Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This game is one of those wildly-branching many-ending Twine games, kind of like For the Cats from last year (or was that Ink?)

The main gameplay is choosing some form of transit, having it fail, then switching to another.

I’m kind of torn on this. One the one hand, I think part of this game demonstrates my thesis I’ve had for a while that ‘simulating something boring/frustrating is usually itself boring or frustrating’. On the other hand, it has some pretty funny parts. Both of my two endings were genuinely funny. And it’s organized in a way that allows fun replay with repeating the same segment over and over.

I beta tested this game.

I have to say right now that I played this game twice, once in Chrome and once in Firefox, which I downloaded just for this purpose.

It is MUCH better in Firefox, where every character is voice-acted. I would really strongly suggest only playing it that way.

This is a long choice-based game with full voice acting about a character who takes up photography as a 'bucket list' item while the apocalypse happens due to a zombie virus.

Your camera purchase serendipitously leads you to find your former childhood friend nekoni online, who you reconnect with, ending up in a discord of former childhood friends.

Playtime is split up into 4 seasons, with an intro, 3 days per the first three seasons, and one day for the final season.

In each day, you'll hang out with your dog, have the opportunity to go to one of several, then hang out in discord, choosing which friend to chat with, then chatting with your friend Neko in a voice call. Your mom also might call.

If you choose the same place to visit each day, it unlocks someone to help you during a crisis later. If you chat with the same friend each day, you unlock a special ending centered around them.

Playing twice gave me really different experiences; in my first one, I hung out with a snail guy at the park; in my second, I hung out with a heterochromia guy in a coffee shop. In my first, I chatted with Artemis the most; in the second, Rainer.

I'm glad I tried multiple paths. One of them (the [spoiler]Rainer[/spoiler] path) unlocks author commentary on the game.

In it, the author mentions that part of the game is about something e visualized for a long time, and this is a chance to experiment with it to see what it would be like.

I think that explains a lot about the plot and setting. Some say dreams are a way of the brain coming up with 'what if' scenarios and testing them out. That's what this game (at least partially) is!

So there is a zombie virus, but much of the game is about the past and discord drama. The virus can be seen as a stand-in for both Covid and for neurodivergence or coming out. The vast majority of characters are LGBTQ+ or allies and respect pronouns. Bad things still happen (at least two really dramatic events occur) but they aren't the norm. The protagonist can positively affect the lives of others.

Thinking about it, the game can be therapeutic. Both of the worst things that happen to you personally are the kind of scenario you can think of in the shower and stress out about, so writing or playing a game like this can be a nice way to work through it.

I liked the voice acting; on this playthrough, the mother's voice and neko's contributed the most. The pictures were great; I especially liked the papercraft.

Not everything is perfect about the game; it feels really long, and it's not apparent at first just how much freedom there is. Due to the personal nature of the game, some choices don't feel authentic to who I imagined myself to be. But it helped when I realized something; I read the Great Gatsby earlier this year. I used to really dislike it, but once I realized that the narrator wasn't intended to be perfect or for us to always agree with him, I liked it much more. It's the same here; I don't think Yancy is meant to be perfect. I think part of the idea is to see what happens to someone who is doing their best but sometimes messes up.

Overall, this game gave me a lot of food for thought. It made me a lot more sympathetic to aroace people, as, while I don't identify as such in the longterm sense, I realized that I have a lot of those feelings right now in my life. And the game helped me imagine different scenariosin my life as well. So a lot of food for thought!

I beta tested this game.

This is a murder mystery set on an Antarctic ice station. A murder has been discovered, and you are highly motivated to solve it. Unfortunately, without any real authority, all you can do is gather evidence and hope people find it.

The game is set out on a time-based system. You have a certain number of days until the real authorities are available. Each day is split up into 4 time periods (I think). During each time period you can interview someone, bond with someone, or do a couple special activities. Sometimes timed events come your way.

Conversation can be down just by clicking each link, but sometimes a new piece of evidence can add new topics, which adds complexity to the game.

Some actions require a closer relationship with someone or extended time, which means you may have to replay if you make poor choices early on.

I found the mystery intriguing and the clues logical. It's in the format where the player amasses enough evidence to satisfy themselves, and then you select a murderer to accuse (like Toby's Nose, for instance), but the game can prompt you when you have enough evidence.

