Reviews by MathBrush

This is a tiny game, written by a Slovakian student. It describes itself well, as it's one room in a Twine game where all exits lead either to the same room or an identical place. The only choice is when to stop.

It's a funny idea, but the title kind of gives away the big twist, and the game itself is small, so I would have hoped for something a bit more. That doesn't mean it's bad, though; it feels similar to games like Uninteractive Fiction 1 and 2, made by a skilled author who wanted to convey a specific message/feeling etc. through a tiny or unfulfilling work. Experimentation like this is a great sign (to me) in a young author.

This is the shortest of Andrew Schultz’s trilogy of Petite Mort games based on pairs of two-word pairs that sound alike.

This one has characters that follow you around and bonus points, which are nice, and the art remains frun and fresh, but there are less puzzles overall (which isn’t always bad, since I like these smaller games, but I think the 12-13 point games hit the sweet spot more), and I found a couple of minor typos.

I still, after playing all three games, think the pixel art really contributes a lot. They help ground the abstract gameplay really well, and show the effect the player has on changing the environment. For me, they provide nostalgia for 80’s and 90’s edutainment games, some of which had similar pixel art.

This is a short atmospheric game with great styling choices. You are in a house and you have some difficulty remembering how you got to where you are. You can turn around or keep going but everything you do has some problem.

The ending was, for me, unexpected, and I actually got two different endings when I replayed, which was also unexpected. I liked the creepy feeling that the beginning of the game had the most.

I don't know of any other games by this author but I would play them if they released more.

This is a brief parser game that appears mundane before throwing a twist at the player.

You are in an apartment and can hear trick or treaters outside. But you're not dressed! A pile of clothes lie on the floor, which you must assemble in the correct order.

The game felt well-implemented and the twist was quickly resolved. This was a delight to play, especially in a large competition with tons of long games: just a short burst of concentrated playtime with a big punch.

This was an interesting short game that could be open to several interpretations. It's a short Chapbook game.

In it, you play as a young person in the heat of summer who is kind of bumming around. You live with a few friends but you spend a lot of time on your own. In particular, out in the woods, you come across an empty well. You have a habit of tossing things in, but for some reason, you never seem to hear it hit the bottom...

The game felt introspective and meaningful. I don't want to say too much more, not because of any big twists, but because I think it would just make the experience stronger overall to play through without prior interpretation given by others.

This is another ectocomp speed-IF game by a Slovakian student. This one feels like a take on the Saw franchise, waking up in a room with puzzles and traps.

This is a highly branching game, with almost every choice giving you a completely new branch instead of continuing along the same pathway. Many of these paths are deaths. Some of them were quite amusing, some were surprising.

It's nice to see younger people learning IF tools and experimenting!

This is another game by tzbits using a custom javascript framework. This one uses choice-based links rather than parser verbs.

You stand on rocky terrain near an angel and a woman named Rebecca. They are trying to tell you something, but it's difficult for your character to get the message at first. There are some twists as the game goes on, but it's fairly short, as makes sense for a speed-IF.

The choice-based links all resemble parser commands, like X ANGEL or just NORTH or SOUTH, which I thought was interesting given the other verb-based framework. Maybe they're similar under the skin, like Robin Johnson's versificator.

Like the protagonist, I had a little difficulty grasping what was going on; I could think of 2 or 3 scenarios that would fit what was going on, but I couldn't tell which. But maybe the ambiguity is the point!

This is another game by DissoluteSolute, and is the one I connected with the most so far. You play as a pet bug of a woman who was murdered by flies, using her last breath to curse them and ask her pet silkworms and tarantula to take revenge on the flies.

It is grotesque, short and focused on the story, with little implemented outside the main loop (including words mentioned in the room descriptions). In those regards, it reminds me of Baby Tree, a game that I frequently recommend to people who’ve never played IF as a way to immediately capture their attention.

I felt like the writing was solid and the main couple of puzzles were well-clued and simple but utilizing the classic parser gameplay loops.

Very short, but good.

Starting up this parser game, it didn't have the usual banner text, so I wondered if it was Inform or something else. Typing VERSION didn't bring anything up, but I figured that might have been overriden by a too-strict limited parser, so I opened up the Inspect Element feature and checked, and the javascript was different than anything I had seen. So I looked at the author's itch page, which went to their personal webpage, where it describes a new framework for javascript parser games.

This game uses a limited set of verbs which can be found by typing HELP. The verbs that are here work generally well; I saw a couple of typos here and there and some objects weren't implemented (you can't X TREE, for instance) but that's normal for parser speed-IF, and doing speed-IF in a custom language is especially impressive. So this looks like a tech demo for the new system. If I could put in any requests, I'd like to be able to change the VERBOSEness like Inform does. Currently, moving to a new location doesn't give the room description, you have to separately LOOK; it would be nice to be able to set that property. Another thing I missed was the ability to manually RESTART.

The story is about wandering through a pumpkin patch alone, finding a variety of items while also dealing with oppressive fog. I enjoyed the ambient room descriptions and the messages when trying to go 'off map'. There are also two endings, which is neat considering the game was written so swiftly.

This game is by a Slovakian student as part of the One Boat Crew team.

It's a branching Twine game, with very different paths depending on your choices. All of them deal with a kind of strange reality you find yourself in. I took what I thought was the 'weird' path first, but when I did the 'main' path later, it was a lot shorter.

There are semi-comforting/eery endings and horrifying endings, which is a nice mix, and I would be proud of my high school students if they created something like this.