Reviews by MathBrush

This is a Texture game, a system that uses a drag and drop of verbs to pull over nouns. The text was small on the buttons, which is a bug I’ve seen before that’s due to the system, not the author, I think.

I really liked this game. I’m into weird short horror/terror and the author has an excellent command of character and setting and is able to effectively spin a tale that drew me in.

The main commands are APPROACH, REFLECT, and TAKE, and I loved how each of these took on different meaning throughout the game. I also felt like I had real agency; there was an interesting object early on I intended to look at but lost the chance as I progressed; yet there were still interesting things to do. It made me feel like the game was replayable.

I found one ending (The Captain, I guess you could call it). It seems like there are more, but I felt satisfied with my playthrough.

I would definitely read more by this author, good work. It suits my particular reading tastes, and I can’t guarantee that others would have the same experience.

This was a fun little game about an unfun situation.

I think I experienced this game in the best way possible, as I am a fan of the game it is connected to (Ascension of Limbs) and I got the most interesting ending first. If I had experienced it any other way, I’d probably have not liked it as much.

You play as a woman in a house that has been tormented by a thing for a long time. Years, maybe? Maybe not.

Something is in your house, a wretched thing. The game doesn’t really expand on what that is. I imagined something like a mix between a baby, a Slitheen from Dr Who, and a silverfish from Minecraft.

Most of the action in the game is generated on the fly as the wretched thing performs various gross deeds. There are a few keys ways to interact with it, but other than that there’s not much to do.

That’s probably the main thing I didn’t like. Tons of items are in the game, but almost all of them have a message like ‘that’s not important now’ or ‘you don’t need that’. That makes sense from a scoping point of view, but I felt a little sad every time an interesting item turned out not to be usable.

But I liked the writing. And the ‘good’ ending really explained a lot about one of Ascension of Limbs’ main mechanics, so that’s what I liked best about this.

I think I underestimated this game going in. It seemed just like a regular old Ink game with a silly premise that would be over in a few minutes.

Instead, it was a somewhat longer ink game with a pretty funny premise and a lot more state tracking than I’m used to in Ink games.

You play as a cowboy who was been transported to New York City (I read that in the voice of the old pace picante commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi6AFz2fbr8&t=13s 1). Once there, you have to find your cowboy hat!

I liked the tone of the game. It reminded me a bit of old ‘holy fool’ operas/plays where someone’s pretty dumb but is resistant to suffering and oddly accepted by everyone around them.

I had recently revisited NYC after moving out years ago and it was fun to see how his experiences paralleled mine (like wandering through the city and accidentally ending up in Times Square, having wild youths follow you around–in my case, the students I was chaperoning–, a helpful city native who doesn’t really care what’s going on with you as long as you don’t get in their way too much).

There was a kind of stat system. I couldn’t tell if it was actually checking stats or just being goofy, but I liked the stat names. And frequently I had to strategize to try to figure out what to do next.

So overall, this seems just right for a mid-size game in IFComp: not long enough that you get tired or bored, not short enough that you feel like you didn’t play anything. Good middle ground.

This is a choice game in interactive play format, with the option to act out the play yourself.

It is set in Russia in the time of the NKVD and the period between the two World Wars. One character, a policeman, has to deal with those close to him, some of whom are dangerously too progressive and others that are dangerously too conservative.

While the Russian setting originally suggested similarities to writers like Dostoevsky or Chekhov, I actually found more similarities here with Ibsen’s plays. There is a great deal of emphasis on interpersonal relationships that are fundamentally flawed but with an underlying spark of life; not of hope, or of joy, but simply of a determination to continue existing.

I’ve seen other reviews describe the ending as perhaps weak; I saw a comment saying there was a third ending and tried it as well. I do think that something is missing. I feel like the narrative arc is missing a little more denouement. We build up throughout and get a climax, with the endings all being very climactic, but there’s not enough time to resolve the tension and resolve the various threads. So I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what’s here, but I think for my personal tastes I’d like a little more. I’ll be rating this one highly.

This is a creepy game in Twine with well-drawn backgrounds and characters.

You play in a coffee shop where a variety of customers keep coming in, but also several murders have occurred in the recent area and shadowy figures are hanging about you.

The characters were all distinct and mostly believable. Everything is tinged with just a hint of grey realism, so everyone has mildly depressing flaws.

The art was very well done. My only complaint on the visual side is that the very first background image is close to the text color in parts, making it difficult to read.

I played through to two different endings, including what appears to be the final ending. I was a bit surprised by the implications of the final ending, as I’m not sure how the rest of the game would make sense in that context. Although as I’m reading this it just dawned on me how it could all tie together, so hmmm…

Overall this was a game that improved my day to play, so I hope others check it out.

This game is a brief but lively game in a fantasy world with anthropomorphic animals (although they're apparently not quite anthropomorphic animals) where you need to whip together a few random ingredients to make a creative recipe.

It’s written for the Magx compiler, a variant of AGT, and runs in Gargoyle for me.

The world seems fun and lively. To me it felt like Redwall but with invented names for the various species and fruits. While the game is fairly short, its many locations and NPCs and the worldbuilding made it feel large.

