolutely everything is in limerick form, even the choices, which are all first lines of limericks.

I give stars in 5 criteria: polish, interactivity, emotion, descriptiveness, and if I would play again.

This game is both very polished and very descriptive. The limericks are clever, and the game uses color very effectively.

It's funny, I'll admit, but the sheer number of limericks was wearying by the end. I often feel this way with poetry (I've never finished Paradise Lost), so I didn't feel very emotionally invested.

The interactivity was a sort of gauntlet style where you could lose at any point in the story making the wrong choice. It makes for less writing (which makes sense with so many constraints!), but I wasn't really into the overall structure. There are some paths that do branch and recombine, though.

And overall, I would play again, and I would recommend it to people looking for something quirky.

This game is meant to be contemplated slowly. You wander along a beach, looking at symbolic locations, waiting for the end of day.

The walkthrough is especially entertaining. (It only says (Spoiler - click to show)Don't worry about the puzzles., and I listened). Overall I found it peaceful, if a bit slight.

The timed text, though, was rather aggravating. Other readers may not have the same reaction, but timed text goes against everything I like and find distinctive about parser games, and this game contains sections with timed text that takes over a minute to get out a page's worth of text.

The writing and design is otherwise excellent. The portrayal of a beggar seemed a bit classist at first, but the beggar's home shows that perhaps things are not as they seem at first. A lot to think about here.

Homebrew parser games are notoriously difficult to get right. Most are frankly bad, with poor parsing and tiny games.

Bradford Mansion is one of the better downloadable, executable homebrew parser games I've seen. Sensible floor layout, puzzles tied by common themes, most puzzles relying on simple verbs.

But the parser isn't completely up to the challenge. There are small inconveniences (like L not being recognized as LOOK), but larger ones as well. A few key puzzles require extremely precise commands, with anything just a tiny bit off being unrecognized. This makes the game extremely difficult to solve without the walkthrough.

It has some tricky combinatorics/code puzzles, which are not completely covered in the walkthrough (being part of a hidden track). A plus for the puzzle fiends out there!

This game is clever. It is a python notebook with code that you can run. You are assigned tasks to do, altering the code and running it.

The code is obfuscated, with a large portion of it hidden in a huge string array. Making the code changes suggested in the text portions reveals 'secrets' in the code. Some secrets are a lot simpler than others.

This game is complex and creative, but I found it a bit confusing near the end. The first 'subversive' instruction was difficult for me to follow (especially 'put it in the parenthesis'. Put what in which parenthesis?)

Overall, I was glad I played and love the innovation happening here.

This game grew on me over time.

Like Pseudavid's previous work, this game is a highly-polished Twine game that focuses on time, place, and interpersonal relationships.

In The Good People, you play as a person descended from the inhabitants of an ancient village which was covered by a reservoir, and which has now only recently emerged. The exact setting escapes me; it seems like Native Americans in the Southwest due to the reservoir setting, but could also be Irish perhaps (?) or South American.

You've started a relationship with a travel writer who is of a different race from you, and you feel alienated from your past and your people.

This slice-of-life opening is pretty good but a little too 'high art' for me. It takes a sharp turn in the middle, though, that resonated strongly with me.

Uses unusual text placements, graphic images, occasional slow text and text animations.

Sam Ashwell's games always seem to be from a parallel universe where IF developed in wildly different directions. They don't 'fit in' with usual IF tropes.

In this game which quotes (and reminds me of) T.S. Eliot, you are pursuing a wounded troll across a desert while being pursued by Yellow Dog.

The feel is sort of like a mix between Stephen Kings's Dark Tower and mythology. You encounter a series of obstacles, characters you deal with through menus (reminding me of De Baron. This game reminds me of a lot of things!)

Pure symbolic obscurism can be pretentious or effective. But I'm a sucker for it, so it definitely is 'effective' here for me.