Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

Liza Daly has come up with quite a few ways of presenting stories in the past, including complex parser games, the precursor-to-Twine game First Draft of the Revolution (in tandem with Emily Short), and the Windrift engine.

This game builds on that earlier material. It is very short, finishable in 5 minutes (unless I missed something major!).

Basically, there is a sequence of choices in the story, each of which can be revisited at any time. There is a bit of hysteresis, a term Emily Short has used before to describe how doing and undoing choices doesn't just put you back where you started, but has lingering effects.

This was an interesting game. Perhaps the most interesting part was the author's afterword.

The idea is that you set off to several journeys that are procedurally generated. Along the path, you can control how surreal the messages are by staying on the path or wandering away.

Much of the conversations at the end of each journey were repetitive, which the author states is a bug. It gave an interesting effect, though, almost like a dream, a ghost conversation, or a fading memory.

I really enjoyed this game in Introcomp, and the finished version is even better.

This isn't a grandiose or intense game. This game is just like an Agatha Christie story, with great attention to psychology and detail.

It manages to have a lot of material you have to plow through without feeling too much like lawnmowering. The author has a lot of context-sensitive programming with inventory-based puzzles, and that's what gives this game a good 'choice feel', if that's even a phrase.

You are at a hectic Christmas Eve dinner and Grandma's ring turns up stolen. It's your job to track down the culprit before the police have to be called.

Overall, this was my favorite Spring Thing game. Well done.

This game was designed as part of a class in game history. It's one of the most successful games I've seen done as part of a course, since most such games are very timid in their scope. This one is decently-sized.

The author decided to feature game history and critique heavily. Something happens in the game, and then you get a quote relevant to what you just experienced.

I found that an enjoyable premise. It did suffer from implementation issues, which are the bugbear of parser games in general. For instance, there is a telephone which cannot be referred to at at all.

Overall, it's a valuable addition to the niche of 'games about games'.

I helped beta test this game.

This game is pretty simple. It's a series of locations (28, I think), many of which are connecting rooms like hallways. It has one NPC. The rooms are fairly plainly described. The puzzles are contrived a bit.

But it all works. The puzzles are supposed to be contrived; you are literally exploring a 'demo game' within the game that is unfinished, and you must take advantage of errors in the code to win (like IAG Alpha).

The puzzles are fun, including a modular arithmetic/Chinese remainder theorem type puzzle.

This is a game that fills its own niche of small puzzle-fest exactly well.

This game is a collection of individual short story/games about musical artists in a cabin recording We Are the World.

The style is surreal and dense, between Finnegan's Wake and The Wasteland. Some are more coherent; Huey Lewis's was essentially a straight story. An example of the surreal language is "People need to stop using reptile as a pejorative. The universe is a spaceship."

On a review for Charlie the Robot, I said: "There should be a name for the genre of 'biting commentary on society that is self-aware and occasionally dips to crudity, with hints of cheerful ideals always tinged by irony, using an overload of text as literary device.' Such games include Spy Intrigue and Dr. Sourpuss Is Not A Choice-Based Game. It seems increasingly common."

It seems like that trend is continuing. This particular game has some of the least overall plot of all this genre I've seen. The different sections have little to differentiate between them, reducing the surreality to an essential sameness.

I could see this really attracting a certain personality type. I do not think this is an objectively bad game. But it didn't suit my personal tastes. A game similar to this but with a bit more interactivity that I could recommend is The Harmonic Time-Bind Ritual Symphony

I beta tested this game, but didn't finish it at the time due to personal events.

This game is similar to Bullhockey 1, but it improves on it. Implementation is smoother, inventory is cut down a bit, and atmosphere is distinctly improved.

Playing through the entire game, the highlights to me were an old house containing a series of dramatic historical vignettes and a self-referential finale scene that breaks the fourth wall.

However, this game is opposed to my personal play style. I play light and breezy, skimming text and rushing through. This game is designed for careful and studious play, with dense and obscure puzzles and the need for careful notes .

Overall, each of these games is getting better.

(Note: game contains some mild BDSM imagery)

This game is a sort of meta-commentary on writing and the nature of writing, technology, and maybe a bit of Sci-Fi.

It's format is essentially that of a cited and annotated series of paragraphs, each on separate pages. The presentation is slick, handling different browser sizes adeptly.

There is an extra layer to the game allowing you to access a command prompt with a few actions.

This game constantly hints at their being more, but I felt like that promise never materialized. That may be part of the point, but I feel that somehow just a couple of small tweaks here and there could have made everything gel for me.

More than any other piece of Western literature, Hamlet has been mangled up and mashed and transformed, from Hamletmachine to Lion King. But it makes sense, because it's a compelling story.

This version is a mashup between The Maltese Falcon and Hamlet. It borrows heavily from noir tropes, to the point of parody, but it also features heavy elements of surrealism.

This is a short, linear game that maintains an illusion of slightly less linearity.

It's an interesting concept. Some of the surreality was hard to distinguish from bugs at first, and this created a kind of disconnect between me and the interaction.

I can't tell if this game is genius or just confusing. But I like it.

It's a pretty hefty Twine game at around 30K words, with much of this tied up in different relationship tracks.

You play a worker in a futuristic San Francisco that seems to be on the edge of apocalypse. You've suffered intense losses, including the recent passing of your mother, and most of the game deals with reflection on your relationship with her.

The game has excellent media usage, including a skyscraper that scrolls up and down as the player moves, and heavy usage of a beeping watch alarm.

The writing style makes heavy use of inference and allusion, making for a confusing read. It also employs non-linear narrative, so this is a pretty complex game.