Reviews by MathBrush

Enkii

Upon completion of this game, it states that it won't accept any rewards from IFComp. In accordance with its wishes, I'll extend that to also mean I won't write a full review.

In fact, if you plan on playing this game, I strongly suggest you play a different game. The walkthrough of this game agrees with me.

Under Loch

This game had a pleasant presentation, with a nice background color. It has a secret you need to beat it, so feel free to check out the well-guided walkthrough, which doesn't give much away.

Once I got the game started, it became an interesting back and forth. You play as two characters, one who is visiting the UK on a pleasant excursion to a loch and another who is trapped in a hotel room near the loch. Together, the two of you coordinate a search to help her get out while getting some life details.

The conversations feel nice and genuine, which, since the game is mostly linear, is its best selling feature, outside of the initial puzzle of getting started.

I genuinely am quite confused by the ending. If it's meant to be supernatural or sci-fi, that would make sense. If it's meant to be a 'the reader will likely be confused like the protagonists, but should be able to figure it out', I'm afraid I didn't figure it out. I'd love to hear from others.

Given that the names of testers were anonymized, meaning that they're likely recognizable people, and that the author uses a pseudonym, and that it uses interesting technology features and pleasant styling, I'm going to guess this is by Allyson Gray.

On Repeat

When I got divorced I realized I had never really formed my own musical tastes. As the second child in a family of 9, I usually just went along with whatever was around me, like musicals and pop. In college, when I got a smartphone for the first time, I asked girls I like what music they liked, some of which I enjoyed as well and some of which has remained on my phone for over 20 years with perhaps less than 10 plays ever (sorry, Matt Acosta's Songs we Sing and Carrie Underwood's Carnival Ride). I did pick up a fondness for opera. When I married my ex-wife, we mostly compromised on generic pop.

After my divorce, I was emotionally shattered for a long time. I looked up the 1000 best albums of all time on some website and tried listening to them. Radiohead's OK Computer was number 1. I ended up really liking Radiohead, Pink Floyd, and Kanye West (censored versions). I bought every Radiohead album except the first one (can't remember the name, just remember it wasn't as good) and I listened to basically nothing but Radiohead for 2-3 years. It was the kind of depressing music that matched my mood (along with Kanye's online clean version of "Runaway" in a movie form, which I typically listened to more than watched). I stopped listening as much when my emotional health and confidence improved in the last few years. While not relevant to this game, I then got into video game and cartoon music through my son (like Adventure Time, Undertale, Steven Universe), and currently have been listening to a lot of Daft Punk and French, Spanish, Chinese and German songs (French and German for when I teach the classes as elective, spanish and chinese to have something to talk to the spanish and chinese teachers about). (I was looking through and found my recap for June-August 25. It's trash but that's okay. The number one song on there was, slowed down, the background music for a swimming video, and someone said it was the worst song they had ever heard, but I liked it and listened to it a lot. A lot of other videos on the list were only on there because of autoplay; I don't even like some of them. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=LRSRApzxWf1UTFGSjbiKiaPMz-XzR-n1g777u&si=LZMb5TNIQUK5OUtf. I also just found my 2023 recap which was in my transitional period between Radiohead and other stuff and has a bit of everything above https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=LRYRWuIJu55ZElFFBGjagoHV69yXEJSAsAJdt)

Anyway, this game reminded me of that Radiohead period, I'd put it on all the time when feeling bad.

In this game, you are going through a kind of funk and can spend each day cycling through calling your mom, listening to a new album, getting coffee, etc. with the same options each night and day. Different options can help you feel good or bad.

On my first playthrough, I did nothing but listen to the album at all times, and, predictably, I was sick of it at the end. This playthrough was kind of boring. On my second one, I played a variety of links, going back to the album only when I needed a pick-me-up. That was nice.