Overall, I liked this mystery. The time and stress meters add some extra complexity, and the Notes system helped me stay organized and not have to worry I was going to forget something important. I think this will do pretty well in the competition, although there are many good games this year to compete against!

Now, this is another game I tested, but, sad to say, I didn’t finish testing it at the time, because it’s actually pretty hard! I have finished it now, though.

This is a long, difficult Dialog parser game that uses Dialog’s hyperlink system to turn itself into a parser-choice hybrid.

In it, you play as a sidekick to a cowboy hero who is famous for saving people from villains. The secret is, though, that you are the one who is actually saving everyone!

The game is expansive, and largely revolves around getting Buck out of trouble, defeating henchmen, and investigating the outskirts of town.

Gameplay is very hard. You can lock yourself out of victory; to avoid that, you can set ‘winnable on’. If it’s in ‘easy’ mode, you’ll know right away that you messed up. If it’s in ‘hard’ mode, you’ll only find out a few turns later.

The solutions to all puzzles revolve around objects that are far away and that usually aren’t labelled or associated in any way with the area you need them in. Given that this is a big game, that means that the best way to progress is likely carefully mapping out the world and taking every object you can find, looking at what verbs it’s capable of, then trying out obstacles one at a time.

Alas, there is an inventory limit that comes into play fairly often. I think you might be able to carry some things in the knapsack, but I forgot to try that this playthrough.

As a side note, multiple puzzles require you to throw an object into an adjoining room, which isn’t standard in most Inform/Dialog games, so keep an eye out for that!

Overall, I think this game deserves a long, careful playtime that will likely exceed the two hour IFComp limit. So I recommend trying it out, and coming back to it after the comp if you like it!

Dust is about a man in the Wild West who comes to town looking for his wife when he comes across trouble. It involves a lot of conversation and the use of a lot of tools.

This game was entered in the German IF Gran Prix earlier this year, where I personally found it the best game of the competition. I enjoyed the characters and the western setting.

I love foreign translations and foreign things in general (maybe I’m a xenophile?) so it’s always hard to know when playing a game in another language if it is the language that attracts me or the game itself.

In this case it’s a little bit of both. One reason I liked it in German was its simplicity, with descriptive but mostly non-figurative language and the use of menus in conversation and some actions. While in German it was brilliant for someone with a weak vocabulary in another language, in English I could have enjoyed some more complexity in writing, and perhaps a slightly expanded map.

But there’s a lot here that I loved in the original and now in the translation. I like how you collect various tools and apply them, giving the game a physical feel. I like the social dynamics, with the non-violent but still substantial threat of the sheriff holding onto your papers while you investigate, and the tavernkeeper urging you to grab a cookie. I also enjoyed the townsfolk popping in and out, from mean grandmas to ball-playing kids.

I helped test this game a little by reading through the English transcript looking for any errors (of which I found very few).

This XYZZY-award-winning TADS game shows off a lot of the power of the engine, like tracking what the sense can detect and from how far away.

You play as an officer in an Empire of planets, sent to check on a small backwater. Your goal is to talk with the local technophobic elders and leave. While there, though, you meet a strange, disingenuous but beautiful woman.

I like quite a few of Eric Eve's games, which tend to be very polished, have highly interactive characters, and fun puzzles. All of his games tend to have attractive women who either already know you and are attracted to you or just met you and are attracted. This game leans kind of heavily on the latter; in fact, if you ignore the girl and just complete your mission, you can only score 10% of the points!

This game is both easy and hard. It has many objectives, but you can end the game at any time. Winning at all is super easy; getting the maximum score is incredibly hard.

Smells and sounds matter in this game, as does physics. Objects can be pushed around, etc.

I do think it's a bit too hard to complete fully, and somehow I found the open-ended nature of the game a little less personally satisfying than his other games, including my favorite, Nightfall, which has stronger pacing. However, it's clear why this game was a candidate for (and winner of) the XYZZY Best Game award: it is impeccably polished, responsive, and clever.

I'm going to review all 3 acts here.

This a Baldur's Gate game. It is possible to play and generally understand it without having played the game (I'm in that scenario) but it generally builds off the associations, motivations, and understood characteristics of that game, which I've only partially absorbed through meme osmosis.

