Reviews by MathBrush

I was making a game that had some thematic elements in common with this one, from what I'd heard, so I wanted to try it out.

Pretty much everything about this game is a spoiler, so I'll describe the non-spoilery parts first.

The idea is that you are a highschool boy who's long-time friend and neighbor Sayori has invited you to join a club with her and three other girls. When you do so, you find that all four members have their own insecurities, but are each in their own way soothed by your presence and attracted to you.

Like most visual novels, text is split up into short chunks with different character poses per chunk. In this specific novel, there is a pretty large gap between choices. I saved often, as I was clicking fast to keep the game's text speed around the same as my reading speed, but didn't want to use 'auto' or fast text due to some text that disappears quickly. The main forms of interaction are choosing the order to talk to people, choosing who to spend time with (rare), and writing poems.

Poem-writing takes the form of 20 or so pages of words. On the other side of the screen are chibis of several characters. When you click a word a character likes, they jump up excitedly. Once you've written your poem, whichever character jumped the most enjoys listening to it the most.

You have about a whole week's worth of meetings and poems and chances to get to know the person you're interested in. This is all part of Act 1 out of 4. There are hints that something else is going on; Monika, the leader, refers to some out-of-game concepts like saving and loading, and all of the girls in the club hint at some darker sides to their lives.

Spoiler time:

Moderate spoilers (gives away general concept and discusses act II and the dramatic end of Act I)

(Spoiler - click to show)
By the end of Act I, your neighbor Sayori ends up hanging herself, with the character of the music and game presentation distinctly changing.

In Act II, the game resets itself and you play again, but without Sayori. This causes some logical changes in the game world, but we also see more glitches, with some text replaced with a strange bold black font with pink background. The characters you interact with are shown in more and more awful situations.


Full spoilers:
(Spoiler - click to show)It turns out Monika, the president of the club, is aware of the fourth wall and of your existence as a player, and of the files in the game. She spurs the others to suicide and deletes their 'character files' from the game (as you can check in your OS). You end up floating in a void world with her unless you delete her own character file, which ends up setting up a new world that has its own problems in the brief act 4.


Discussion of the concepts:
(Spoiler - click to show)The game has a lot in common with other popular meta-games of the 2010's like Undertale that address the player directly and show awareness of existing in a game (although such games have existed for a long time). The long Act I, though, with very few 'unusual' events, requires a way to keep the player invested and involved. Ironically, then, in trying to make a good setup for a 'twist', the first act of this game is probably one of the better 'traditional' visual novels, especially since so many other popular visual novels have some kind of major twist in them.

To create horror, this game uses several techniques popular in game creepypastas and horror films, like:
-Use of realistic graphics when 'fake' graphics have been the norm
-making the player think their computer is glitching
-establishing norms for what characters can do and then breaking them (like 4th wall breaking)
-using content inappropriate for the rating level initially established (like strong profanity, sexual references, and graphic deaths and mutilation)

Overall, it was effective in the presentation of these concepts. There is some need to suspend disbelief, though; we see Monika primarily motivated by an annoyance that the player never chooses her; however, choosing her is not an option. This is mentioned in-game, though, so it's not exactly a plothole, more like a Greek tragedy.


There is some content, especially violence and self-harm, that I generally am not comfortable with. In this case, I was well pre-warned, but had another factor that made it less shocking. I tend to immerse myself in characters in interactive fiction or text adventures, which makes shocking events more upsetting, but I did not identify with the main character at all here. He's written with a strong voice and makes a lot of comments and decisions I never would; I know that's common in a lot of games, but I feel like it was even stronger than usual in this game, as if we were never meant to identify with him. I felt at arms-length the whole game.

This game has high production values. I'd give it 5 stars, but I don't intend on replaying.

This game (I think it was made for Shufflecomp?) really touched me. You play as a person in a kind of melancholy town at evening, watching grass blow and seeing things like power lines swaying in the wind and an old radio. When downloaded, the game plays peaceful, ambient piano music that strongly affects my rating.

Gameplay is about wandering around, at first, and then learning to interact with the world in a new way.

There are some whitespace issues and the interactivity took me a bit to figure out, but the music was polished and I loved discovering the mechanics. Very emotional, very powerful, I can't remember the last time an IF game made me feel this way (but I don't expect all readers to feel this, as it just happened to fit my mood and time of day, and things always feel better when you discover them organically rather than when someone tells you they're cool).

I've been playing through the most popular games I've never reviewed and this game has been at the top of that IFDB search for a while.

