Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This game has you read through 5 sort of interviews in Twine. Each one has a background character from a fantasy (or science-fi or both) tale explain to you how they feel about life while you react.

Each ends with a choice, which you must explain via text entry.

Reading all 5 stories unlocks a sixth story.

I liked the interactivity of it, the text entry and so on. But because the game seems designed to be a mirror for the reader, a lot of the text was bloodless and generic, designed to apply to as many situations at possible.

It covers some fairly controversial topics, including a dedication to a notorious American criminal.

I enjoyed this game, which took me a few hours to complete (and one big part I missed out on because I didn't notice a certain room exit).

This game uses the same hybrid system as in Detectiveland and Draculaland, where you choose a noun to hold and various options become available.

The breadth of the puzzles is impressive, and the humor is great. A few times I was frustrated by not knowing what to do, but when I realized what was needed, I felt like the puzzles were fair.

The endings were nice, I think. It's good to have satisfying endings for a game.

The Marino family has released several Mrs. Wobbles games over the years. This one is fairly long, and features two different protagonists.

All of these games feature a heavily costumized and illustrated Undum interface, like Twine but with a single, unbroken page of scroll. Text appears and disappears, stats are tracked, and there are several images.

This game seemed to have more depth than the other Tangerine House games; it offers two paths through the game, and a complicated inventory and even an economy.

This is a very large game/story, comprising 3 Twine stories, 1 inklewriter story, 1 Instagram album, and three wordpress blog entries.

Reading quickly, even skimming from time to time, it took around 3 hours to finish.

The story is compelling: an unemployed woman gets a business opportunity from her brother that's too good to be true.

It's gritty and dark. It's full of profanity, which I filtered on my computer. It's also completely believable.

I'm giving it 4 stars because the fifth star is for "would I play it again?" and while it was very compelling, I felt mildly traumatized by the time I was done.

This is the first game to use Liza Daly's windrift system besides her own.

I found the writing in this game to be sharp and evocative; I loved it, and might nominate this for best writing of 2018 when that time comes around.

It's very short, and the interactivity is quite limited, but the visuals are placed very well, and the styling and writing come together in a really pleasing way.

I found this short horror story compelling. You are someone, somewhere, intentionally vague, and you have a knack for finding faces on things.

The game is more than just that, of course, but I found it compelling, especially with the multimedia.

I don't want to say too much about it, because experiencing it all is the point. I wasn't satisfied with the conclusions of the piece though, even after experimentation. But that's something that's due to personal taste.

This has nothing to do with my rating or even something I think the author should do, but I wish the game had included a gallery of found faces. But I can satisfy that interest by my own searches. I like this game.

I've enjoyed the full Guttersnipe sequence of games; they generally feature well-thought out puzzles involving an urchin doing ridiculous things and eating junk.

This game puts a spin on things by placing your long-standing help system and narrative device Percy the Rat in confinement.

It features stereotypical Italians as the antagonists, with names like Tony Macaroni. It would be somewhat uncomfortable, except that it's less of a parody of Italians themselves and more of a parody of gangster movies's and novels' parodies of Italians.

There were several bugs in the version that I played, but it made the game more interesting, as I had to type exactly the right command, and it became just another puzzle. But polish and interactivity correspond to two of my stars, which is why I'm giving 3/5.

Edit:

Since my original review, the game has been revised to fix many bugs, so I'm increasing my score to 4/5.

This is a Twine game that features a number of people surrounding Trump, especially John Kelly, Stephen Miller, and Jared Kushner.

The game makes use of multimedia, with links to real-life articles, various illustrations, scrolling text aimations, and sounds.

The plot is fairly simple: you play as an intern thrust into the role of providing positive information for trump. Different factions try to tell you what to pass on, but you must choose between them.

The game has a few bugs listed below that should be easily fixed. Also, I felt like something was off with the links. I found myself frequently scrolling up and down to read the text after clicking a link, and had some trouble when coming back from aside-text (as everything became reset on the original page when I returned).

I was glad I played, as it was amusing. On a personal note not factored into my rating, I don't agree with its demonization of Stephen Miller as the evil behind the throne. Many people have been posited as the true evil behind the throne for some time in the Trump administration, and I think that shifts responsibility away from the President.

One bug report for the author:

(Spoiler - click to show)On the page near the end referencing constitutional crisis and WWIII:

The (link-reveal:) command should be assigned to a variable or attached to a hook

Also, the very last page seemed to have an error, as it showed a 'fire mueller' tweet as a graphic, while having a written text that said:

(Tweet text: "After hearing the words of my celestial grandchild, I have decided to rescind my order to fire Robert Mueller and will be resigning from the Presidency. I hope that once I am gone, we can begin to heal.)

Santoonie Corporation was a group that sprang up in the early 2000's promising a very advanced game called Amissville that never materialized in completed form. They went on to release a series of games, including Delvyn and Zero, and, finally, Lawn of Love.

Each of these games has an ambitious opening scenario that is mildly under-implemented and contains some sort of offensive or bizarre standard responses before eventually petering out in a section that cannot be finished.

This game is no exception. This game has an opening picture, a preface, an introduction, and a prelude. It features an opening scenario with conversation and detailed rooms, but with basic features missing (like when moving in an unavailable direction, where no text is printed. Apparently a sound was supposed to ping).

The story involves you meeting a pair of interesting young women, neighbors, one of whom plays a game with you. The game peters out shortly after.

If you find this interesting, try Delvyn, Zero, and the TADS Amissville.

This is a parser game written in C++. I played it on my own at first, but after I found it had trouble responding to several commands (and crashed after a few unexpected commands) I resorted to the walkthrough.

This game leans heavily on old text adventure cliches, especially making homages to Curses! and, perhaps, Scott Adams games.

Several scenes from Curses! are exactly reproduced, such as the delicately balanced key and the spade joke.

The worldbuilding was fairly well done, but I can't recommend this one due to the difficulties of the parser.