Reviews by MathBrush

This is a short, well-made Twine game in French with a few brief choices and at least 2 endings.

You play as someone who missed a train, so is driving on a trip and taking a passenger with them to split gas.

The game sets it up as a long journey, so I was surprised to see it was only a 1-hour trip! It reminded me of the saying, 'In America, 100 years is a long time. In Europe, 100 miles is a long distance'. And that's true; my commute every day is close to an hour both ways, and the same is true for many of my students, and that's just within my city (Dallas). Going to the next city to visit family can take 2 hours. To me a longer trip would be like our school's trips to nearby states that take 8 hours or so of driving.

Anyway, digression aside, there is tension in the game. Our passenger is strange, and his behavior uncertain. It reminds me of college, where two women who were friends of mine got a ride from my tall roommate who was mildly socially awkward. It was late at night and they were driving in a quiet area, and the roommate pulled out leather gloves from the glovebox and put them on. He had no idea that the girls were terrified that he was about to kill him; he just thought the gloves looked nice and were comfortable.

In any case, I enjoyed this story.

I played this game as it was one of the least-rated games in the Short Games showcase.

It's a visual novel about a girl who meets a witch who's broken her broom. The pictures are drawn with bold colors and depict colorful characters.

The story is pretty simple; you walk around town viewing halloween decorations and trying to find a new branch for the witch's broom, and you intermittently get binary choices on how to treat people. While the game was short and its branching simple, I enjoyed the decisions, had to think hard about them, and experienced real consequences.

I found this piece charming, and enjoyed playing it.

This was the least-played Petite Mort game on my list. I wonder if people might have been off-put by thinking the cover art is AI, but the credits link to the different components it was built out of (some pixabay resources), so it’s legit.

This is a pretty brief Choicescript game. Most popular choicescript games boast of their vast length, so it’s a difficult medium to do an Ectocomp game in. Here the author handles that by reducing branching in the early parts and replacing it with player reactions, leaving stronger branching for the end (unless I misread that; it’s just the impression I got).

The story is based on Irish folklore. Late at night, you find a strange feathered cap near the ocean, of the type that your family used to tell you was worn by fairies. Keeping it, you begin to find strange occurrences around your house. It kind of made me think of Tailypo, but more like ‘what if Tailypo was hot?’

Overall, it was fun. I didn’t find any bugs, and I’ve always loved Gaelic, so seeing it in the game was a bonus.

I was having a mental mini-crisis before playing this game. I had found that I hadn't been interested in playing IF as much in the last week, and wondered if I just wasn't enjoying the field as much as a whole or just the individual games I had been playing.

I sorted IFDB by latest publication to see what interesting games were newest and to see if there was any pattern. I was surprised to see a game had been released less than an hour ago, and by Jacqueline Ashwell. I've liked several of her games before, like the Fire Tower and her Fingertips game, but she hadn't released anything this decade.

But no, it was a new game. Booting it up, I thought, 'okay, this is the kind of IF I like. It's the kind of well-implemented strongly voiced style that was really prominent in the 00's.

I was slightly dismayed to see that the game invited you to follow specific actions in real life. I haven't really engaged will with games like that in the past. I didn't, I'm afraid, draw sigils on my arm when playing With Those We Love Alive and I didn't relate to the self-help in a recent IFComp game designed to help with heartbreak.

So I did skip a step or two in the instructions (I live in a one-bedroom apartment with my son and there's not a lot of space for turning off lights or shutting out sound), but I followed the journaling part. It was really therapeutic; I realized that I had had a huge number of positive and great things happen to me this year, and that the bad things that happened I could be proactive about next year (like getting proactive car maintenance). So I found that very satisfying.

This was a good interaction and restored my faith in IF and helped me decide my next move in IF (I was debating whether to release my new game I'm working on into IFComp next year, meaning I wouldn't be able to help out that year, or in a different competition, but I've realized I enjoy the helping out aspect a lot, so I'll release it separately).

Garry Francis has a longstanding series of polished, relatively 'meaty' parser games with traditional puzzles and a variety of settings.

