Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This is a twine game where every letter is hyperlinked to other passages. Each passage is a single sentence fragment describing a thing.

It's short, and charming. I enjoyed it; it doesn't have much substance to it, but it doesn't need to. It didn't provoke any strong emotions in me.

The individual letter idea was clever, and elevates my opinion of the game.

This is a lengthy essay in 4 or 5 parts about what it means to be Christian and LGBTQ.

The author describes their coming to grips with being a non binary person.

I found it interesting, and it was polished and descriptive. But I felt like it didn't benefit from its interactivity.

I beta tested this game.

In this game, you play as an orc monk who has sworn off violence. However, your monastery has been attacked, and you are the sole survivor.

The game tracks several stats, including rage and health, and you have the chance to visit three different locations on your way to the grand finale. There are several endings.

I enjoyed this game, but I wished it were longer. I felt like there wasn't enough material to grab into a story with as much background information as this one. What was there, was good though.

It's hard to conceive of a game that is more Ryan Veeder-y than this one. This is most likely due to the support from his Patreon, which was started (according to its home page) because he wanted more reasons to include complex irrelevant subsystems in this game.

And this game has them. There's not that much you have to do in this game, but a lot you can do. Random mini quests and red herrings abound. I spent around 2 hours on this game, but the main pathway can be finished in 20 minutes or less.

There are two characters to pick from, but the choice is inconsequential...sort of. And sort of not. I felt rewarded for playing through with both.

I read a paper on humor theory once that talked about the 'incongruity-resolution' theory, which is that we laugh when we experience something out of the ordinary, that doesn't make sense, and then have it resolved suddenly. This game is built on nothing but incongruity-resolution. Everything in the game is a mix of useless and semi-useful.

I liked this a lot more than the Roscovian Palladium, or any other of the short random games that he makes every few months. A nice game to play if you just want to burn time and fiddle around with stuff.

This game reminded of another game, which I couldn't remember for a while, but now I recall is the author's 2016 game, Light Into Darkness. I liked that game, but this one is better.

It's a brief moment in time. The game definitely plays around with the typical speed of a parser game, where major events can occur in one command.

I hit on a good ending perhaps by chance, early on, and replayed to stretch it out as long as possible. If I hadn't guessed the command, I might not have liked it as much, but it was good.

This was a strange game. When I started it, I thought, 'Oh, so this is writing which might be something really good, or just fluff'. As I played through, it all sort of fell together, and I liked it.

It's bizarre; a sort of mix between 80's neon punk and Jack the Ripper's London. Plus some of ancient Rome thrown in.

I had a bit of trouble at first figuring out what to do, but I grasped it in the end. I think this was my favorite of La Petite Morte, and perhaps of the whole Ectocomp competition.

This is a short Ectocomp game that branches strongly.

You play a recently deceased woman who has the chance to go back and haunt one of three different people: her daughter, her old flame, and her enemy.

The game is sort of a gauntlet, because many of the choices are wrong, but you don't always have to restart completely.

I found it charming, with some interesting mini-twists, but overall I had to replay a lot of different sections to see it all.

This is one of those short games that is more like enacting a ritual than solving a puzzle. You find yourself inside a dream, with an unusual purpose.

Like another game which I enjoyed in this comp, your character is more nuanced than the typical interactive fiction protagonist.

It's a speed-IF, so it's fairly short, but it's well-polished. There weren't many surprises due to the foreshadowing, but the imagery was vivid.

In this game, you play someone who's been reading too many scary stories alone in a house, and you're too scared to go upstairs.

This is a great, relatable setup. Things are sparsely implemented, as is to be expected in a speed-IF, but I found no bugs and it had a fun verb choice.

The ending felt abrupt, which was disappointing, but I understand that not much is possible with speed-IF. This had the most relatable PC, for me, of any game I've played this year.

This game is confusing; I played it through 3 times. But it's polished, with descriptive writing, had a haunting emotion, and I've already replayed it a few times. So I'm giving 4 stars.

Most of Groover's purposely opaque work is an allusion to some known fairy tale, which provides a framework for understanding the piece. His original stories tend to provide more in the way of explanations.

This piece is a hidden-object fetch quest, with a sort of standing-up-to-bullies theme that reminded me of Andrew Schultz's frequent theme of 'everyone told you you were worthless and now you'll show them'.

I enjoyed the meta-puzzle of trying to piece it all together. It never gelled for me, but that's okay; having some things left unresolved improves the atmosphere.