Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This Twine game is intentionally short and linear, but it's not quite as linear as it advertises; basically, you are unwinding after a long day, and you get to pick what order to unwind in.

You seem to be a volunteer for a hospital, as well as a student. Actions like taking off your boots or untying your hair trigger memories from earlier in the day.

I found it fascinating as a glimpse into another, medical world, as well as portraying a character who seems to be a minority in their current situation.

This game was inspired by the debates in America surrounding the law passed in North Carolina restricting transgender individuals from using bathrooms besides those of their biological gender.

This game isn't really an allegory, as exactly the same things are happening in this world as in ours. Rather, it reframes the discussion using fantasy techniques to give events a greater emotional impact.

I played through one branch to the end, and rewound a bit to get three different endings. The Twine styling and coding was beautiful, with links represented by +'s for links that furthered the study and *'s used for asides.

It took less than 25 minutes for me. The interactivity was interesting, because it spells out the consequences of your choices in an in-game way.

Fans of DeNiro's other works or of topical commentary will appreciate this game.

This is an ePub game with hyperlinks. It consists of a series of articles with footnotes and cross references.

The idea is that a viral outbreak has caused the collapse of America, combined with Trump’s actions. As you dig deeper, though you find a greater truth.

It’s coever, but the chosen format is slow paced and sometimes dull in the name of realism, like when it had a largely standard ten page blank medical form. Many critical moments are hidden in transcripts emulating Reddit and 4chan, and the author took painstaking care to recreate the racism, homophobia and misogyny of these forums. This didn’t really suit me.

This was a creative format, and represents a great deal of work. The writing is detailed and feels authentic.

This game is, it seems, written in Esperanto. I thought it was Portuguese at first, but the game itself corrected me.

You are Alice, and, I believe, you are headed to an Esperanto-speaking conference, where you meet someone who tells you about Esperanto. I learned that Esperanto has between 100,000 and 1,000,000 speakers. Given that the number of Twine fans is probably somewhere in that range, too, and the intersection is fairly low, I don't think many people will be able to complete this game.

I only got through the first third of the first chapter. Looking through the code, it seems like there is a compelling fantasy element in the middle.

This is an intriguing game, and a great amount of work.

Cryptozookeeper is an XYZZY Award winner, and is one of the biggest games out there in terms of content, especially in terms of NPC content.

You play as a character who is sucked into a world where you can blend together DNA and create new monsters, who then fight each other in a pokemon-like system.

The system takes center stage story-wise, but not mechanically. The game is structured in a series of 'episodes', each of which results in new DNA for your devices.

The game has a ton of characters, many of whom constantly follow you around and talk and joke.

The implementation is selective; some parts are extremely detailed, while many synonyms and scenery descriptions are omitted.

This game is truly monumental. It also has a great deal of profanity and suggestive language.

I swear this game was different the first time I played it. In any case, what it is now is a living dungeon Twine game; you are a living dungeon, and adventurers come in in a cycle. You choose from a menu of 3 randomly generated options until either the adventurer dies, or succeeds.

I thought it was clever, and the graphic was helpful. But I felt like it could be further developed.

Arthur DiBianca has made several popular limited parser games, including Grandma Bethlinda's Variety Box, Inside the Facility and The Wand.

Excelsior was their first attempt, and its player respons/reviews influenced the later games.

Excelsior restricts all action verbs to movement and 'USE'. Your goal is to reach the top of a tall tower.

I thought I had played through this whole game before, but I played through with the walkthrough, and I was surprised at how much there was. I think this game does not measure up to DiBianca's later games, as there is a great deal of "something changes somewhere that you can't see" devices here, that makes the game very complicated.

This is a mid-length IFComp game from 2006. It's a surreal afterlife/coma type game where you've been in a car crash and must travel through your mind to escape back to reality, hopefully with your wife.

It has a maze of rooms, inaccessible at first due to the fact that doors and archways are placed on ceilings and high walls, willy-nilly. You eventually learn to control the maze.

Much of the game revolves around smells. There is a Nim game and also a difficult cryptographic puzzle. I found it under-clued and somewhat unfair.

This game has all the usual Panks trappings:

inn - check
Jesus as a combatable NPC - check
hellhound - check
automated randomized combat - check

This game adds some of the Japanese atmosphere of the Ninja games to the mix. But overall, it's more of the same.

I have to give a caveat about my score first; I think this game is really around a 5 out of 10 on the IFComp scale; it's short, silly, self-conscious. But, it satisfies all of my 5 star criteria:

1. Polished: I didn't encounter any errors, and the writing was consistent, and even the plain twine styling seemed to fit the story.
2. Descriptive: The game has a nice voice and inventive language (I chuckled at the word turdburglar, especially because I misread it at first).
3. Interactivity: The game presented me with exactly the kind of options I wanted at several points in the game. It was actually very effective at presenting options that made me go 'Yes! This is exactly what I want to do'.
4. Emotion. I smiled a lot.
5. Would I play it again? Yes, I'm interested in exploring the mechanics.

So this is technically a 5, but on the 'how much will the average IF player like it' scale, I'd give it a 2-3.