Reviews by MathBrush

Naarel is a prolific author who has a great back-catalogue. Because of that, I think I've been spoiled a bit with their back-catalogue. This particular game, while it has a compelling narrative, lacks some of the awesome interactions or beautiful styling/images I've seen in their other games.

What's this one about? A train is passing by (in fact, it will always pass you by!) which causes you to reflect on your place in life, your hopes, your dreams, your constraints.

Choices are one per page, with a little bit of fancy choice-usage near the end. The story is neatly divided into chunks of relatively similar size to each other.

The style of writing is evocative and emotional. It uses different sense, mentions concrete details, and has a nice plot arc in a short space.

This game was made specifically for Emily Short by Sam Kabo Ashwell, and contains a great deal of procedural generation.

The idea is that you're sorting through a large collection of scents that you created during your life. Each one has a collection of smells and a unique bottle that it finds itself in. Each one also brings to mind a specific memory from the past. You can then associate different parts of the smell with different parts of the memory.

In the end, you can conceive of a smell that includes all the elements and memories you chose, even if it could never exist in reality.

The writing is descriptive and evocative. The game uses vorple and has great-looking UI and transitions. I played it a couple of times to see how it worked and what variations there are. It has a definite kind of feeling to it, a kind of worldliness and world-weariness. When confronted with its procedural nature and open-endedness, I struggled to find any meaning in my choices, feeling like it was more like a brainstorming session or tarot reading (which may be a plus for some). Glad I played! Good writing.

This is a Bitsy game, which uses two-color-palette minimalist pixel art and arrow controls to create a world to navigate, and text pops up when you run into certain interactive parts.

The story is a poetic description of the impact whales have on marine life both while they live and after they die. Its fairly brief, and the whole thing hinges on the writing being good, which it really is.

The artwork pushes Bitsy to its limits, with majestic whales, beating hearts, deep sea life, dithered gradients, and more. The music fits the game quite well.

Not too long, but enjoyable.

In this game, you are diving to explore the ocean as an underwater photographer. As you do so, you run into a real, live mermaid!

Interspersed with mermaid dialog, you can explore a little bit, with the game having a small world model. I played once and wasn't able to see everything, so it seems like the game makes replays worth it.

The character dialog was convincing and the game made use of its format effectively with its cheerful drawings and appropriate music. Short but fun.

This was a neat experiment in a game jam designed to use non-gamemaking tools to make games.

This is a forum thread where the idea is that you read through the edit history to see what happened. It seems to me like someone having a breakdown and then it being covered up. Who covered it up, though? The government? Another personality? Parents?

It's a fun concept. Its open nature allows you to think of many possibilities but also hampers the story due to not providing enough answers to really pull you in. But a fun and unique idea.

This was a pleasant, compact Adventuron game. It had a feature I’m not used to seeing, where right-clicking on yellow words brought up possible actions. I don’t think it was all possible actions, because in both cases I tried it it only brought up ‘Examine’, but I thought it was cool!

The idea is that you’ve accidentally released the ghosts of your ancestors and you have to capture them back into the box you got them from.

There are two main ghosts to catch, each with a couple of puzzles. These puzzles were well-thought out; it looks like this Petite Mort game went for polishing a smaller-scope game rather than pushing out a bigger untested game. I think that was a smart choice! This setup would easily allow expansion if the author ever desired to do so, and I would look forward to that. Still, it’s pretty good as-is.

This game, like many in Shufflecomp, makes extensive use of public domain art.

In it, you play as two characters who died in a dangerous mission at sea and are now stuck in purgatory.

The game is fully voice acted. The two main plots that I found were the resolution of their feelings about life and death, and one of the characters coming to grips with their gender identity.

I liked the writing and voice acting, and the images contributed a lot. However, out of the three games entered by Bez in this competition, I think I preferred "A Little Guidance for A Big Heart" for its quirky ensemble. This one was meditative and thoughtful, though.

I liked this Shufflecomp game that was a short vignette about a band.

You are awakened in the middle of the night by an associate concerned about one of the other band members.

You and the other band member, Holly, talk about her fears and concerns.

I like how, even in this short space of time, the author was able to make the conversation realistic and with real choices that affected Holly's responses in a way that I could really sit and think about what I wanted to achieve.

The game also muses on whether ongoing success is achieved by sticking to your ideals, making what people want, or the luck of the draw, something I've thought about a lot before.

It's possible that I'm getting older or have a carbon monoxide leak in my house, but I frequently play games recently where I have absolutely no idea what's going on. Everything is in evocative prose but I don't know what it's evoking.

So I appreciate Bez's clear and straightforward stories with interesting characters where it's easy to follow along and see the story progress. This is a story about going to an event to meet people while a little guy in your pocket gives you dating advice through an airpod. You reveal some facts about yourself and become aware of others.

Like many of Bez's recent games, this is voice acted with a few different actors participating, and was styled nicely. Out of Bez's three games in this competition, this is the one that I most liked.

This is a game with at least three different endings and which has a pretty neat mechanic.

Everybody is dead at your party (well, it's not exactly your party, but since you're the only one alive, you might as well be). You can examine many of the dead as well as a lot of the scenery around you.

There is a hidden thread running through things which I found fascinating. At the moment of your hostess's death, (Spoiler - click to show)your pink pearl necklace is snapped and the pearls go flying. You can find these pearls as pink 'o's in the words of the different areas</spoiler.

I thought this was a neat mechanic and its symbolic meaning became more apparent in the different endings. Really neat idea here.