Reviews by MathBrush

This game was coded in 2.5 days by a first time author with one beta tester. It requires what is generally an annoying way of interacting with a game. By all standards, it should be a fairly horrible game.

But it placed 19th out of 35, and wasn't really that bad. I like fairly campy, psychological horror, and this game provides it. It had great descriptions, and spookily changing descriptions.

This is a very short game. I liked it, in the end.

This game casts you as a werewolf agent for a large group of werewolves. You have to travel to a snow-covered Chinese village to investigate its destruction.

The story and setting are actually pretty good, and I liked this game. Where it falls down is in presenting information to the player; nowhere, even in the extensive menu system, are you told how to transform between human and wolf. Conversation topics have to be guessed to proceed with little in-game explanation.

Fun mid-length game to take for a spin. Nice use of different senses in descriptions.

This game is big, and full of little easter eggs. It's one of those games that is created with love and creative, but seemingly based on things in the author's life and somewhat underclued.

Typical puzzles in this game include finding keys and operating semi-complicated machinery.

This game casts you as the vampire Martin Voigt, travelling through a hellish landscape to retrieve three talismans of power and find the three priestesses who can help him.

The setting is imaginative and well-defined. Generally, each room contains a challenge, which at first can be solved with a basic power, and later requires you to fetch items from the other parts of the (small) map.

It was a bit gorey and not for young children. Some of the interactivity was off, in the sense that actions were underclued. But the overall level of polish was high.

This game feels just like all of the 60's scifi stories I read growing up, in a good way.

You play as a young child on a lonely outpost in the sea during a war between Earth and Mars. Alone for the day, you get to use your imagination around the island, until events take a sudden turn.

The multiple viewpoints reminded me favorably of Rover's Day Out and Delphina's House.

There were a few parts where the interactivity just didn't do it for me, which is why I deducted one star.

This game has numerous issues, and is best played with a walkthrough.

With a walkthrough, it can be pretty fun. It does include steps like waiting 19 times in a row, with each Z producing a text dump.

The reason it can be fun is that its story, which has early hints about employees not being all the way there and oddly intelligent robotic devices, is compelling in the large scale.

Worth trying if you like to skim read and don't mind walkthroughs.

This game casts you as a demon in the bureaucracy of hell. You decide to make a break for it and get out.

This game has several NPCs, most of whom respond to just a few topics/activities. It has well-coded puzzles involving searching and manipulation.

But much of it just feels underclued, especially the second half of the game. This makes it somewhat difficult to finish.

This game has you sent on a quest to collect parts to make a magic item, escape from a jail cell, search a dungeon, and has both a classic logic puzzle and a collection of riddles.

I didn't really like it at first, and played through with the walkthrough the whole way. Along the way, though, I began to like it more. The descriptions can be fun and interesting, though unpolished. The story has some fairly large plotholes, but I feel like the game was close to being complete, fun, and bug free, if the author had had more time.

Saving John is a Twine 1 game with the standard CSS and formatting. In it, you find yourself in a dangerous situation and have the opportunity to construct a backstory for what happened.

The backstories involves jealousy, betrayal, love, profanity, and so on. The game is fairly short, but can be replayed several times.

The writing was descriptive, and the interactivity worked, but the story just didn't click with me, and It didn't feel all the way polished.

This game by a good author (see 'Delusions') reminds me a bit of Gris et Jaune by Jason Devlin, another talented author. Both games have very strong openings that hint at a great game full of polish.

However, both were not completely finished/polished in time for the competitions they were entered in. This game, in particular, falls flat in the most exciting part: the actual game simulation. You play as Mario, and you have to jump with timed Glulx effects, but it just doesn't work out, and later levels are, I believe, unfinished.