Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

Several others had recommended this exceptional story to me. And I found it really was as good as they say.

In this game, you encounter a band of children, just as much heroes as your character is, except in their own sphere.

You take part in their adventures, seeing Fallen London through a child's eyes, and encounter a bittersweet story of growth and loss.

Highly recommended.

This was an excellent addition to the Fallen London mythology. I played it several months ago, but forgot to write the review at the time, so pardon me if there are errors.

I strongly remember the 'astrological signs' in this story. Of course Fallen London is under the ground in a giant cavern, so the existence of stars and astrological signs is a somewhat contentious subject.

The story takes you into a strange world with insects and caverns. Very fun.

Voyageur is a Unity-based game (I think) with amazing sound and pleasing background visuals.

It's similar to 80 Days in that it's a choice-based travel game revolving around buying items at a low price and selling them at a higher price. This mechanic fuels your ability to dive ever deeper to the center of the universe, meeting different planets that are parts of different factions along the way.

This game makes heavy use of procedural generation, sort of a text version of No Man's Sky.

With both No Man's Sky and Voyageur, I felt that maybe that procedural elements were pushed a bit higher than the scripted parts. Many of the planets eventually began blurring together.

I reached an ending that satisfied me. A mellow game, good to play at leisure.

This game is really breaking new ground. Among Twine games, it's remarkable for both using extensive beautiful graphics, animations, etc., but for also being long and puzzle-y.

You play as a rabbit in a warren of other rabbits, but something truly odd is happening. As you explore more, you uncover an entirely new setting.

A few of the puzzles seemed fussy, and I wasn't completely emotionally invested in the story, but this is a Twine game I can strongly recommend to those new to Twine and those experienced in IF.

This game by Victor Gijsbers contains many of the best elements from his former games, including an examination of player agency and strong NPCs.

You play as the commander of a mech, complete with manual and custom parser messages. Unfortunately, your visual components are damaged, so the on-scene pilot Lemmy has to do the talking for you. But Lemmy's quite the character, making life pretty difficult.

The parser is constrained to those verbs recognized by the mech, and even by the nouns which Lemmy 'tags'.

This game is shorter than I would like, but it's pretty good when my main critique is that I want more of it.

Contains some strong profanity in some paths.

This game is similar to David Welbourn's classic 69105 keys. You search through piles of keys divided by adjectives, trying to find a unique key. It includes some innovations over the previous game, including multiple game modes, a different kind of randomization, and an anti-game for finding the 'worst' key.

There seems to be a bug with the second half of the game that lets you instantly win, but otherwise this is a nice to game that goes from 'banging your head' to 'oh I see'.

Liza Daly has come up with quite a few ways of presenting stories in the past, including complex parser games, the precursor-to-Twine game First Draft of the Revolution (in tandem with Emily Short), and the Windrift engine.

This game builds on that earlier material. It is very short, finishable in 5 minutes (unless I missed something major!).

Basically, there is a sequence of choices in the story, each of which can be revisited at any time. There is a bit of hysteresis, a term Emily Short has used before to describe how doing and undoing choices doesn't just put you back where you started, but has lingering effects.

This was an interesting game. Perhaps the most interesting part was the author's afterword.

The idea is that you set off to several journeys that are procedurally generated. Along the path, you can control how surreal the messages are by staying on the path or wandering away.

Much of the conversations at the end of each journey were repetitive, which the author states is a bug. It gave an interesting effect, though, almost like a dream, a ghost conversation, or a fading memory.

I really enjoyed this game in Introcomp, and the finished version is even better.

This isn't a grandiose or intense game. This game is just like an Agatha Christie story, with great attention to psychology and detail.

It manages to have a lot of material you have to plow through without feeling too much like lawnmowering. The author has a lot of context-sensitive programming with inventory-based puzzles, and that's what gives this game a good 'choice feel', if that's even a phrase.

You are at a hectic Christmas Eve dinner and Grandma's ring turns up stolen. It's your job to track down the culprit before the police have to be called.

Overall, this was my favorite Spring Thing game. Well done.

This game was designed as part of a class in game history. It's one of the most successful games I've seen done as part of a course, since most such games are very timid in their scope. This one is decently-sized.

The author decided to feature game history and critique heavily. Something happens in the game, and then you get a quote relevant to what you just experienced.

I found that an enjoyable premise. It did suffer from implementation issues, which are the bugbear of parser games in general. For instance, there is a telephone which cannot be referred to at at all.

Overall, it's a valuable addition to the niche of 'games about games'.