The game did make me reflect a lot; it's filled with relatable things that most people would experience, though a few things differed from my own. I like calling and talking to my mom, but I don't do it very often; typically when I do it's because I'm feeling down and I know she'll make me feel better. I don't hear about protests and don't even know what news I'd have to listen to to get protest alerts. I have a cat, but not one I got for myself, one that ended up with me, and we both coexist with each other but don't have dedicated playtime together (she's pretty antisocial).

The game serves as a mirror, reducing our PC and their lived experience to bare essentials to better reflect our lives. It's not substantial, but we can easily make it substantial through our own impression of it.

The Very Last Night I Spent at Ethelred Estate

When you're making a surreal horror game where you doubt your own reality, it's hard to tell if the story has problems or if its accurately simulating the protagonist's mental state. I think this game has problems, though. I reached a point where I could no longer play (with the only choice being 'listen close') and there were several types (like "It's if" where it should have been "It's as if".) Other things could be mistakes or intentional. At one point the game says you're "pregnant again" right after saying you're pregnant for the first time; that would fit with the game's blurb ("the details in her mind keep changing").

The plot that I saw (starting from a wedding) has the player's mother warn of a huge problem that will occur related to firstborns in the family. Something's wrong with the estate itself, with cracked mirrors and a cockroach infestation.

The core concept is something I've seen executed well before, and if the bugs and typos were fixed, I think it would be worth putting out an updated version of the game. I would immediately increase my score from a 1 to a 3 (I only have it lower since my rubric penalizes buggy games).

Golden King

Damon Wakes likes to push the boundaries of what is considered IF. This year I'm thinking of it less like a 'this is really important for me personally to establish what is IF and what isn't' and more like 'this is a poll by Damon and it's my turn to vote'. For me, I wouldn't want to see more like this. Fullscreen 3d engine games with sound go against most the reason I like IF (discreteness, gameplay that can be started and stopped). I did like the Ultraviolent Unicorn game and would like more of it, and have been avoiding UI3. Sometimes even the 'bad' games are 'good'. I rated The Miller's Garden very low and it's currently the lowest-rated game by Wakes that isn't an Uninteractive Fiction game, but I included it in my longlist of favorite games, because it just stuck in my brain for some reason, the mundane inevitability of loss.

Anyway, this game, as I said, I didn't like as much. It's not even the 3d engine and voiceover; the game 2/5 by BenyDanette is a french/english bilingual unity game where you make choices walking down hallways that have printed text in them and voice overs. I liked its introspection. I think the reason I liked this less was simply the lack of printed text.

Morality-wise it was interesting. It's a gdevelop game where you play as a chess king and everywhere you move, things turn to gold. I intentionally turned trees to gold and got a voice over and guards to gold. The whole time my wife and child spoke and laughed with each other. I knew there might be some ending, but I decided to simply stop playing. The laughter of my child was beautiful, and in my immersion I didn't want to silence it, and only not playing could guarantee that it wouldn't permanently end (though of course, ironically, turning off the game silences it).

Ass in the Woods

This was a brief Twine game that had a cool-looking background, colored text and text effects, and some impressive moments of description.

It's fairly short. I can't tell if it branches a lot or not; I played once, and there were a lot of options on how to react to things, which was nice.

It's a retelling of part of A Midsummer Night's Dream, but instead of Bottom being pampered by Titania from a love potion, the fairies seems to be pranking him by treating him like a theatrical star.

In the path I played, Oberon came, with a cool intro where the game described trees stretching into antlers with gore on them and such.

The game uses a time text mechanism at time but can be skipped.

I like the UI things and I enjoy Shakespearean works. I didn't end up feeling a strong emotional connection to this work, but its hard to pin down why. Maybe because it missed some of the things I like most about Shakespeare like the wordplay and word choices, and because the new material was fairly simple (mostly about a person being stuck up). But I feel glad I played the game.

The Copper Tavern

A lot of times when I'm making a game, in the first day or two I'll make a toy model with some of the items and people in it just to play around (like for Never Gives Up Her Dead, one of the first things I did was make Frankenstein from the horror psychology area and give him some dialog).