Playing through, I can see why it has been popular over the years. It is a parser game but has a list of all verbs and nouns for each location, and the puzzles are lighter than many other games at the time, making it a pretty easy experience to complete (though I did use a walkthrough at several points). It's also split up into 7 or so smaller adventures, so it's easier to plan out play sessions, and it has detailed pixel art and animations.

It's filled with a lot of pop culture references. Puns, Monty Python sketches, TV shows like Gilligan's Island and Fantasy Island, etc.

While the puzzles were generally fair, there were several points where items that you'd had and had seemed like gags for a long time turned out to be useful exactly then, which is probably where the greatest difficulty lies (remembering everything you've read or seen or picked up up to this point).

There are occasional point-and-click parts, the largest being a system of waterways to navigate.

Parts of the game are genuinely very amusing. As a whole, though, it is really reminiscent of 80's nerd humor, where women are primarily sex objects and non-American cultures are mostly there for jokes. This game has several jokes where rape is the punchline, and a lot of the drawings are of busty women whose clothes are falling off. Part of the game involves sneaking into a virgins' temple where you hope to see them nude, and the first virgin you see (not nude) is 15. There are stereotypes about Native Americans, and so on. All of this would come off as solidly normal, if a bit risque, in the 80s; the art style and jokes are very similar to softcore pornographic games my brother owned like Leisure Suit Larry (though no full nudity is there).

I enjoyed the difficulty level and gameplay, but I soured on the game more over time, especially after the sex-focused Olympus area, so I ended up just using a walkthrough to end it off. I did find the uses of all the magical objects you had gathered to be pretty funny, though!

This is a troll game in multiple ways. First of all, there is a troll. The point of the game is to cross the bridge that he is guarding.

Second, it's designed to have a ton of red herrings, like an overly-complicated calculator and a recurring noise.

Third, the whole point of the game is to prove a point in an argument.

The main argument is whether a logical solution is a solvable solution (and the point here is that the answer is 'no').

This remains a big sticking point in parser design three decades later. Many authors are surprised to find players getting stuck in parts of the game that should be logically clear or blindingly obvious; a lot of this is because for most parser games there are many logical things that we politely ignore, like realistic carrying capacities or getting tired or using the restroom. Those things are ignored because, when implemented, they are generally dull and boring. The experience of playing is, to me, more important than realism, and that ties back into this game's themes; while the game is logical, it not an enjoyable experience.

This game is Chandler Groover's earliest game. In it, a feathered serpent devours you while you are standing on a Mesoamerican pyramid, and you can only move up and down within the body for most of the game. While flesh and organic parts abound, there is also a lot of symbolic imagery providing for some vivid descriptions.

The reaction it received and his postmortem almost serve as an origin story for his later games. He mentions (mild spoilers for the types of puzzles in the game but not their solutions):

(Spoiler - click to show)Other people do not play parser games like I do. I like to examine everything, so I wrote descriptions for almost everything in my game, with the idea that people would examine things to uncover clues. However, many people didn’t seem to do that, so they missed clues for the puzzles if the clues weren’t placed in the general room descriptions. In the future, I cannot expect other players to share my devotion to examining the scenery, unless I give explicit instructions that this should be done (which I’ll most likely do, because I love the mechanic of examining things within things within things).

and about puzzles in general:

"Don’t add puzzles just to add puzzles. This probably means, for me, don’t add puzzles. I’m not nearly as interested in the puzzle-solving aspect of interactive fiction as I am with its potential for creating atmosphere, or for warping a narrative’s meaning with dynamic text. Those are what I ought to focus more on."

Groover's later emphasis on light-puzzle and limited parser games with easy-to-understand mechanics does seem like a direct result of these early design decisions.

I love the vivid imagery in the game. I do agree it takes close attention. I thought I remembered how to beat it, from years ago, but even knowing part of the puzzle I had to go to the walkthrough after going up and down the serpent several times in order to find the starting place of the first puzzle.

I liked this game enough to base a significant chunk of my game Grooverland in it, and I'm surprised I had never reviewed it. Definitely worth checking out! One of the smoothest-implemented 'first games' I've seen.

I thought I had played and reviewed this game long ago, but it turns out that I was thinking of Universal Hologram from 2021 by the same author, with some overlap in concepts (I swear I remember the pyramids).

This game is centered around the concept of living in a simulation. Several people have theorized that a sufficiently advanced civilization would simulate other civilizations, which could simulate more, etc. so that the chance that we are living in a simulation is very high, close to 100%.

There are many variants of this, including Rothko's basilisk, the idea that future AI will simulate post opponents of AI and torment them in hell forever. This game takes the stance that it's likely that future civilizations will simulate those in the past.

