Reviews by MathBrush

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.

This is unique among IF; the closest thing to it I've seen is the current Spring Thing game Life in This Northern Town.

This is an anthology of five games: one inform game and four heavily modified Twine games.

I'll discuss each game in a minute. First, an overview: the folder from itch.io contains six images, one of each of the main protagonists together with a cover photo. The art is very well-done.

The general idea is that five heroes banded together, and then something occurred to them in the long run. The games focus on the beginning and the aftermath, skipping the traditional climax. It's contemplative.

Each game is named after a main character. Looking at the photos before playing is advised.

Alemayehu is the Inform game, and perhaps this should not be the game to start with when you're playing through. It is a constrained parser game, with a few actions primarily relating to other characters. It is a one-room game.that last a couple dozen actions or so.

Apollinariya is a textual labyrinth in Twine. The screen is split in two, with a table of contents on the left and text on the right. Your goal, if there can be said to be one, is to fill out the table of contents on the left, after which you can read the story as a whole. Links are unusual, as clicking on them reveals arrows going left or right, occasionally crossed out. To me, this was the weakest Twine game, as I ended up lawnmowering every link to get the last bits of story. But I enjoyed the final story.

Arzan is a heavily styled letter with a number of binary choices. in tone and styling it is reminiscent of First Draft of the Revolution. While the story is fairly linear, it offers some significant choices in terms of tone and emotion.

Cevahir was perhaps my favorite Twine subgame. Based on a taciturn character, it is minimalistic in writing but uses evocative visual imagery.

The final Twine game, Renatum An Amurum, uses retro styling, similar to text boxes in SNES RPG's. Similar to the Texture writing system, hovering over links provides additional context, but links are still clicked instead of dragged. This game requires replays to get the full story.

On the negative side, I found the new names and the obscure writing hard to get into at first, and I was surprised that the Twine and Inform games had been bundled up into applications.

I felt like I knew the characters by the end, which is a good sign.

This game was written as a learning sample of the ZIL language. It was written over just a few days.

As such, it is small and lean. But Welch has managed to put a few clever puzzles in.

I was unable to solve this without a walkthrough the first time I tried it. After the walkthrough, which is very detailed, I felt like the game required a number of fairly mean actions, but with suitable rewards.

I find this game most interesting as an example of the ZILF language. I wonder how many of the standard responses were hand-coded, and how many part of the language.

This game is highly unusual. It is a text adventure maze implemented on an emulator of an old type of computer.

The setup is fairly simple: a maze that reveals its shape to you once you fail to complete it, and which regenerates randomly each time. A single item, of questionable utility, is found in the maze each time.

The solution to the maze uses a trick I have never seen before in interactive fiction, and which is very cruel.