Reviews by MathBrush

This is the third-least rated game on the Hosted Games app. While some games have tens of thousands of ratings, this one has had 9 ratings in 5 years.

It’s a puzzle game. There are six or seven chapters, and each chapter has a “correct” path and multiple dying paths. Making it through one chapter means that you don’t have to replay it if you die.

The game is surreal, with a forest full of shadows and ghosts and demons.

The writing had some good descriptions but seemed more intent on atmosphere than communicating helpful descriptions. We are constantly becoming disoriented and confused, the trees are always full of shadows, there are strange sounds and growls; all good elements, but it can become kind of repetitive. There are also a lot of typos. I myself have a lot of typos in my own writing, but I try to use spellcheck and get friends to read the game to look for mistakes, and I think that would be helpful here.

It eventually ties into some (Spoiler - click to show)Mayan mythology, which was an interesting twist.

The puzzles include mazes, repeating actions, finding keys, etc. It is difficult to predict the effects of your actions. The main verb in most choices is “Percept”, which I looked up and is a noun (different than precept), but in the game it seems to be used like “perceive”.

Overall, it has a lot of rough edges, but I didn’t regret my playtime and I feel like the author must have learned a lot by writing it.

In this game, you have to move words around with a special SWAP command. The opening move, in fact, can be deduced from the name of the game.

Part of the game is figuring out what to do, so I'll put the rest of the discussion of the game and story in spoilers.

(Spoiler - click to show)
This is a series of increasingly complex sentences where some words have been swapped with each other.

So, you're trying to get words in the right order. This is made a bit easier by the fact that only words of the same size can be swapped, and by capitalization rules.

It honestly must have been hard to ensure that words weren't duplicated (which could have caused some issues with commands being well-defined).

I was spoiled by an online review about the plot, but it's okay, because that's what made me want to play.

The plot is slowly revealed that transposition technology can swap the minds of living things around. This can, however, cause cognitive decline. The messed-up order of words can be seen as both representative of the wand and of the cognitive decline.

Near the end, sentences come faster and less-well-formed.

The final choice was interesting. I found two endings.

I liked the understated creeping dread of this game, great work.

This game has you play as a travelling warrior equipped with a legendary sword.

Everywhere you go, you can talk to people, look at things, wait around, and, most importantly, CUT things.

Most of the puzzles revolve around a combination of talking and cutting the right thing at the right time.

Gameplay-wise, this game reminded me (positively) of the games Gun Mute (a linear sequence of fights with a powerful weapon and limited verbs), Tales of the Travelling Swordsman (a powerful sword-bearing hero defeats one challenge after another with their trusty sword), and a little bit of Forsaken Denizen and Attack of the Killer Yeti Robot Zombies (strategically defeat enemies with a lot of action). This isn't to say the game isn't innovative; its combination of melancholy, conversation, world-building and mechanics is good and new.

I especially like the conversation. Gun Mute and Tale of the Travelling Swordsman both went out of their way to have non-speaking characters as a major plot-point, leaving combat as the focus. In this game, conversation and cutting take up roughly equal roles.

I love the storybuilding here, which manages to give a good sense of progression in scale and understanding despite the (relatively) brief length of the game. It feels weighty, like the story of a much longer commercial game.

The puzzles were fun. I got stuck two or three times. Once, it was a fun fakeout. Another time, I thing the game funneled me into an alternative puzzle, which worked well. The last time I used the in-game THINK command for a hint.

Fun game, fun story.

This game was entered into Spring Thing 2025. In it, you play as someone near a fire in a cave. You are going to sleep, and going to dream. In the dream, you explore a fantastical dreamscape.

A recurring feature is that you continually have a timer and you die if you don't periodically wake up. I don't know what intended play is but I just woke up and stoked the fire after every choice, and used the 'back' button if I ever selected a choice with no new options.

I'm going to look at this with 5 different criteria:

+Polish: I didn't encounter any bugs and the writing was smooth and typo-free.
+Descriptiveness: The world seemed vibrant and interesting (in dreams).
-Interactivity: I didn't really enjoy the frequent waking up mechanic. It did pay off at one point, which was cool, but most of the rest of the game felt like I was just repeatedly scouring the options till something changed.
+Emotional impact: The game was amusing and the dreamscapes made me feel whimsical.
-Would I play again? I did feel kind of frustrated with the waking up thing, and the ending felt like it lacked a little weight.

This game threw me off (intentionally) at first when it didn't allow me to make a new save and had me continue. I thought I must have played a while ago and tried to reset, but it didn't work, so I kept going. It turned out it was (Spoiler - click to show)intentional, as the person I'm playing as was playing the game within a game. Pretty cool!