You play as someone (or a simulation of someone) living in Mars in a world where all needs can be eliminated. The game deals with themes of whether happiness can exist when decoupled from suffering and whether suffering is necessary for happiness, and the idea of the existence of a thing vs the experience of the existence of a thing.

It uses lampshading and occasional crude language to contrast with the elaborate language of the more philosophical parts, a combination common in a certain subset of early Twine games (especially Spy Intrigue and its immediate predecessors and successors).

Overall, I think it communicates a desperate search for meaning in life and a desire for human connection.

This brief work was entered in the 2024 Neo-Twiny Jam.

It's a well-written and polished game about a spacecraft where survival is no longer really an option.

I found the writing dark and atmospheric, and the three possible endings all presented a real difference due to our agency.

However, I didn't feel like I had enough time for the impact of the weight of the story to take full effect in the brief time I encountered it.

I've been trying to go back and review games I remember playing but somehow forgot to review.

This game is one of Astrid Dalmady's earliest games. Her twine games were the first twine games I every enjoyed playing, back in 2015, and got me started playing more.

This game is fairly brief but branches a lot, with 10 endings. Most endings can be found by falling on the wayside.

You play as someone about to enter the faerie realm through a mushroom ring, hoping to find something you lost (which you can select at the beginning). You remind yourself that, whatever else you do, you must not eat the food the faeries bring.

The UI and styling are great here, and the game pulls out some neat tricks. I played to two endings, but there's enough sameness in replays that I didn't look for the other endings.

The Wayhaven Chronicles are one of the most popular series of commercial IF games available. They follow a detective in the small town of Wayhaven who has recently been assigned four beautiful vampires as partners, out of which the detective can choose one to romance.

This series is projected to last through 7 books, although only 3 have been released so far; with some over 1,000,000 words, it's understandable that this might take a while.

This second game furthers the romance in the first game while adding a new mystery. Now that the hero is aware of vampires, other mysterious creatures come into play, and a new carnival comes into town, complete with creepy attractions and a horrifying mirror maze.

I felt like the balance between romance and plot shifted even more towards romance here than the first game. However, due to the need to stretch the romance over 7 games, the progression of the romance is glacially slow (at least for the A romance I chose). It reminds me of the Twilight novels, where Stephanie Meyers had to come up with more and more contrived reasons to keep the two main characters apart, or of the Office and the way it dragged out Jim and Pam.

So for those reasons, I found this game less compelling than the first. The creepy carnival was fun, and getting to know my teammates and the world around me. The game is great at providing enough roleplay options to really act your personality. I played a generally positive and cheerful character who liked their mom and was happy with the supernatural, and even if sometimes there was only a single hopeful choice, I picked it.

I did encounter more failure this time around. Despite heavily investing in one skill and using it at every chance, I often failed checks for that one skill.

While I didn't like this quite as much as the first one, I consider it a 5 star game among the general field of interactive fiction.

I recently heard a theater teacher give advice on how to play drunk people. She told students not to act drunk, but to act like a drunk person trying to act sober; otherwise, it will come off as over the top.

This game is written as a romance pretending to be a supernatural police procedural. Almost all interactions, plot points, choices, and scenes are designed to progress your romances with a variety of options.

The base story isn't bad; it's mostly unresolved by the end, as the game is part 1 of 7 intended games in a series, with 3 completed so far. Still, the 'substory' is fairly resolved.

The idea is that you are a recently-promoted detective who discovers a series of grisly murders by persons unknown. Simultaneously, a team of four vampires move into town (not a spoiler, as the game uses dramatic irony; while our protagonist doesn't know what's going on, we generally do). The four vampires happen to all be described as extremely attractive (and customizable as to gender), from the intense and brooding captain A (except names depend on gender selection) to the gregarious N or aggressive M.

I was pondering Choicescript games recently and realized how much better the system is at romance than almost anything else, the way parser games are better at object manipulation puzzles than most other things. Romance naturally lends itself to choices both on who to spend time with and on how to roleplay your interactions with them. This game has much less of an emphasis on powers and win/loss scenarios than most choice-based games (though some of both exists). Instead, the vast majority of options are role-play that affects your stats, and instead of those stats determining what you're capable of, they determine the way people react to you. If you are positive and happy about the supernatural, people comment about how relieved it was easy for you to accept; if tense and fearful, they are worried too.

The game is a romance power fantasy, where multiple beautiful people care about you, are impressed by you, and are excited about you, while you are simultaneously very important and powerful but also very fragile and needing protecting.

Outside of the romantic options, the game is not quite as exciting as, say, Night Road, another vampire game with investigations, but with them it's a solid game option. It makes sense that this would be one of the most popular Hosted Games of all time. I look forward to part II.