Reviews by MathBrush

This game plays out like a branching graphical novel. It has quite a few beautiful hand-drawn backgrounds and images.

You are a space traveler who has left the earth with her young daughter. You are separated, and must travel to five different planets, seeking your daughter.

Choices are few, but you get some major ones. For me, the biggest attraction is the interesting characters and depicted societies in each world.

This game is chock full of atmosphere, with compelling story and writing. Many 2017 IFComp judges found it compelling, and I predict it will receive at least one and probably several XYZZY nominations.

You play as a young witch in a Finnish village whose mistress has died. A dream has haunted everyone in town: a fighting force of strangers is coming in boats.

The game is fairly short, but well-done. There were a few guess-the verb spots, though. Overall, I recommend it.

This game has you going to a live escape room in a mall or building somewhere.

Inside are a series of color-coded rooms with a variety of puzzles. They include a variety using slightly-less-standard-but-still standard verbs like 'search' or 'look under', etc.

I enjoyed this game. It didn't really inspire any emotion in me, but as a small puzzle snack, it does what it is intended to do.

I feel like this is an improvement over the author's previous game, Questor's Quest, and I'd like to see more from this author.

This well-done game presents a murder mystery/creepypasta through a series of faux Wikipedia pages.

By clicking on link after link, you slowly come to realize the scope and depth of a deep plot. Unlike a normal murder mystery, this one has creepy pasta vibes, similar to SCP or the Russian Sleep Experiment, except more grounded in reality.

I found it interesting and compelling, although I felt it was a bit pulpy, and occasionally became tedious finding the links. It's the kind of game I wish I would have thought of.

I beta tested this IFComp 2017 game.

This is a Twine game framed as a situation (specifically of feeding sea-monkeys), which the actual story is fitted into.

I found the colors and presentation very nice, and the game overall very polished. I did find it frustrating how long it took to reach the final ending, but that was mostly due to time crunch around IFComp. If you have time to play, this is a relaxing and enjoyable experience.

Contains infrequent strong profanity.

This story is fairly linear, more like dynamic fiction than puzzle-based or branching cybertext.

In this game, you read the story of an old witch who, out of loneliness, creates a girl out of turnips.

This game has Megan Stevens' most imaginative writing of her IFComp games, and presents an interesting analogy between the witch/turnip girl and parents/millenials. It's short, and worth reading.

This game is a fairly traditional RPG, where you find better and better weapons/armor and equip them, and gain gold. It's framed as a VR story in a casino to better explain why items disappear in a puff of smoke and why all treasures get converted to their cash values.

I found the game enjoyable, and fairly long, although I bug kept me from going from the novice half to the expert half. I would recommend it for fans of RPGs.

This game is pretty aimless; you are on a bus that runs into something on the street, then you go around the park.

I think this part of what 'slice is life' is defined to be; there are no real goals. You can buy soda, talk to an old man, take Tylenol (which has very different effects than the Tylenol I'm used to. Unless it's Tylenol pm; maybe that makes more sense).

I found two different endings.

This is one of the large puzzle fest games out there in recent years.

You play an adventurer entering a strange castle where all actions are performed by a wand: you set the wand to a color combination, then you go on.

It has a fun feel similar to Grandma Bethlinda's Variety Box, by the same author. Slowly, more and more combinations are revealed to you, often allowing you to go back and do things that you've been wanting to do for a while, but were unable to do.

HIghly recommended.

This game is by Luke Jones, who also wrote the interesting Bony King of Nowhere for Spring Thing in 2017.

This game is a treasure hunt puzzle fest type game, but it's kind of spare and with some hard-to-guess puzzles. The puzzles mostly revolve around finding the item or items that will induce NPCs to do things for you.

The game has a large cast of characters, many of which have multiple versions of themselves over 3 time periods. It has also has many rooms over the same time period. But much of it is under implemented. A porter is present in each time period, but has very little description or conversation in any, except for one short paragraph once. However, the author was explicitly inspired by Robin Johnson's minimalist games, so it is likely intentional.

The game has good bones, though, with a pleasant run through campus history and future. If the author switched to Inform 7, like Steph Cherrywell did, and budgeted more time for beta testing and polishing, they could build on the success they already have.