Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

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.

This game is purposely modeled after Depression Quest. Instead of Depression, it models Anorexia, and was constructed as part of an academic sort of study.

This game is fairly long; if you load it up in Twinery, it has a huge amount of nodes and more than 5 endings.

However, the game often felt detached to me, and I ran into several broken pages that I had to back out of.

This is a short Twine game entered into IFComp 2017.

It branches in a non-trivial, interesting way. You are lying in bed after an evening with some man and you realize you need to wash your hands. But it's dark, and you don't really want to.

This is a character whose life is centered around routines, and around keeping secrets. I found it interesting, but not compelling.

This game reminds me of Pilgrimage by Victor Ojuel. Both are symbolic games with female protagonists based on the 4 humors: sanguine, phlegmatic, bilious, and melancholic.

Beyond that, though, they diverge significantly. Temperamentum has a 'real world' and 4 different worlds themed on the idea of hot/cold, wet/dry associated to the 4 humors.

The game is heavy, about loss. I enjoyed it, but parts of it are almost impossible without the walkthrough, and the walkthrough itself is unreliable in parts (for instance, west and east are switched at one point, and in another, it uses the word 'woman' when only 'her' works).