Reviews by MathBrush

This was a pretty grim short story with a lot of room to explore and contemplate. In it, you play as someone estranged from an abusive father who has now died in hospice at your sister’s house.

The death of a close relative who as abusive is especially upsetting, as you have grief without anything to offset it. Or you have neither grief nor happiness at first. I had two grandfathers die within a few years of each other; one was beloved and surrounded by multiple generations that he had raised, even down to a great-grandson he had raised as his own. The other grandfather had been physically abusive to his children in their youth, and when he was older he smoked so much that none of the grandkids wanted to visit much due to the smell. His death felt so much less to me than the other grandfather. Years later, I thought about him more, and performed some rituals for the dead (part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), and that helped me connect with his memory more.

Sexual abuse can dig even deeper; I’ve met several friends and extended family members whose most deeply held secret was sexual abuse by someone close to them, often someone they still saw on a regular basis and cared for as a relative while simultaneously being hurt. So many kids have a putative dad or presumed-absent dad in public and a ‘real’ dad that can’t be made public because they were an abusive uncle or grandparent.

This game captured all of those feelings really well; everything felt so authentic, down to one relative denying the abuse ever happened and kids having trouble talking about it as adults.

The end I found was fitting. It took me a second to realize it was the end; it might have helped me process it more quickly if there was a signifier of the ending, like a horizontal ruling or the words “the end” or “fin”, but those are stylistic choices up to the author.

Good writing, bad feeling.

I was bewildered by this game when I started it. Most moves result in instant death. A lot of words in the description are bolded, but typing them does nothing. I downloaded HTML tads on my work computer in case there were supposed to be hyperlinks.

Eventually, I typed random verbs, and shout took me to a new room! Trying to figure out the connection and dying a few more times, I pondered more on the name of the game and realized what was going on.

This game has numerous strange and surreal vignettes. My favorite was a car ride with someone who has strapped knives onto all the surfaces, that was an interesting image.

The writing and the initial mystery are the two main components of the game for evaluation. Like I said, a couple vignettes really called out to me. I didn’t grasp a larger pattern or see a common thread (however, that’s pretty common for me with poetic IF, and I’ve had discussions with a few poetry authors on how poetic IF should be evaluated. But this is a rated competition, so I’m comparing to other games, including by the same author! So for me the vivid imagery and the frustrating beginning are the parts I think of the most).

This is a short, atmospheric game about a ferry at night with surreal overtones. It reminds me a bit of the game Cactus Blue Motel, with a magical world of horror mingled with wonder. This game tones down the wonder and cranks up the horror and wistfulness.

You are on a ferry, and it’s mostly abandoned. A series of unattended but distubring cars is near you. You can wander around, but the only people you meet are also alone, and are uniformly described as a ‘stranger’, which I found effective at setting the tone.

I felt like I had a lot of choices. There were many places to navigate to and people to talk to; there were cycling choices letting you create your own backstory with real differences (like, you could want to be a shaved-head punk or a braided-hair linen-sewing person). And there were things you could learn about or do in one spot and have it referenced later. Finally, there were multiple ending choices. So this game is actually fantastic in the variety of interactivity it offers, in addition to the creepy atmosphere.

This is an Andrew Schultz game written in Adventuron. The adventuron aspect allows the use of pixel art here, which I think greatly enhances the experience. There were several pages where I said 'wow!' out loud when I saw them, including one featuring animals. Great work here; since these wordplay games can become very abstract, the art helps ground the game, and the colors are cheerful.

This is a wordplay game about taking two-word pairs and typing other two-word pairs that sound like them when spoken out loud. There are 12 such pairs. I got stuck twice: once, not realizing I pronounced something differently than the author (curse my Utah accent!), and another where I didn't realize I was doing wordplay on the wrong thing in a room.

Overall, great scope and polish for a 4 hr game. I would definitely look forward to more games in this vein (e.g. level of difficulty, size, graphics).

This is a military mermaid exploration horror game, a genre I didn’t know existed until now.

This is also a choicescript game of around 25K words (according to the author), which can be played in less than an hour.

