Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

Sometimes Twine games just click for me, and sometimes they don't.

Two ways they can fail is to either encourage/require you to just click everything, or to have trivial choices that clearly don't effect the story.

This gave really gave me the feeling of strategy. Even if it was an illusion, I felt like I could play a specific kind of character and have it matter.

The game contains some highly unusual events, part of which gets explained near the end of the game. I don't think everyone will love this game, but I know many others who also like it. For me, this is the kind of Twine writing that very few people get right: Hennessay, Dalmady, Corfman, Lutz and Porpentine, a few others. Welch can write with the best!

Playing this game felt like being in the video for Thriller or some other sort of famous creepy song.

It's largely linear, with a series of obstacles and strong hints on what to do (except at one point where I completely failed multiple times in a row at what turned out to be the last two puzzles of the game).

Some of the content of the game wasn't really up my alley (you follow a girl out of a bar because she's so attractive), but it was coherent, and everything meshed well with the opening.

In this Inform game, you are a private investigator who is haunted by strange phenomena. It has a large cast of characters and expansive geometry.

However, due to its nature as a fairly quickly written game (for Ectocomp), it suffers from a lack of implementation that makes it difficult to play without the walkthrough. I took my time, examining things, in the opening scene, and missed out on all the triggers that would have led me to discover more.

Best experienced with a walkthrough.

In this Ectocomp Grand Guignol game, you play as a masked reveler in a sort of grim fantasy realm.

This is a substantial game, bigger than most IFComp Twine games (though I think this is a proprietary system, not Twine). There are at least 13 locations, an inventory system and economy, various sicknesses you can acquire.

It seems like an Italian horror version of Carneval, with decadent displays by comedians, dancing, buffets, etc.

I found a satisfying ending after exploring about half the map, and felt content. Styling was rich and gorgeous. I think this is even better than Devotionalia, the author's IFComp game.

This is a feel-good game, which, as the author pointed out online, is very different from their last game, Bogeyman:

"my entry for ifcomp, which is genre-neutral: "extremely disturbing", "relentlessly horrible"
my entry for ectocomp, which is specifically halloween-themed: light-hearted family-friendly HIJINKS"

This game is based on a classic kids' cartoon, and it holds up well. You have a big, lawnmowery exploration phase looking for supplies before setting up a home alone-like defense.

The game feels slight and smallish, but polished; this makes it perfect for a casual competition like Ectocomp.

This game is a shortish Texture game with a Halloween theme. You are brought before a macabre group and forced to perform a ritual.

The Texture programming was more complex than I'm used to, which was a nice change. It felt like a real puzzle. At first, I thought it was similar to Moon Goon, with an altar containing 'assorted items', but the ending couldn't have been more different.

I loved the overall plot design in this game. Given its fun-to-length ratio, you should just go try it.

This game is framed as a collection of friends sharing tales. After an intimidating wall of opening text, you begin playing the mini-games in random order.

You can, at any time, excuse yourself to go to the bathroom to skip a tale, which opens up a small segment of the game.

The stories were fun, and in a wide range. One was essentially a one-note joke; one was a deeply disturbing exploration in three parts that was frankly horrifying; another was like a fairy tale; and the fourth is a fun riff on metaphorical games.

I found this game truly enjoyable. Its one defect for me was the difficulty in finding the right actions/verbs on a regular basis. However, that may be part of the charm. But when I saw a pattern on the wallpaper and couldn't X PATTERN, or couldn't get a response for cutting it with one of two items present in the game, I got frustrated. SHOUT could work more often, TALK TO isn't implemented. But I don't know if it's worth it going back to spruce this game up, since the fun's already there.

First, it's fun that Spirit AI is putting out a Halloween game.

This is a unity game, and it's big: 140+ mb. It has graphics, courtesy of Tea Powered Games, and text, courtesy of Emily Short.

The basic framework is a nice wallpaper-y background with a visual novel-style character you're speaking with.

You have three forms of interaction:
-selecting a topic (I found 3 topics in my playthroughs). Different topics allow different conversation options.
-selecting emotions (up to 6 or 8 or so, each an on/off button). These are independent of each other, so I could, for instance, choose to be curious, open, angry, sad and hungry. These alter the conversational options in a procedural way, sometimes unlocking more.
-the conversational options themselves. Some, with an exclamation mark, have a greater effect on the game.

You play a ghost who is haunting an old house. At first, you have great difficulty in speaking, but that is gradually relieved (unless you mess up like I did on my first play-through.)

This game has many endings and quite a few topics.

Overall, I was impressed by the flexibility of the engine. I could see this being integrated with 3d Unity games, with physical location or costumes being a fourth way of influencing topics or replacing one of the methods above.

The procedural text had pros and cons.

At its least enjoyable: clicking a radio button on and off rapidly would cycle through the options, changing words like 'abject' to 'inconsolable', for instance, exposing the guts of the game.

At its best: when used as intended, the proceduralness lets the game respond to your intentions in a pleasing way that would be horrible to write as an author.

So you only really see it when lawnmowering or experimenting. But in this game, I found it easy to get lost, as I frequently had trouble guessing what the effect of my actions would be. So I ended up seeing a lot of the 'guts'.

As a demo of the system, it worked very well. As a story, I found it interesting and worth playing several times. I'm glad this was in the competition, and I hope a lot of people sign up to try out the engine (I know I'm interested, if I can find the time!)

It was great to see something as complex as an audio game entered.

The controls are simple: 1 to say yes, 2 to say no. It uses Unity. I wished there were a pause button, but that would matter more in a longer piece.

The game is made using voice changers. The main 'scary' voice is highly distorted, but I was able to hear it most of the time. Your character's voice is like a chipmunk.

The story is that you've been kidnapped after signing a waiver, and you have to answer questions from a questionnaire. My game ended after two questions.

B Minus Seven writes games that are more surrealist poetry than anything else, and this is no different.

It's unabashed in its content, using profanity, brashness, confusion and vulnerability. It's also very short. You pick from three things in a cross between a recipe book and a shopping list, each one with 1-3 more options before returning.

It didn't really gel together for me, but for fans of B Minus Seven it is a great addition to the oeuvre.