Reviews by MathBrush

This is the second elevator-game based Ectocomp game I've played this year. Both are effective in their own way, but while Going Down derived it's effectiveness from understatement, The Elevator Game is much more in-your-face.

Like Owlor's other games, this game is loosely based on My Little Pony (in the sense that the characters are ponies with a similar art style), but otherwise the mythology and other world building details are different.

The game is fully illustrated, with some of Owlor's best work here, particularly in a sequence when you watch the elevator game taking place through a security camera and 'pausing' the camera reveals hidden objects.

I think that, for what Owlor is going for, this is a real success. But I found the horror to be a bit too over-the-top to be really effective; I'd like more moments where things were left to my imagination.

The author is going for something very different here, something out of the norm. As they state on the Ectocomp page, this game is a short story with no choices.

It's a vaguely mysterious game, with hints of influences from Asia (parts of it reminded me of China, India, and Israel). The blending of different cultures was the most important part to me.

The formatting was very hard to read, though. Pararaphs weren't spaced out, and the text was presented in large blocks. The dialogue could do with some pruning; it had a lot of the quick back-and-forth nothings that real dialogue has, but which do little to improve narrative writing without careful implementation, which was lacking here.

I liked the ending. On a technical note which is not due to the author (I think), I couldn't scroll down, and had to zoom out to read the text.

This is a purposely obscure short Twine game. It makes extensive use of color shifts and effects.

The story centers on a young (?) couple who have been forced into hiding while people like them are hunted down.

The first part was a lot like the diary of Anne Frank, so much that I thought that would be the final twist.

But it devolves into a dissociative mess near the end, in a pleasing way. The hard thing was that I didn't really know what sort of effects my choices would have, but that's unavoidable with the chosen subject matter.

This is a game that should be enjoyed at a slow pace, even though it's not too long. The slow-burn is the point, and it's good! I also recommend sound.

A friend of yours wants to play the 'elevator game', a creepypasta-esque game where you have to go to different floors in different orders, and you are supposed to end up in an alternate universe.

The elevator is mimicked here with muzak, elevator bings, and gentle use of graphics. I liked it! But it's hard to rush through.

This game is about a relationship between you (the angel Gabriel) and Demeter, a human man.

It’s a 2-room game, and the main object is to find objects of various colors to complete a rainbow. The game cheats a little by hiding colors in meta ways, but I found the color hint reasonably fair, well implemented, and fun.

This game has you explore a reservation-based casino to try and uncover the truth behind a murder.

It implements a blackjack game, and uses graphics and a hand-made parser hybrid engine.

The primary portion of the game is investigating a few suspects by interviewing them, examining their items, and talking to those who have seen them.

However, I never felt strongly emotionally invested in the game. I did feel interested while playing, though.

This game has you exploring a fairly minimalist underground factory. Each room has one thing in it (except for a complicated office with several things), and most things are undescribed.

There are 3 or 4 puzzles, which are pretty good, but could use significantly more synonyms programmed in.

I liked it in general, but found it frustrating. The release notes were good.

This game uses the obscure Floo text system. It has a 2-hour timer (that resets once it finishes). As you push any key, characters show up one at a time, revealing some text that seems procedurally generated, but not by the Floo engine; it seems like it was pre-generated and put into the floo interpreter, ready to be revealed one character at a time.

This game has you tapping the space bar in rhythm to simulate swimming. As you continue to swim, the game's story progresses. If you stop swimming, you get an alternate version of the story. By progressing between swimming and not swimming, you finish the story.

It's a magical realism story centered on one moment in time, as you swim from one beach to another. I found it effective, but the interactivity wasn't quite what I liked.

This game is written in PDF form, and you read along yourself, jumping to different pages.

I can't help but compare this game to Trapped in Time, another PDF gamebook entered into IFComp in a previous year. In that game, you had a tight series of events that were played over and over, and it allowed 'parser-like' actions where you would add 10 or 20 to an entry's number to do things like examining or using a card.

This game, however, relies more on randomized combat, and the largest parts of the game are two mazes.

It has some interesting storyline near the end, but I feel like it could have been tested out more by some experienced beta testers to help find out what works and what doesn't.