In it, you are a captive mermaid used by the government to carry out dangerous missions. Several divers have died in a certain area, and it’s your job to figure out what can go wrong. Your greatest tool is your voice, which can injure or soothe others.

You have to explore a mysterious shipwreck and deal with a number of frightening phenomena.

I liked the storyline and the various creatures a lot here. And there was plenty to do, like choosing what to explore first, deciding how risky to be when encountering new dangers, etc.

I sometimes found my attention wandering, including one scene mentioning a splinter that I reread two or three times. Other times I was very locked in, usually with the things unique to being a mermaid (like using the voice or dealing with the collar around your neck).

I like Jacic’s games in general but I think this one is especially good; the aquatic setting is the perfect setting for the author’s strange creatures and creepy atmosphere.

I forgot that I never reviewed this, though I played it several days ago!

This game is a Bitsy game, meaning it has two-color low-resolution pixel graphics with simple two-frame animations, and text that pops up as you run into things. This particular game is a macabre and darkly humorous take on the Wizard of Oz.

You play as Dorothy whose dog is lost. The Wizard the Oz is a cruel necromancer reigning over the land and the only one that might be able to help you find your dog. The scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion take on far different forms here.

The game is a little tricker than most Bitsy games, requiring some fetch quests and some intuition on where to go to solve each problem. The ending was both positive and negative; it reminded me of the ending of Sister Location in the FNAF franchise, with its colorful and cheery tone but a 'not quite right' ending for our protagonists.

This is a horror Twine game that plays on the fear: what if you were alone, far from society, with a man who wanted to exert complete power over you, leaving you no freedoms, nowhere to run? Also, what if that man and his family were also super messed up and wanted to mess you up, too?

This is an effective horror tale. I could feel the helplessness of the protagonist and the disturbing nature of the family’s ‘hobbies’.

I played through twice, once super quickly to estimate length and check for content warnings and another for real gameplay. I got two pretty different endings, so there is some real freedom here (ironic, given our protagonist’s plight).

There were some occasional grammar or spelling oddities, similar to the amount I tend to have in my writing. Other than that, the game seemed highly polished.

This is a Spanish language game with an engine that reminds me of the engine Moiki, but I’m not quite sure what it is. (looking it up, it’s fi.js).

The idea is that your car has broken down in the middle of a forest. The last evidence of civilization that you encountered was a sign saying “Mititz”.

Trying to make it back to town, you encounter a strange and frightening sight in the woods. A chase then ensues, and you have the chance to do an inventory puzzle or two.

I wonder if the game might be unfinished, or if it just ends semi-abruptly. I escaped, and an option to huir down the road. But the game stopped right after that. It feels like it could definitely be an ending, but there might be extra content I didn’t find.

I liked the writing in this and emailed it to my Spanish teacher friend, since she’s been doing a unit on superstitions and myths.

I was glad to get this game in my randomized list, as Ruber is someone who’s consistently produced good games for a decade.

This game taught me a lot. I thought at first it was a fictional story about a pro-Amazon forest activist who is murdered by activists, but apparently her life and death were real.

After your death, you have the option of your spirit spreading out and inhabiting various life-forms. I thought that would result in a short branching game, but instead you occupy all of them in turn: a river, a wolf, a tree.

The writing was poetic and pretty. The themes reminded me of Captain Planet, which I watched enthusiastically as a kid, and Ferngully. But knowing it was real made it way more sad. It’s definitely a topic I’ll research more in the future and talk about with my students (some of which are very into environmental conservation).

I was looking through games in my wishlist with no ratings and this popped up.

This twine game from 2021 has two available routes. In one, you play as a male spy, and in the other as a female spy, both in nearby interrogation rooms.

In both paths, you can look around the cell or pick the lock and try to escape.

The game uses a lot of well-chosen illustrations, some from pixabay and others that look hand-made.

The game feels slightly unfinished; I found some exposed code errors and entered debug mode on accident at one or two points. And sometimes I had conflicting text on the screen that felt like I was seeing two paths at once. So I feel like if the author wanted to ever expand on the game or polish it a bit more, it could be more solid, but I had fun.