Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

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.

This is a political game by what I presume is a non-native English speaker who is very experienced in their own language, as there are numerous typos together with a very creative story.

The game also contains a great deal of offensive material, but it's difficult to tell who it's aimed at; I could see it being equally offensive to everyone, but curiously inoffensive at the same time.

The central storyline is that slugs have changed the world into a hyper-connected group of individuals that subsist on trashy news stories, including stories about Soros and Clinton.

Playing this game was certainly an experience.

This is a Quest hyperlink game written for Ectocomp. It was written in less than 4 hours.

You play as a vampire masquerading as a newspaper delivery girl, visiting different areas in the city.

The game had nice styling and art, and I appreciated the apparent depth. But there were some translation issues that made the puzzly parts of the game hard for me to understand, and several typos.

This Ectocomp Petite Mort is a tricky little pentagram puzzle.

It took me a while to understand what I needed to do. The game had a fairly entertaining framing story which (especially the latter portion) elevated the game in my opinion. Even though I didn't necessarily agree with its message, I respected it.

The main puzzle consists in placing objects on a pentagram (with both inner and outer pentagons). I thought for half of the game that I could only walk on pentagram lines themselves. Certain objects repel each other, and the game encourages experimentation.

This is a speed-IF game, written in just 4 hours, but it has some pretty good heft; I've seen some IFComp games with less material, and it has nice styling.

It presents a scenario in which you've run out of biscuits, and the effects of Brexit have made it difficult to get enough food.

There are multiple paths, most of which have no choices (which makes sense for a Speed-IF), and the game encourages replay. Probably the best use I've seen of Twine in a Speed IF for creating the most material in the shortest amount of time. A nice game to add to Benson's growing portfolio.

This is a neat little puzzle/story written up in just a few hours.

You are in one of Caleb Wilson's bizarre worlds, a world of blood and ectoplasm and strange gods.

You are provided with a multitude of items and left to sort it out for yourself. Every object has a use, and in the end there are 7 ways to finish the game.

The best part of this game is the immersive worldbuilding.

First, a note about my ratings. This game is very short and is necessarily unpolished (as a game written in just 4 hours). So I took off one star for that.

But I found it had emotional effectiveness, I would play it again, the interactivity worked for me, and the writing was descriptive.

You are having a terrible nightmare and feel paralzyed. There is only a small amount of time to help yourself.

It took me a couple of play-throughs to get through it, but I was impressed at the level of craftmanship in an Ectocomp game. Well done.