Reviews by MathBrush

This game allows you to experience three different randomly generated tarot readings, complete with illustrations.

This is a polished game, and it incorporates information from a survey done about people's impressions of the cards. So it's almost like having a reading randomly selected from several dozen other people's readings.

It was impressed, but I saw it as an intellectual exercise without gut feeling.

This game starts you in a dark room with several voices talking to you. There are eight doors, some locked, and others not. Your goal is to escape.

The different voices seem to represent parts of your psyche, and the short game is a game of self-discovery. It is illustrated with hand-made colored pencil drawings.

The writing is littered with typos, and the storyline is somewhat confusing. It was descriptive, though, and good at evoking emotion.

This is a fairly brief game written in free verse. It seems to draw on the writings of four famous women who died, mostly in controversial situations (including deaths that resonated in the trans and African-American communities).

The writing was interesting, but the free verse format made it hard for me to make an emotional connection to the writing. It was interesting looking up the four women in the story.

This Twine game uses appropriate styling and occasional graphics to tell a slice-of-life story in a world where cybernetic enhancements are common.

You have encounters with two different friends whose lives are different than most people's, and explore some unusual technology.

It feels like a brief vignette of a larger world, either a fan fiction, a taste of the author's own universe, or an introduction to a longer game.

In this game, you have jumped down a hole into a central hub-like room with multiple color coordinated rooms branching off.

Puzzles follow a sort of game-logic, where mysterious machines and illogical creatures and locations abound.

Parts of it seem forced and/or rough. The machine that merges birds with items is fun to tinker with but some of the results seem hard to guess.

The writing takes a major downturn during the whale segment, where it begins insulting the player and taking a negative and small view of life. This is isolated, and weird.

Overall, I can say with Dwight from the Office: "A lot of the evidence seemed to be based on puns."

This is a short Twine game that leans heavily on standard detective tropes. You, a hard bitten male detective, have a female client come in with an extensive backstory that you explore through various links. A lot is made of her appearance, but more in a deductive way than a seductive way.

The woman's story is about suspected adultery. The story uses standard Twine styling and has a heavy amount of text per choice, making it more like a story with distinct branch points and less like a mechanics-driven game or visual art piece.

Overall, I would have preferred some more deviations from the noir formula or some more compelling mechanics, but what's here is done well.

This is one of the longest and most plot-intensive games entered into IFComp.

The story is a sort of self-insert fantasy. A college student who is bullied and shy is courted by beautiful women and powerful men due to his latent universe-changing powers. It unfolds over several days, over a week.

Unfortunately, there are two flaws in the implementation and design. First, the author has decided to implement in great detail the most tedious parts of the game. Ordering food takes several steps, repeated daily. Campus contains many non-essential locations, which seem possibly to be based on the author's actual campus. Most of the game consists of opening your backpack, selecting the right book, putting it in your backpack, closing it, marching across campus, sitting in class, waiting, going to the cafeteria, ordering food, swiping your id, sitting, going to your dorm, swiping your id, and entering your room. This is repeated at least five or six times in the game.

The second flaw is that only this path is implemented, and only with the exact walkthrough commands. Attempting to order food without the walkthrough is extremely difficult.

Overall, I was glad I played.

This game was not what I expected. With warnings about graphic violence and explicit language, the title 'American Angst', and the logo of an American flag-colored smily face, I expected something like a mix between 'The Purge' and 'Saw' and anti-Donald Trump revenge horror.

I got something else instead, and was pleasantly surprised. This game is an amnesia-based horror game that tells the story passively through set pieces, until the end when all is revealed.

It uses extensive styling, with special 'emphasis' boxes, an 8-bit looking battle interface, and special designs for links and devices. Profanity occurs about once or twice a screen, but my chrome extension blocked it easily.

The game saves automatically, and takes you back to checkpoints if you die.

I found the story compelling, and was surprised by the ending(s).

The game has rough patches, though. The credits don't list a single tester, and it shows. There are several mis-spellings (such as the word 'matrace' for mattress) and small grammatical errors (like 'the flashlight doubles for a nighstick' instead of 'doubles as').

Similarly, there are many game elements which should improve interactivity but end up not doing much. There is a panic stat which doesn't seem to do much besides letting you choose between having a panic attack or not. The battles are more random than strategy based. And choices aren't informed, some literally being 'left or right?' with no other information, making it feel like you don't have control.

Having had this game tested would have caught some of these issues. As it is, though, this is a well-done game and one of the best Twine games of 2017.

I love reading creepy stories and sci-fi stories, and one subgenre of both of those that I like is the time loop story. While such stories can be played just as a puzzler (get this sequence right to fix the machine, like Fingertips:Fingertips), I especially appreciate the ones that focus on human thought and feeling.

This game is well-written and focuses on character and depth. It is, as far as I can tell, completely linear (or completely cyclical, I guess I could say). It's like an endless roundabout with occasional exits that lead to the same roundabout. But it does have an overall narrative arc.

It contains some dark themes, and isn't really appropriate for children, I would say. I found it meaningful and well-done.

This uses slow text, which I usually dislike but found appropriate here (and not too slow). It also used music which I didn't listen to.

This game is part of the They Might Be Giants Nanobots tribute album. This 'album' consists of Twine games inspired by the songs and their lyrics, and is a sequel to the Apollo 18 Tribute Album of parser games in 2012.

I passed over Nouns at first, as it's fairly minimal. I was learning Twine at the time and downloading games to look at the code, and Nouns had a tiny, tiny 'game map'. Then I realized it was all javascript.

The game consists of one passage, almost all of whose words are links. Clicking on each link transforms the game.

I thought it was random at first, but on subsequent playthroughs, I realized there was a specific pattern involved. I liked it.

I only took off one star because I didn't engage with the game on an emotional level. Otherwise, the game is polished, descriptive, with good interactivity and a nice overall experience.