The story is that Astarion (here's where the pre-existing knowledge deficit kicks in) and you have been sucked into a nightmare world by a creature that feeds off of suffering. Astarion who, in the 'real world', has made great progress in escaping from an abusive vampire overlord, has now regressed and in his mind is back where he was at the start, hopeless and alone.

Gameplay in all three acts revolves around a combination of exploration and conversation. All significant actions cost energy, which you only have ten units of at a time. In the first two acts, energy is replenished every night, and you also level 3 skills of manifesting as a dream ghost: Speech, Sight, and Touch. In the third act, energy is replenished by finding secret 'gleams', and you can no longer level your attributes.

In all three days, Astarion has a health bar which, if it goes low enough, will cause him to die. Each day has other important meters as well, such as Astarion's mood, or the attention that can be drawn to you. Basically, this game is an Astarion Tamagachi.

For the first two days, the main goal it to keep him from dying. I discovered after some experimentation that the amount of health he loses or gains each day is based on his mood. I kept dying over and over early on from trying to max my stats first, but in fact there is plenty of time to boost stats with leftover actions. The main goal here is to please this man.

The main difference between the first and second days is that the second day adds more 'special' events with objects and intruders, while the first day just sets up the rhythm of the game as a whole.

The third day is very different, as you are pulled from encounter to encounter, where Astarion talks to people while you explore or interact.

This game is brutally hard (for me!). I died many times trying to complete Act I. There's just almost never enough actions to go around. I found it useful to save every day and reload if I don't achieve my goals. I made over 50 save files through all three acts.

The third act seemed impossibly hard and frustrating until another reviewer pointed out that you can get new actions by finding 'gleams'. I'd spoiler that but I think it's a fundamental part of gameplay and shouldn't be difficult to find in the first place. Finding that, and realizing the 'conversations' often stalled, giving you enough time to explore, helped this section work out better.

Visually and auditorially, the game is beautiful, with nice styling, transitions, fonts, colors, and sound choice.

Conceptually, while this game is symbiotic or even parasitic object, only able to exist in tandem with the resources provided by Baldur's gate, it still (to me) had a generally satisfying plot arc and some nice power progression.

Many ifcomp games are made for ifcomp. This seems like a passion project that just happened to be good enough to enter into Spring Thing and IFComp. I like it.

This game is graphics-and-sound heavy, with a lot of images of casinos and creepy houses. You play as a thief in a casino who suddenly finds himself tasked with escaping a house of horrors.

Gameplay involves exploration and collecting clues, as well as emotional reaction options in the past.

There are some inconsistencies, like some links being capitalized and others not. But the puzzles all seemed to work out all right, with everything becoming useful at some point and the game solvable by clicking every option.

Overall, I think it would have been fun to have more challenges after the first set, as the game felt like it was setting up for some really heavy-duty stuff, and that could have made the ending more powerful. But there are many good things here.

I had a moment in the middle of this game where I thought, 'This reminds me a lot of Porpentine, especially *their angelical understanding*. But I thought, 'No, come on, there are a lot of other twine authors and not every game is a Porpentine reference'.

But at the end it included a list of references to Porpentine, including lines borrowed wholesale (and credited). So that makes sense, it really does have a similar feel!

This is a love story of sorts between two women, raised in a monastery, trained in swords, devoted (or not) to gods. One woman was rebellious and was cast out; the other, a coward, stayed behind.

Gameplay focuses a lot on time: one second, two seconds, etcs. There are prophecies and visions, so that events happen and will happen and have happened, making time confusing. I think I saw an Adventure Time reference, too?

Overall, the writing hit a lot of what made Porpentine good, references to bones and gods and change and colors that are left unexplained but all can be seen as symbols of change or transition or other metaphors.

The game has consistent imagery and theming, even when restarting, which I appreciated.

Pretty neat game!

I don't really worry about spoilers very much, as I find most games and movies are just as fun if you go into them knowing what happens as they are when you come in blind.

But this is one game that I accidentally got spoiled on, which is a bummer, as that's a lot of the fun. Fortunately, only half of it was spoiled, and the rest was still a mystery.

In this game, the names of everything have disappeared. All you see around you is 'something' and an 'other thing'.

The whole game is about experimenting and trying to figure out what those things are. Once you have an idea, the game is pretty short.

Overall, fun and well-done.