In this story, we play as a wounded soldier, and I mean really, really wounded: quadruple amputee, difficulty seeing and hearing. But you're able to interface with computers. And you can get therapy through virtual games, where doctors pose as NPCs to ask you questions.

You have a friend in the games, named Ada. While you play, you have flashbacks to your time in war. It seems like a semi-fictionalized version of America's constant wars in the middle east, with an 'endless war' in a desert-y area. The fiction part is about people surviving and being rehabilitated with expensive health care then shipped out to serve again.

I had different ideas for how the story could wrap up in a tidy way but it was left with several things open to interpretation, in a way that worked well for me. I enjoyed the variety of animations and text effects and fonts and the way the game differentiated different speakers and settings. Great work.

In this Twine story, you play as a down-on-their-luck artist who is trying to sell a painting. Unusually, you have the ability to enter your paintings and retrieve things from them, including magical creatures, called Artifexes. You usually keep one 'keepsake' from each of your 'canvases'. You need to sell a painting in order to keep on top of bills but there's a problem with your newest painting (and your newest buyer).

There are three things I liked about this game:

-The real-life parts were convincing. Our character seemed like a lot of artistic-type young people I know, in the way they act, the language they use, their relationship with family. The parts where the dishes just aren't done and that makes them too depressed to do the dishes, and that makes it hard to do anything, is very real. I also suffer from depression, and it changed my life when someone said that I shouldn't feel guilty for using paper plates if it improves the rest of my life. I do that now and it's really cut down on the amount of dishes I have to do. I also make sure not to buy too many dishes so that it can't get overwhelming. Anyway, I related to this a lot.

-The magical parts seemed consistent and well-thought-out. It felt like part of a TV show or series and the kind of thing where people could keep wikis on the info, as opposed to the kind of slapdash 'use your imagination and focus on your feelings' magic I often write.

-The choices felt like there were real consequences and reasons to pick both. Even if there weren't consequences some times, choosing to be angry at your jerky but lovable cat or apologizing to it felt like it mattered.

This game is a tribute to a character (Elaine Marley) from the Monkey Island games, which I admit I've never played (I've always been more into the 'text' part than the 'adventure' part).

It alternates between notes from the author about his feelings on Elaine Marley and Monkey Island (with some especially fascinating commentary on the layers of reality in the games) and actual gameplay.

I liked both parts. The author notes were fun to read and to compare with my own experiences interpreting and understanding games.

The gameplay parts involved escaping after being kidnapped by the ghostly pirate LeChuck. You mostly explore every option until you find all the items you need, then make some whacky contraption or something to escape. To me it felt like I could feel clever guessing what I needed to do early on, but that if I were stuck, the game would let me try every option until I succeeded.

Overall, I loved the heartfelt feeling the game had, it felt the opposite of impersonal or cold.

As I was playing this game, I thought, "This is exactly the kind of game I enjoy most easily: a polished kind-of-puzzly parser game with fun dialogue." It's amazing the reach that Charm Cochran has, from the gritty choice-based game We the Remainder that I first got interested in, to short story-focused games like 1 4 the $, to meditative and poignant games like Sundown and Gestures towards Divinity, to this game.

You play as a spy who has access to word-reversing technology. With it, you can reverse words you can see. Like Counterfeit Monkey, there is some thought put into world-building; people's perception of words (including your own perception) affects whether you can reverse something or not.

I enjoyed the riff on Spider and Web at the beginning with the lockpick, that was genuinely amusing.

The game isn't too long; there's really 3-4 sets of puzzles (the initial rooms, dealing with an NPC, a locked room, and the endgame).

It's an interesting balance of open-endedness and hand-holding. On one hand, conversations can branch a lot--but it often requires you to go through every topic. Puzzles have many potential solutions--but you're often given explicit hints about it and can ask for more in-game. This balance worked really well for me for 90% of the game. It broke down when it came to the puzzle with the (Spoiler - click to show)hammer. There were a ton of items that could potentially serve as a (Spoiler - click to show)handle in my mind: (Spoiler - click to show)the lockpick, a spare part, a branch of the retem shrub, maybe even the yam. But it's probably because I didn't know what a (Spoiler - click to show)spanner is and I dropped it early on as I didn't see a use. The hints didn't get explicit enough for me to know what to do and there was no walkthrough, so I looked for other reviews and saw what to do here as well as the next step which also seemed pretty unintuitive (but for which there is a hint). Now, this doesn't mean it's a bad puzzle; I barely struggled for 10 minutes before getting help. Someone patient and methodical could easily have solved it. It just stuck out when compared to the other puzzles.

Overall this was a good experience. I spent a long time griping above, but that was a minor divot in a good game.

