Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This fairly short Twine story has us playing as a magistrate's assistant, reviewing three different accounts of ghosts by three different characters.

The characters are inspired by the Chinese novel Di Gong An.

I found the setting interesting and the writing well-done. The only real choice was the order of the stories, but there was a bit of a puzzle at the end which I was pleased with.

This game combines dating game-type choices with complex static storytelling to form a rich interactive game.

You go to a Halloween party, and a lot of people are there. A supernatural event puts the whole town in danger, and you have a group of 8 people you can interact with, including multiple romantic partners.

Most of the choices relate to how you treat people. It doesn't track perfectly, though...I picked constantly to have favorable interactions with one character (Zachary) and twice with another (Ione) and received romantic possibilities only with Ione.

Very impressive. The title and cover art led me to believe it would be a short and under-implemented parser game. Instead, it was a rich and polished novella.

The font was a light grey that was a bit difficult to read, as a warning to the visually impaired.

In this game, you play a patched-up person made up of different people's parts.

It comes in three acts, two of which are exploratory, and the third of which is mostly a coda.

In the first act, you explore the house of yourself and your master, spending several days or weeks in-game exploring, thinking, learning, and solving some puzzles.

In the second act, you have the chance to interact more with the real world.

The styling was nice here, with Harmonia-like spacing and margins. Options are greyed out to indicate places you should explore more.

This really worked well on a lot of levels. I found the exploration tedious at times, but I don't think that there's an easy fix, and the game is good as-is. My ending was touching.

This is the second Ectocomp game I've played by howtophil, and I have to say that it's not as good as his other, and I actually think that's a compliment.

This current game was, as far as I know, the author's first completed work. I remember testing it in the forums. It implements several clever ideas/puzzles, one puzzle in each of four rooms.

However, it sort of attempts too much at once, not leaving enough time and space for careful implementation.

The author's second game in this competition, Wake Up, was written in less time but with more skill. It had a narrow focus, excellent implementation, and a great overall structure. It's clear the author is learning by leaps and bounds.

So I can't strongly recommend this game, but I can recommend Wake Up, and I believe the next games to come from this author will continue to increase in quality.

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.