This game seems like it never made it past that stage. Like its apparent sister game, Gambler's Quest (both made in punyinform by one-named people with no links, similar walkthroughs, uploaded at around the same time as indicated by adjacent numbers in the urls, both unfinished games), this game has just a few rooms with a couple of interactions in them and not a lot of coherence. It does have a complete story, but some things don't make sense (I never found an eviction notice but its mentioned that I found one) and many things aren't implemented. The AK-47 makes me wonder if it was intentionally meant to be random and buggy and score low in IFComp, but it's hard to tell.

The Acquisition

This is a quintessential staple of the last ten or so years of IFComp: a short, unstyled branching Twine game with no variables that has witty dialogue and a clever premise.

(okay, I actually looked up games on IFDB made in twine and tagged IFComp game and actually could find almost nothing satisfying the above criteria. So it's the opposite of quintessential. But it felt familiar and homey).

This game is styled as a CYOA book, with turning to pages. In it, you play as a man of moderately wealthy means who wants to buy a $3300 Glen Baxter drawing. You can't actually afford it, and your wife will be and is very upset if you decide to buy it.

The nagging wife/mid-life crisis dynamic feels a bit like a throwback to earlier eras of humor (combined with the suicidal/surreal humor, it feels vaguely millennial, like me), but the writing is sharp and witty. It's not a long or substantial game, especially due to the branching, but it fills out its time well.

This is the last game on the IFComp review spreadsheet without a review.

It's a short game, written in texture. It mentions violence, brief nudity and profanity but there's very little of each (so the author is being conscientious).

The concept reminds me a lot of the AI-generated fruit people videos I see popping up on my social media (I don't think this game is AI-generated, just the themes are common). A lot of them begin with things like this game begins with, a hospital room with two women fighting over one man, later kicking to a wedding scene (I don't know why hospitals show up so much in the ai-slop videos). Here, it makes sense, as I think it's drawing on the same tropes, mostly those of soap-operas, telenovelas and some of recent sci-fi.

There are multiple paths, all of which lead to the same general reveals but substantially different results. I thought the twist was interesting.

The game itself has a typo; it's listed as El Ruido (the noise, referring to the noise in the MC's head), but the search bar and title screen calls it El Rudio.

Triangle for Two

I was surprised to see this one unreviewed so far, since Naarel tends to have strong prose and games that are easy to finish, which usually means lots of IFComp reviews. I suspect that it comes from not having the game length field filled out (I'd put it in the 15 minutes or less category, though I took longer as I thought through it and reread chunks). Also, it ends without THE END or something similar at the end, so people may think they didn't finish it. I'm not as familiar with the co-author, though I suspect the text itself may elucidate that matter.

This is a short, polished twine game with literary text that deals with a social/personal facet of life. That's a fairly large field, but this reminds me more of Ann Hugo and Glassrat than any other authors (I enjoyed both of their games a lot).

The main topic of this game is that someone who has two people in the same body has to announce their mutual coexistence to a friend. This is complicated by the several differences in the two's personality. One sees the friend as a close friend, possibly even more. The other is hesitant, protective, tense.

There are three kinds of links: progressing links, 'aside' links that go to another passage and return, and replacement links. One page uses a lot of replacement links in a clever way.

It was interesting to read in the literal sense (by that I mean I wanted to know more and went back and forth and read it a few times to gather more information). I have family members with similar situations; my brother's wife has several alters (using her language here rather than the game's) including one that likes group video games when we do voice calls together.

What strikes me about the character in this story is the combination of '>1 people in =1 body' with body dysmorphia. The woman in the pair sees the male body as 'other'. I was also struck by the lack of other people; the few people I've met in life with similar situations typically have several different alters, some steering in groups. Having exactly two, one man and a woman, makes for a really compelling relationship, well, 'triangle', with others, as the name of the game reveals.

The writing was good as always, with multiple references to places and things in Poland.