Reviews by MathBrush

In this game, you wake up in darkness on a space station on Mars. The oxygen is getting low, and you have to repair the spaceship!

This is written in the Donjon engine, one I've seen come up several times in French games and which always works well overall.

There is a small map here, and only a few items, allowing the game to be completed relatively quickly with few surprises (except for some fun easter eggs).

Overall, the game is pretty sparse. The majority of each room description is taken up by listing exits. An AI is mentioned but doesn't seem to do much (it is almost implied that the player is the AI but then we put on overalls so it wouldn't make much sense. Unless the reader is the AI?) And there is a little bit of lack of verbs or clues.

I gave two stars to a game by the same author last year and I feel a bit bad giving two stars again, but I think that for me personally (since my rating is just subjective and is only my opinion), if the author did some more testing where they had players try commands and implemented anything they tried, the game would be a lot smoother. But maybe I'm wrong.

Actually, I am very glad there was a walkthrough provided and it made things very smooth after I had explored for a while and got stuck, so I think I will add a star for the good walkthrough and the funny spores.

This French comp game has a form of interaction I've never seen before and which I quite like.

It is a mad-lib game, in the sense that the primary interaction is filling in blanks that are then used in the rest of your story. The blanks include things like your name but also more important things like what special object you have.

This doesn't make for very good interaction itself. But what happens is after your choices are locked in, the game lets you pick between several 'implications' of your choices, and that's where the true agency lies. For instance, you can create a kind of menace in the dungeon that causes some negative thing to happen to you (I made an enormous burger that makes you fat). Once you select that, the game asks if the Enromous Burger can be defeated in combat or talked to (I chose combat). I ended up losing the game in the end (my girlfriend from the guild of assassins was killed by the burger so I was stuck later). With different choices, there would be an entirely different story.

The main storyline though is that you are part of a monastery where the prioress wants you to lie to the future queen to protect the monastery treasures. You decide to disobey by finding the legendary ____ of Saint ______ to help you.

Overall, it was fun. Because I made the choices, I didn't get as emotionally invested, but everything else was great.

This is a visual novel that has some really great animation and overall visuals. The text was in nice little chunks that made it easy to read even though many characters had weird speech things (like one who talked while holding a golf club in their mouth!)

It's not super long, either. You play as a robot-looking character who has done a really great job at their last three internships, but who now is ready for the hardest one of all.

You're invited to a hotel where a dog-like manager tells you there is a conference of traitors going on, but one of them is a traitor-traitor: that is, they're secretly not a traitor at all! You have to figure out who did it and confront them.

There is only one suspect and one interview, so the game is much briefer than you might expect it to be, but it's hard enough that I played through a few times without solving it. It's okay, though, because it's just a fun, goofy game with memorable characters. Definitely worth checking out!

My enjoyment of this French game went up and down as I played. My very first thought was, 'Wait, Gavroche games? Didn't they win last year with a demo game that was unfinished? Why are they making another demo instead of finishing that game???? Will they never finish a game?"

But this game is, just like last year, very fun after all. If it just ends up having several demos each year, that's not so bad after all.

This game features you as a recently activated robot who has been repurposed to steal from a museum! Your human co-conspirators are designated by card suits and communicate with you via radio, with one being especially foul-mouthed.

Once you get further in, you discover a cast of robot characters that have some humor and some pathos. I got my arm ripped off in a robot arm-wrestling competition, and that was pretty neat. Visually, it's great-looking, like many Moiki games are.

Overall, I planned on a solid 3/5 due to the unfinished, but the exhibit vignettes changed my mind to 4/5.

This game reminded me of why I have liked the French Comp over the years: the innovation.

You have in this story a book that can flipped forwards and backwards. It has about 8 or 9 pages total (at first). At first, I thought there was a bug, as the book seemed intended to have jewels on the front but they were missing, but as you read, you discover that's not the case.

An ancient civilization conquered all galaxies but couldn't prevent the end of the universe as it was consumed by black holes. Instead, it found a way to encode its entire history and culture into three crystals (the ones missing from the cover of the book), each held by a different guardian.

