Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

Okay, this game is not a comp-killer. It's short, the puzzles are very easy, the plot is linear.

But it's just brimming with honesty and earnestness. This is a real-life tale of friendship and tribute. The protagonist doesn't sound like me; grabbing a 24% THC stash in Colorado and downing draft beers with buds isn't me. But that's okay; the thing I like about this game is that it's a window into another life, a window into a period of bonding and experience. The author has put his real self on the page (or at least made it look like that!) and it's so rare to find something like that.

And the simple game design makes for less bugs. There are some rough spots, but it wasn't too hard to get out of.

Here's to friendship!

This game is pleasant, and has a simple map and friendly, talking animals.

You are exploring an island and its surrounding reef, looking for treasure. Along the way, you solve some riddles and help out some new friends.

It's all very pleasant, and it boasts numerous testers, but I feel like the design has some issues. Some puzzles (like Morse code) work great.

But others have trouble. One that comes to mind is the shovel. When we use it, we're asked where we want to use it. It turns out the answer has the form DIG PREPOSITION NOUN. This is a really big space to get the answer right in. Do you dig NEXT TO THE SEA? IN FRONT OF THE TRUNK? When you open up the parser to three-word puzzles, it makes things more difficult.

This happened later for me with the flat stone. You need to use one thing with another thing to affect a third thing. There are just so many ways of typing it, and I had to turn to the walkthrough.

There were a few other things that were similarly open-ended (like the riddle), and so I kind of bounced off that portion of the game and didn't become invested.

Overall, I found this fun, with wonderful imagery.

In this game, you play as a new user on a poetry forum. You select from 3 usernames of varying respectability (and they all get commented on). You can then join 4 or so different chat workshops.

Each one has different characters, all reminding me of real-life forum members: the rude ones, the funny ones, the cute ones.

I got the Kanojo ending, which I enjoyed. The game's not too long, but it's replayable and its length suits its purpose.

I didn't feel strongly emotionally invested, but it's polished, descriptive, has good interactivity and I would (and did) play it more than once.

MTW tends to make games that have similar strengths and similar weaknesses.

Pros:
-Large casts of interesting characters that talk to you and follow you around
-Big maps and inventories
-Compelling plot points and settings

Cons:
-Only one path is implemented
-Difficult to predict correct paths
-Typos and bugs

This game is no exception. A mysterious mongoose/cat and a mysterious woman come into your life, and you investigate a weird house with links to the past.

I used the walkthrough because, from experience, it's difficult to play a MTW game without one.

Edit: For some more specific feedback on this game:

(Spoiler - click to show)Consider the following exchange when meeting the first human NPC:
>talk to woman
That's not a verb I recognise.

>ask woman about woman
sleeping young woman doesn't have anything useful to say about that.

This is a game filled with NPCs. It takes only 5 minutes to put in a response to TALK TO WOMAN that suggests using ASK/TELL instead. The capitalization and/or article usage for "sleeping young woman" is harder but is doable.

The default responses for many simple verbs like JUMP, PUSH, and EAT have all been left in.

Error messages make up the bulk of text you see when playing a parser game, and they need a lot of work here.

This is a game that I like, but which I feel could have been quite a bit longer.

It's got fun illustrations, an enjoyable premise (giant slugs attack everything), and the beginnings of inventory- and location-based puzzles.

But then it's over so quickly. It's 10,000 words, and you don't see most of those because it branches a lot.

In a way, it's kind of like Dungeon Detective 1 last year. I liked that game, too, but it was also too short, and the author made a bigger sequel (Dungeon Detective 2) this year that was much longer, and I loved it.

If anything, I just want more of this. Would love to play more games by this author.

Hmmm.... this game hit home in several areas. You play as a young man entering graduate school to satisfy his father's wishes. You reflect on your past life scouting as you deal with the drudgery of graduate school.

It wasn't my parents who pushed me, but I did graduate school and also had been a scout. Both parts rang true: boys discussing the forbidden parts of life in tents on trips, graduate school largely consisting of a series of failures aggregating very slowly into a dissertation.

The problem is, and this comes up in so many games: can a simulation of a boring event be fun? And my answer is no. Sure, Farmville and Universal Paperclips simulated boring things, and yet were popular. But they added a social aspect and/or increasing complexity. Just showing the drudgery of graduate school is accurate, but it's just not fun to me.

