Reviews by MathBrush

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Résumé, by Requiem
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Work on your resume over and over, August 5, 2023
Related reviews: less than 15 minutes

This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

It's a Texture game, which I haven't seen a lot of recently. This system has you drag verbs onto nouns (or, here, resume sections), both causing changes when you actually drop it and tooltips when you hover.

The humor (or pathos, depending on how you view it) comes from the self-criticism or uncertainty or Sisyphean task of dealing with all of this.

I found only one ending, but I found it multiple times.

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vanitas, by sweetfish
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A cute story about different social media, August 5, 2023
Related reviews: less than 15 minutes

This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

It is as far as I can see completely linear, but uses interactivity as you can click to make each line appear.

The gimmick here is that it's a single story but changes every few lines into the format of a different social media site like Twitter or Reddit, showing how some things stay the same the more they change.

Pretty neat. One crude joke that doesn't add much to the story, but overall some tight writing.

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goodnight, by Rylie Eric
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A night of troubled thoughts, August 5, 2023
Related reviews: less than 15 minutes

This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

It uses all of its words in one path, a torrent of thoughts that pile on. The narrator lies in bed with thought after anxious thought crowding the mind. Thoughts of death, of unimportance, come endlessly.

There is some comfort in the end, at the hand of a friend. Overall, the feeling is of a storm followed by sunlight, observing the wreckage.

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So You Have a Knife at Your Throat, by Natasha Luna
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A brief but thorough exploration of two assassins colliding, August 5, 2023
Related reviews: less than 15 minutes

This game was written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam.

It features 2 assassins who have met at knife point. Will you fight, or romance?

It manages to pull a few surprises while playing with well-trodden tropes. The writing is to-the-point and effective. I enjoyed playing it right after I finished re-watching Hawkeye, which includes a similar assassin-on-assassin fight.

Short, but worth it.

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The ecology of the waterways of Mars, by Liza Daly
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Fascinating and beautiful exploration of a historical work, August 5, 2023
Related reviews: less than 15 minutes

This game was written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam.

This one was fun to read up on. I was just talking to my son a few days ago about 'automatic writing', where mediums would just let the pencil move and see what writing the spirits produced.

This game is about one such work, a long epic by Sara Weiss detailing the history, biology, and language of the people of Mars. It is accompanied by beautiful illustrations from the original text.

While the game itself provides fascinating insights, reading up on the accompanying material and just searching the original book in general was very fun.

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Cat vs Villain, by Raccoon Raconteur
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Implacable villain vs unstoppable cat, August 5, 2023
Related reviews: less than 15 minutes

This game was written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam.

It's pretty funny. A cat has appeared in your evil lair but you, a supervillain, are completely unable to do anything to stop it or damage it.

There is a lot of flexibility, and paths diverge but merge again, which I prefer to pure branching or no branching. Pretty fun!

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in igni, by Lapin Lunaire Games
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Pretty words but complex; a difficult life at court, August 5, 2023
Related reviews: less than 15 minutes

This is a game that is styled in loving detail, written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

It describes in elliptic and complex language a person who has arrived at court and must carefully navigate the political systems and other intricacies.

The text is simultaneously rich and difficult to understand. For instance, here are two sentences (not set in stone; both can be changed with cycling options):

(Spoiler - click to show)Overwhelming in its capacity for promises as binding as fingers through water. Bloodless as the art she would learn soon enough to become to survive the court’s pleasure.

These sentences are both descriptive and grammatically correct, but due to their nested phrases and clauses it becomes difficult to figure out the meaning.

Overall, it presents an interesting setting.

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One-Word Warlock, by Damon L. Wakes
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A tiny but huge game: one-word pages, but hundreds of them, August 5, 2023
Related reviews: less than 15 minutes

This game was entered in the Neo-Twiny jam, written in 500 words or less.

The author has decided to maximize the usage by putting only a single word on each page and making the game branch quite a bit. I played to 2 or 3 endings and found things very unlike the other reviews, so I suspect there's just a ton of stuff out there.

There are references to a lot of stories. Extra nuance is given to the single words by having voice acting for most of them.

Overall, it was pretty funny in general. This is a very clever idea and unique in the comp; I think I saw a few two-word games, but a one-word game like this take a lot of work, especially to make it work out as well as it has here.

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JUDAS, by vileidol
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Play as Judas betraying Jesus, August 5, 2023
Related reviews: less than 15 minutes

This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

I'm a fan of Jesus, so it was unusual to play a game from one of his opp's perspective. The game was black and red themed, with a shaky-looking font.

In it, Judas condemns Jesus while also regretting his actions but also justifying it by sorting through and twisting old words. I imagine these thoughts to be very similar to those of someone who just got dumped because they cheated on someone.

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The Orb [WIP], by Adalil
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Promising start with a few bugs, August 5, 2023
Related reviews: less than 15 minutes

This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or yes. It actually had a pretty cool setup and I liked the structure and where the story was going. Unfortunately, it had some broken logic that made multiple errors appear on most pages on both Chrome and Firefox.

Seems like the only thing missing here is more Twine expertise. With some more practice with the code, this game could be great (or the next one the author makes). Right now, I don't think it's finishable, though.

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