This outing isn't up to his usual standard of excellence. It has a very small map, with no 'special' room descriptions for items, so most rooms end up with default listings like 'there is a lamp post here' or 'In the fountain you can see water' (not taken directly from the game, but similar). I found myself fighting the parser for basic interactions. For example, with the monkey, (Spoiler - click to show)it suggested giving a donation. I tried GIVE DONATION. That wasn't understood. I looked in my inventory and found cash. I tried PAY CASH. It needed a second noun. I tried PAY CASH TO MAN and PAY MONKEY. Both weren't undrestood. I tried TAKE CASH. I was unable to do so. I tried PUT CASH IN CUP. It said, 'But you are not holding the contents.' I later realized that there was a separate source of cash I needed to find. There weren't really any puzzles beyond (Spoiler - click to show)finding the coin, which is okay, but that's usually a highlight of Garry's games.

I'd usually say at this point that at least the setting was charming, but each room is given a minimal description, as are the vendors, and there is little emotional exchange between us and our three-year old child. My character felt detached, irritated.

I can say though that this out of the norm for Garry, who usually has very solid games, like The Mystery of Winchester High or Search for the Lost Ark.

This game was entered in PunyComp.

It has a lot of interesting elements that I would love to see more of or more polished.

You're on a boat drifting in an ocean. The setting and tone, which were my favorite parts, is dark and distressing, like a survival game like raft or subnautica where you are in danger of your life at all times.

There's a mysterious voice that comments on things you did. I was interested in seeing this expanded on, but the game ends before I could discover more. It reported a score, but no score was used in the game (so it was 0 out of 0). I found directions difficult to understand; the game used non-standard directions, and while the correct word to use was in the text, it might have been nice to have it bolded. Later, while I could leave the boat with (Spoiler - click to show)swim to debris, (Spoiler - click to show)SWIM TO BOAT or SWIM TO DINGHY to try to get back did nothing; some kind of response might be nice.. There were some whitespace issues, with missing line breaks before the command prompt most of the time.

If this game were polished more or expanded on, I'd definitely be happy to rate it higher. The concept is great and the author(s) did a good job of establishing tension and mystery, I think it just needs a little polish.

This is the last game I'm playing/reviewing in Ectocomp, and is the most-rated one in the comp so far. Having played it, it's easy to see why.

You play as an employee in a firm that seems to specialize in educational software. For some reason, you constantly get emails intended for people that aren't you.

The game was trickier than I expected, and I wasn't paying attention at first, so I didn't know who to forward emails to for a while (which is part of the gameplay). This enhanced the experience, as it got several people mildly annoyed at me and made me feel like we were all playing the same game in multiplayer.

Then, things begin to change. The workload gets harder in ways that shouldn't be possible, and a greater burden has to be shouldered. The ending is ambiguous, which I liked.

Unlike most petite mort games (which tend to be quick sketches of games due to the time constraints), it seemed to completely polished and fully fleshed-out, which makes sense as it seems to be scoped well (with a system that doesn't require much branching, if any, but still rewards interaction by having you guess who to forward an email to).

A great game to end the competition on!

This is a polished-looking Ink game with a great story arc, solid writing and interesting characters. It has frequent strong profanity that seems natural to the characters.

You play as someone who is currently presenting as a man during a date. Your best friend Tom is coaching you, Cyrano de Bergerac style, on how best to romance your date. As things go on, facts come out. Gender identity is a central component of the story.

There are a variety of ways it can end, some shorter than others. It took me a few replays to see how the author cleverly handled the scope of the game without letting it get out of hand (by funneling several types of choices to the same results).

The horror here is the horror of self-hatred (in my interpretation). Pretty much every path leads to some kind of self-loathing. The other narrative thread I identified is toxic friendship.

I think that most people on the forum will find something rewarding in playing this game.

This was a compact but complex puzzle game, impressive for being written in 4 hours.

You are a ghost, only able to interact with the world once each year. The house you are in is being used for a vacation by guests. Your goal is to interact with them to guide them to the truth.

Unfortunately, you are very weak, and time is short. I found myself struggling (in character) to do almost anything, like opening windows and doors. But after replaying several times and exploring, I discovered the pattern needed to win.

Dialog and presentation were good and the puzzles were engaging and not too hard or too easy. Great work.

This game is a speed-IF parser game. Like many parser authors have done before, this author has chosen to write a 'my apartment' game, spending a lot of time on a familiar setting. Appliances are the most common item to be implemented, each with at least something to do. It's hard to implement a whole apartment in 4 hours, but the scope has been narrowed to just two rooms.

Other than that, there's not much to talk about.

Besides, of course, the corpse on the couch. But that's another story for another day.