In fact, the overall structure of the game is pretty dull. Flashbacks are linear, with scattered 'expand' links that sometimes give extra text in-line and sometimes link to another page.

So why do I give it 4 stars? Well, it was just all so relatable. The prose didn't jump out and bite me, but it wormed its way inside of me. The narrator feels like a real person, even though this is a work of fiction. There's just a kind of raw honesty to it all that appeals to my sense of self and my own history.

Writing a mystery IF game is hard, but rewarding. The hardest thing to handle is the deductive process: will the PC find clues before solving the case, or can the player can deduce the answer on their own? Does the player need to link clues themselves, or do they automatically process them?

This is a good game, but I'm not quite sure it nails that deductive process. In this Twine game, you play as a young woman in a sci-fi future renting out an old detective's office for the night. Your father has died, your sister is missing, and you have to search for her.

You have numerous locations you can go to. You have an NPC companion who can examine things for you. You have an inventory where any item can be used with any background link, giving quadratic complexity. You also can deduce things with your companion, linking concepts with, again, quadratic complexity. Dying alters the game subtly.

All in all, it makes for a rich game. But the state space is so large that it's difficult to know where to proceed next. Do you need to deduce in the middle of the game? Is dying essential? Do items need to be examined by your companion, used on NPCs, or ignored? I found myself frequently turning to the walkthrough.

Storywise, it uses some classic sci-fi tropes (techno-cult, do robots have feelings, etc.), but it executes it well. I felt comfortable with this game. The author says 'hire me' at the end, and I would feel comfortable hiring them for a writing project.

I think I would give this 4.5 stars, but I am rounding up.

Provodnik Games made their debut last year with Railways of Love, a sci-fi game set in a future Russia where you were locked into one path which later opened.

This game is somewhat similar. It is set in the same future (both feature 'spikeheads', robot transmitters). Both games are illustrated, the former in 8-bit pixel art, and this one in gorgeous, smoothly animated black and white art.

The writing is good, with some English hiccups here and there. A son in a lonely outpost needs to enter the real world by choosing a job. There are two job choices, and the choice gets made over and over.

Near the end, you finally break free, but it's tricky to find. The final screen, interestingly enough, shows a breakdown of what final choices people made. Only 15% of people made my choice, which was a partially hidden ending, but apparently there's an even better ending that 1% of people found.

I'm not afraid of choice-deficient games (I loved last year's very linear Polish the Glass), but I feel a bit odd giving this 5 stars when it's more of a computerized book. However, the constrained interactivity does serve a purpose, and reflects the constrained options of the protagonist. On the other hand, this kind of constraint-as-story as been done many times before. On the other hand, just because something isn't new doesn't mean it's bad. So I go back and forth between 4 stars and 5, which is why I've given it a score of 4.5. I'd love to see more from Provodnik!

Okay, this is a great game in many ways. Pixel art is on point, characters are compelling, the atmosphere at Dan's shady truck dealership is just perfect, and the storyline comes to a great point.

But I found the day by day gameplay a little less compelling. My choice of which job to pick up didn't seem to matter too much, and neither did my driving strategy. It's possible they mattered, but I didn't see it in in-game, unlike my choice of 'side hustle', which strongly affected the game.

So, I liked it, but found parts a bit tedious. This is a trucking simulator where you make money doing increasingly shady jobs, while individuals begin approaching you for help. Your choices of who to help affect the politics not only locally but eventually globally.

This author has become well known for Twine UI work. with many people interested in learning how to make games look the way, for instance, Devotionalia did.

This game has that same rich UI. Buttons instead of hyperlinks, character portraits, rich backdrops, multiple save files in a button in a collapsible menu.

Story-wise, this is heavy stuff, epic fantasy mixed with horror. You are a lone human burying their mother, living on an island filled with huge, sentient insects. You have been offered a controversial position on the island in the religious hierarchy, and life is complicated.

Most choices are about your attitude and response to others (agreeing, disagreeing, deflecting). Others have agency affecting the story. The real replayability factor is in the characters, not all of which you can talk to in one go through.

It's polished, descriptive, interactive, creepiness-inducing, and I would replay, so I'm giving it 5 stars!