This is a visual novel written by a large crew. It has no decision points at all, which means that its merit rests entirely on the strength of its writing and on the visuals and sound. That's always tricky for me when reviewing choiceless games because they feel like they belong to the wider comparative group of static fiction which is much more competitive.

Fortunately, this is written well and the pictures and sound are well-done. The background images have enough contrast to read the text and the focus on having only one character portrait for each conversation instead of going back and forth fits well with the writing style.

The story is about two women (seemingly in mid-20s, since one has spent time in medical school) who meet in London for the first time after having a relationship online. Things go well at first, but their differences pile up. We end up seeing first one side of the relationship, then the other, with a final perspective reserved for the ending.

The rest of the review discusses events in game.

(Spoiler - click to show)One of the characters is reeling from a breakup with a very physical relationship and tries to initiate that twice with the other. The other partner is deeply disturbed by this and tensions rise between them.

Also, the person who assaulted is very controlling. She sets up every thing on the date according to her ideas and is constantly annoyed or disappointed when the other girl doesn't fit with what she wants.

Overall, it reminded me of several episodes in my own life and the life of my friends. I saw one couple break up and learned a year or two later that one partner had assaulted the other sexually. I cut off contact with that person and supported the victim. They dated someone else and later broke up. I then found at that that person who had been assaulted went on to assault their next partner. It was all so sad. And it kind of feels like that's what's happening here; one person was in an uncomfortable hyper-sexualized relationship and was dumped, then went on to assault someone else.

The whole trip thing reminded me of something in my own life. When I was in college, there was a woman I knew who lived one dorm over, the same age of me, and she was a close friend. Our roommates were a big friend group and we'd all watch movies as a group and do activities. I'd taken her on a date before, and I knew her family well even though they lived far away (her mother liked me and showed me some neat poetry forms and became my unofficial poetry tutor). She had a really tempestuous personality and went from hot to cold a lot and had a lot of backstory from an abusive father. I ended up writing a letter saying I loved her but she didn't reciprocate at that time. We stayed friends. The summer after we moved out, I got an invitation to attend her younger brother's baptism (an event that happens in our church at 8 years old). I knew it was just a courtesy invite but I asked the mom if I could attend and she was thrilled. She even asked me to perform the baptism myself. I got plane tickets and paid for a hotel room. Wisconsin was beautiful, and I flew in a plan so small that there were only 3 seats per row (with 2 on one side and one on the other of the aisle) and, as I was the only passenger, the flight attendant had me sit in one specific spot to balance the plane. When I got there, I was welcomed and feasted. We had bear meat that the mom had shot herself. I went canoeing with the adult brother of the girl in question, and had tons of fun seeing rare native birds. I performed the baptism.

But the woman didn't talk to me the whole trip. She was completely silent. I realized I had made a huge mistake (as those reading along probably realized earlier!). I cried in the hotel room each night. She didn't say goodbye when I left, either. When I returned to Utah, flying over the Great Salt Lake, I thought it was the ugliest place in the world. (Not now, though! every time I fly over it now I think how much I love it and look back on that old memory and am glad I changed.)

Obviously I never contacted her again. Months later, though, her stepdad wrote me urgently and with great conviction. He said that she was marrying a deadbeat loser that she had recently met (his description) and said: "If you love her at all you need to fight for her!" I wrote back and said, "I no longer believe that we would be happy together." She married him and also inherited from her grandmother a ranch in Arizona, where I presume she still lives.

Years later, after I was married, some of her family members tried to add me on Facebook. My wife at the time was extremely upset, more than almost anything in our marriage, and said that that girl was trying to reconnect with me to flirt with me and steal me away. So I never added them.

After my divorce, though, I did add the little brother I baptized on Instagram. He went on a mission, got married, and seems like a great guy.

Anyway, so I resonated with this game a lot, both from my own experiences with uncomfortable 3-day visits and from seeing how assault can destroy relationships of others. So I was completely dumbfounded when they stay together at the end, it really defied my expectations. I don't really feel good for them; the hesitant one even resolves to be more physically affectionate in the future, presumably to please the other and against their earlier choices. I did the same thing at the end of my marriage and trying to save a relationship through physical intimacy alone is the sign of a sinking ship.

So, the story definitely made me think a lot, which is, in my mind, a sign of a good story.

This is an exceptional story, a part of Fallen London that is extra "DLC" type content for subscribers.

I really expected this Exceptional Story to be awful, as its description was pretty generic (woman overused honey) and the beginning of it wasn't very inspired (go to these three locations and examine stuff).

But it turned out to be about red honey, one of the best moral dilemmas in the game. Red Honey lets you see someone else's memories, but only at the cost of causing them extreme agony.

This story also uses interesting mechanics, like a complicated hidden lock and key mechanism. And the ending felt like I had real agency.