I struggled with some of the language as much of it feels academic and full of complex words. For instance, in a book on science:

"The book explain how the Subtle is the other face of handicraft and
mechanism-making, and how both can, and must, be balanced, being
the natural path of progress and improved living; the example of how
the energy from the lightning bolt spell can be stored in water-filled
glass container with metallic rivestiment on the outside and a central
spike inside is a prime one of this balancing between Subtle and
handicraft, when on the other side, handicraft instruments are needed
in Subtle research and practice, and no astrometry and time can’t be
done without mechanical devices, and illuminating orbs can’t be
produced without Subtle. Indeed an useful text for a creator, inspiring
useful (and not-so-useful, I admit) creations. Thanks, Etuye !!"

This uses complex language like ‘rivestiment’ and ‘astrometry’ and uses elaborate sentence structure, and some other parts of the game are similar, so I was lost at times.

The puzzles were generally well-clued; I enjoyed the puzzle involving the NPCs, as it felt organic and natural to look around the city and hunt for people.

The implementation is weak in several places, though; many things are described but don’t exist, so if something is mentioned in the text (like the ‘tools of the trade’ in the front room) a command regarding them will result in an error message (like 'X TOOLS: I don’t see any tools here). One puzzle says you need to (Spoiler - click to show)immerse a vine in a pond, but (Spoiler - click to show)PUT VINE IN POND, IMMERSE VINE, INSERT VINE IN POND etc. all don’t work. The walkthrough (which I had to use just for this puzzle) admits this is a ‘read the author’s mind’ moment, but I think it might be better just to make the other actions synonyms for the correct one.

So I think this has some solid worldbuilding and interesting puzzle mechanics, but I think the language could be simpler and more straightforward and the implementation could be refined. When I do rate this on IFDB, I will definitely bump up my score if there is a post-comp release. Overall, I think the characters seemed fun and the food sounded good!

This is a pretty tricky ink game. I had to play it around 10 to 13 times to win, even using saves. I didn’t realize that one of the keys to winning was (Spoiler - click to show)steadying your nerves with a cigarette. At least I think that’s what happened. But it would make sense, since it’s in the cover art.

This a hardboiled NYC cop thriller, kind of like NYPD Blue (although I don’t remember much of that show as I wasn’t allowed to watch it. One of the first network shows with nudity!). You are a hostage negotiator at a bank robbery and have to find the best strategy for capturing the thieves and freeing the hostages.

After many, many attempts, I was able to free all the hostages, although the criminals went free.

On the one hand, I felt like it was too hard to strategize in this game, as there weren’t many clues as to what path is best. On the other hand, it was short enough that I could try multiple things on multiple attempts.

This is a parser puzzle game made in 4 hours or less for Ectocomp.

In it, you play as someone who has been bound and thrown in the basement of a church, a sacrifice for a cult. You have to escape and find your way out of town.

Like most parser games made in 4 hours, it has some rough spots, some missing implementation. But I found many of the puzzles intuitive; I thought, 'hmm, I wonder if I could use that for...' only to have it work.

The writing was evocative and descriptive. There was an isolated example of strong profanity which didn't fit, I think, with the intelligent, brooding and contemplative hero.

Overall, a good effort for Petite Mort, and something I enjoyed playing, although it would benefit from more polishing if there was a post-comp release.

This game was pretty difficult but rewarding. It was entered in the La Petite Morte part of Ectocomp, which is surprising given its complexity.

In it, you have a large rectangular grid of a dungeon, and you have to make a map for adventurers to wander in. You have to destroy adventurers, but to reach the weapons you need to hit them, you have to make a path that adventurers can also take, and if they get the weapons, they win.

I was baffled at first, and had no clue what I was doing. I found that the adventurers follow close behind you and can kill you the instant they have line of sight. I also found that you can't throw the killing weapon unless you have line of sight.

So I was truly baffled until I read the hints on the Psionic weapon, and then things became a lot more clear.

Overall, this was pretty fun. My only sticking point was how hard it was to get started, but after that I liked the puzzle.

This game has me at a bit of a loss. I'm a big fan of Andrew Schultz and probably have had more total fun playing all his games than almost all authors over the last decade.

But this one just doesn't do it for me. It has an amusing start (reminding me of Five Nights at Freddies), but then it got bogged down.

It uses rhyming pairs; each room name has two words in it, and you must find things that rhyme with those two words and which also are alliterative.

There were two problems for me. The first is that progress seemed to require hitting all of the rhyming pairs the author thought of (at least, some enemies weren't counted as 'defeated' until you had done so), and second, the game didn't recognize a very large number of rhyming pairs that would logically work. This is almost certainly due to the short timeframe of the game (4 hours), so as a speed IF this game is actually quite remarkable, but as a game in general I found it less successful.

The second thing is bugs; the downloaded and online versions acted differently, with the downloaded version not accepting the command that gives access to the east and west areas. The online version didn't accept one command in the walkthrough, and the final area could be accessed directly from the beginning of the game if guessed correctly.

Outside of those issues, the game is pretty great; I love the idea of having a showdown with multiple mech monstrosities. Literally the one thing that could take this from a (for me) two star game to a 4 or 5 star game is more polish, but, alas, that is exactly what this specific competition proscribes.