Reviews by MathBrush

Ruber Eaglenest has made several games before with serious themes written in sensitive and poetic ways.

I found this game beautiful as I started it. The emphasis on colors and nature felt soothing, mixed with melancholy at being a ghost.

Interaction was confusing at times, perhaps to show what being a ghost would be like. You have three options most of the time, but they change as you select things, possibly in a pattern, possibly just based on how long you've waited. I never had too long to feel frustrated.

The ending was moving, and a reminder of (Spoiler - click to show)the horrors of war, and our responsibility to seek peace throughout the world. A very effective piece.

I saw the name of this and thought, ‘sounds like a Damon Wakes game’. Then I saw it was a Damon Wakes game.

What can I say? This game was longer than just one room. It seems based on Clue, with a bunch of different secret passages connecting different parts of a map.

The only real question is…when will the jumpscare come?

The actual jumpscare noise sounds like the FNAF ones but slightly different; was it homemade? Overall it reminded me of playing Ultimate Custom Night a bit. It seems like it acheived all of its goals (if its goals were to make players sigh, open up the game anyway, and then click through until jumpscared).

This is a Spanish Grand Guignol game about waking up in a seedship on its long journey through the stars.

It uses what is either AI or modified stock images for its scenes.

It hits on the most exciting time for a colony ship, the kind of time where you have to wake people up and make big decisions.

The system is choice-based, with an inventory (which, for me, wasn’t used) and a little space below the room description to describe the results of various actions.

It was neat, but ended very abruptly for me. I’ve asked others for confirmation, but it looks like right now the game just ends after a surprising reveal. If that was the whole game, I would have wanted more; if it’s a bug, I hope it’s fixed!

This is a game that I suspect rests entirely on understanding the lyrics of a song. Unfortunately, I’m playing without headphones while my son’s on a call, and so I had to keep it down, and the genre is metal with a screaming/distorted voice, so I have no idea what’s going on. The artist is credited, but not the song name, so I have no idea what the lyrics are.

The idea of the game is that you see a cute little worm which wants you to follow him. You then peek through a hole to see a party, and the song plays while the worm grows horns. I can only assume that .

It looks like this game is another game advertising Moiki’s new sound capabilities, which seemed to work very smoothly. The graphics and color transitions were also great. Judging as a game itself, its low interactivity and brief length, coupled with its reliance and careful listening, made it rank a bit lower in my mind, but I don’t think the author was trying to make a complex game, just show off some great multimedia. The band does sound nice, and I’m surprised their youtube channel only has 192 followers.

I believe this is an extended game that is part of the same group of students that produced the game Hotel Halloween, but this story is much longer than those (although still completable in under 15 minutes).

In this story, a visit to a graveyard takes your mind to a different time and a different place, where you are tasked with finding out exactly what is going on.

The game has several surprises, and the writing has touches of emotion and descriptiveness. There are a variety of endings. I felt like its plot arc had a good resolution by the end. One thing that could be improved is better spacing of the paragraphs in the text (just adding another blank line between them would work, I think).

I was interested upon seeing that Christina Nordlander wrote this; when I started IF in 2015, I felt like I saw her name everywhere, so it's fun seeing someone who I consider 'famous' come back.

This is a Playfic game that has a large scope for a Petite Mort entry (completed in 4 hours or less). You are walking in the middle of the night and approach a house, looking for a light source.

The game is fairly complex, with multiple objects that can be turned on and off and a bit of branching in the middle. I found one way to do something very dangerous, which produced a shocking result, but looking at the code later, I realized I had missed another, more liquid event.

Of course with a Petite Mort game there are some coding issues here and there. I didn't encounter bugs but I had huge trouble finding a way type the name of a certain glowing thing because it had a two-name word in the code and I kept trying either the first name by itself or the second, but never both together.

Overall, I liked the vibes of this game; it reminded me of a couple of old Twilight Zone Episodes, somehow.

This petite morte game surprised me with how polished and nice it looked, with a dark color scheme combined with eery accents and cephalopod-based art.

It's a choicescript game about forbidden knowledge that comes from unholy texts. Again, I was surprised at how much text the game has.

But, it ends abruptly, which makes sense, as this is a Petite Morte speed-IF game. And it relies very heavily on a famous work of horror fiction, so some of its best parts were parts I had seen many times before. So the things that stick with me the most are its own innovations, like the abrupt change in setting.

Overall, a neat concept, and fun to play.

This is a visual novel with excellent background images and ambient music, and which has no interactions other than clicking 'next'.

The story pays careful attention to first and second person, with 'me' being a young child named Pierce and 'you' being a figure that grows more throughout the story.

This is a family drama, and deals with Pierce's loss of a family member in the past and with haunting visions.

Reviews can serve a few purposes, two of which are telling the author if they did a good job and giving others an idea of whether they'd enjoy the game or not. My general review system incorporates writing, emotional impact, and interactivity, among others. I believe the author intended this story to have its impact almost entirely through writing; many kinetic fiction authors use the size of paragraphs and new pages to give the 'next' button a more active feel, but this game felt to me to lack even that kind of interactivity, with fairly uniform page sizes.

So, I think the author succeeded in writing an excellent narrative, and I think they should be commended for succeeding in their desired text. I also think that many users are interested in interactive aspects of stories on IFDB, and so my overall rating of a 3 takes that into account.

I do wish I understood the game a bit better. I played Doki Doki Literature Club for the first time recently while researching visual novels; in it, the 'literary' character writes a poem about a ghost under a streetlamp that is flickering. Once you read it, she says something like, 'and of course you know it wasn't about a ghost, it was about a woman trapped in a situation'. And the protagonist is apologetic at not realizing that or understanding the metaphor, but it makes them feel more appreciative of the author and her poem. I feel the same way with this story; it's clear the story isn't really about what it contains, but I don't think I got the real message. What comes across strongest to me is the alienating feeling of being a young child with no family support and everyone you love feeling like they're drifting away, but that doesn't fit with the role of the housekeeper in the game, so I feel like I can't grasp at the 'center' of the story.

This is a well-made Bitsy game about a creepy hotel.

Bitsy is a minimalist text and pixel art animation game engine. Here, the author has modelled a hotel with quite a number of items scattered around, and multiple rooms.

The ambient messages you find around are effectively chilling. At one point, I was checking something out the second time and the game changed drastically. I made a choice, and got a very interesting ending.

I don't know if there are multiple endings. If the one I found is the only one, that's neat; if not, I appreciate the branching. Overall, a very strong bitsy game.

This game was made in just half an hour. It’s a bitsy game (or similar), with arrow key movement and animations, and text triggered when you reach certain squares.

It’s a brief telling of a legend of a creature that comes for kids that don’t sleep well. It features some spooky urban-legend type horror. The students at my school just finished a unit on legends, monsters, and superstitions in spanish-speaking countries, so I sent this to our Spanish teacher.

The animation is very good, although it took me a while to realise that the upper-left picture is like a ‘zoomed in’ version of things (maybe our POV?) and I don’t know what the lower rectangle. Creepier than I thought it would be.