The book's history fluctuates, kind of like (but very different from) SCP-140 from the SCP Wiki. Different chunks of texts will flicker, and clicking on them changes the story. Change it enough, and you get a visual logiv puzzle you can solve by clicking.

I had a lot of fun with this. There are definitely some areas weaker than others (like Rovarsson mentioned, the story is fairly basic; another thing is the puzzles themselves are simple), but the overall interactivity is nice and the story is engaging, so for me the game as a whole was more than the sum of its parts.

This is a heavily-altered Twine game that has images with mouse-over animations, text that changes in dramatic ways, and other fancy effects. I had to turn on the scrollbar to get it to work on my mouseless laptop, but otherwise it worked well.

The game was written in English and then translated to French, but I played it in French first, an amusing intentional roadblock in understanding between two Anglophones. I then replayed twice in English.

The game is brief, but rich. You have been seeing a psychiatrist and are having lapses in memory, have been hearing voices, etc. At first, the doctor is eager to help you, exploring your past, but things get darker...

Overall, it's a surreal game whose strongest features are it's neat visual effects, its replayability, and its sinister atmosphere.

This is kind of a happy accident; this game is one I played before in Spanish from Ectocomp, but it happened to match the 2023 French Comp themes of treason and archives, so it was translated and entered into that as well.

This is a compelling story, which involves a soldier that is obsessed with collecting the letters of other soldiers, usually after they die. He wants to write his own letter, the best letter ever, and will stop at nothing for his goals.

There are 3 acts, each one fairly brief with actions that are generally clued in the instructions or text. I found it easier in French than in Spanish, to be honest.

Overall, the obsession here is very compelling.

This is just the very first act of a large story. It sets up the main action and then promises the next story (as shown by the Episode 1 in the title).

It is a choice based game, designed in portrait mode rather than landscape, with either a 'next' option on each screen or a few choices. There are several nice character portraits done.

You are a new archivist at a library in a magical world. People and creatures from all over come and you, an apprentice archivist, must decide whether they should be admitted or not.

So it's kind of a bureaucracy simulator, but has more action in the end. In the middle it has more normal life things like dealing with allergies or finding a cute person.

Promising, but incomplete.

This Italian game hasn't had any reviews since it came out 13 years ago, and someone suggested it, so I checked it out.

It's a cute concept although some parts are a little weird. You are headed to ZenSpa, a company that does interactive fiction. But you have to find your way inside, past the secretary, and up to the director himself.

The game highlights the difference between old school and new school IF, although maybe not the way you'd expect. Pamphlets inform you that kissing is all the rage now in IF games (which I don't think is a very strong trend?). Non-consensual kissing is a bit weird, but in most situations you try it in the game, you get firmly reprimanded and arrested. One situation, though...

Overall, the game was short but well put-together and well-clued.

This game is a demo for a new type of parser.

Basically, you type in the first letter or two of a noun on the screen, which brings up some possible words that can autocomplete, which you do by hitting tab; then you hit tab more to cycle through different actions or adjectives for that noun.

This is a clever idea. I did have some trouble navigating the game though. You're basically some kind of goblin entertaining an ogre king, so there were a ton of words that I didn't understand (looking them up, it was stuff like 'burping' or 'somersaulting') and there were some typos that I think were intentional like 'vous être'.

In structure, as far as I played, the game starts with you telling poems to the ogre king, then possibly fighting his executioner guy, then exploring your living quarters, then quoting proverbs, then fighting again.

Interaction was kind of wonky for me. Almost none of the actions have predictable effects; instead, it seems like the author's goal was to come up with funny or nonsensical results for most things. It was amusing, but it was hard to plan what happened. Combat was especially rough, with many actions healing the other opponent. On the itch page, others had complained about this, and the author suggested making sure that you mix up your attacks and not follow any pattern. I couldn't do this, and died during the second duel. There was also a clock that didn't seem to do much besides making you sleep for a while.

Overall the system looks pretty good, and the game is descriptive and amusing, but the actual game mechanics are pretty hard to figure out and could be explained more clearly.