Reviews by MathBrush

This is a Twine game with some well-done styling that runs for a little over 15 minutes for me.

In this game, you are (I believe) a young Chinese girl at an American high school in Japan. Hannah, a friend of yours, has died, and her ghost is haunting you, but in a mostly positive way, like helping with homework.

Outside of death and ghosts, the games secondary emphasis seems to be sex; although no explicit scenes are shown, there are discussions about the relative attractions and submissiveness of different ethnicities, and of high school girls in general. I felt uncomfortable at times, but it never went beyond talk.

The story centers on finding more about Hannah and the reason for her death, as well as a couple of bullies in the school who do more and more over the top actions.

Gameplay was pretty linear at first; each screen had multiple links, with the last one going to the next page and the earlier ones revealing hidden text. Eventually there were more choices, with two major choices in the game providing the four endings (although the first choice, (Spoiler - click to show)taking the umbrella or not, may not seem important at the time).

The endings vary significantly. Some were about building friendships, but the others felt more shocking to me. One involved (Spoiler - click to show)violently dismembering a girl because she used anti-trans language and revealed she had bullied Hannah prior to suicide. The author in the authors note said that they could have seen themselves doing that to someone in their own life. Another involved (Spoiler - click to show)the bully pushing herself romantically onto the heroine, explaining that all the mean stuff she did was because she was attracted to her.

Overall, I think the interactivity could have used a slight tweak; either having more options early on, or, if it was intended to be read straight through, adding a smooth transition to the link-clicking effect (like a .3 second or less slide-in animation) to give a little more satisfaction with the links.

I didn't strongly connect with the story, but as a roughly 40-yr old cis man I'm not the audience this is going for. I could definitely see someone in a similar situation deeply appreciating and feeling touched by the story.

This game has you enter a place you shouldn't, a portal, an actual liminal space between the real world and the world of dreams.

The main gameplay loop is looking at a subway map, picking a station to go to, and exploring, with items you pick up at one station coming in use at another.

Each station is a pure fantasy, mostly disconnected from the others. It's reminiscent of Miyazaki films like Spirited Away or My Neighbor Totoro (with their subway/catbus). The locations aren't intentionally scary, although some are pretty trippy.

I forgot which station I entered in and it was literally the last one I went back to. I ended up seeing everything, and it was a lot of fun!

To describe the vibes, one early station has a market run by people made of wood; another is a station almost identical to our world, but subtly not.

There were some spelling errors, mostly in the first few pages (like 'rennovating'). There was a pretty bad bug where trying to click on 'alight upon water' to transfer from the brown line to purple line going north gave a twine code error. You can get around it by going south instead and turning around. I think that one other station was like that as well.

Overall, a pleasant game with a few bugs.

This game is based on a seed from the first round of Seedcomp about birds escaping from a cage and freeing other birds. Another game, free bird, is in the comp based on the same seed.

I liked this game, and found it fun to build up plans to help the other birds. It reminded me of 90's television like Captain Planet and Ferngully.

It was a bit hard at times to see the effects of things I did. I didn't look in a mirror until near the end, when it let me set my name and stuff, and that felt a bit out of place; occasionally text about releasing a bird would be repeated.

There were moments of tension (did I do the right thing letting the Wren get out when they were anxious?) which helped improve the game.

Overall, I liked it; I do think it could use a little more polish on a few things, but I think this is a game the author can be proud of.

Walkthrough comp was a competition that had a bizarre 'walkthrough' posited to have been sent by telegram, and each game had to be designed to make the walkthrough make sense.

This game is very rich and complex-seeming, starting with a bizarre meeting with an occult man deep underground. It moves on to magical painting abilities and a sexually harassing duck.

It interprets the walkthrough in very creative ways, making parsing the walkthrough the hardest part.

The walkthrough itself is here:
HERE IS WALKTHROUGH YOU REQUESTED STOP YOU WILL SEE WHAT TO DO STOP THINK STOP X UPHOLSTER SEAT ZRBLM TAKE ALL N LISTEN FOLKS DRAW SWORD WAVE FAN DANCE ABOUT PAINT FENCE TAKE NEXT TURN SMOOTH DUCK DOWN ANESTHETI I EAT IT UNLOCK DOOR SWITCH PLOVER EGG STAND ON EAST SWING KNIFE LION PRAY GET MOUSE Z NW WAKE FISH SWIM DRINK DRINK READ LOOK UP DRESS BOOK SHIP PACKAGE PRESENT BOWL DROP TOY SLEEP PLAY STRING PICK POLISH APPLE EYE MIRROR POSE UNDO TRIM CORSET PUT GREY ON BLUE STAKE LIGHT FIRE HELP MAN STATION STOP WATCH XYZZY

The one command I didn't understand was 'put grey on', possibly because I dallied around too much in one scene.

As a narrative, it's disjointed; as a game itself, far too complex; but as a walkthrough comp entry, it's fantastic.

This Seedcomp game is based on artwork submitted to the first chunk of the competition, and this game focuses heavily on the art.

It makes use of Quixe's image embedding features to let you zoom in to various parts of the artwork while commenting on it.

It's tone is intended to mock contemporary art criticism, especially the trope of critics creating entire invented fantasies about what the meaning of the art is, these fantasies having no connection to reality.

It allows for a few sexually explicit actions but only if you thought of and typed them yourself; a few slight sexual references pop up here and there otherwise. There are some few other painful things that can happen.

In a way it reminds me of Exhibition by Ian Finley or the IF Art Shows from years past, because many of them also spoofed the criticism idea. I think this is an effective piece, especially with the images attached.

This game has you as a humble baker who has a chance of a lifetime: a sponsorship from a King. If only you can get into the ball!

The game has a few major puzzles, the first being getting past the guard, and the second involving hygiene.

The puzzles were a little tricky; the first one was hard to guess what method to use until it was revealed all at once by an item, and the second required careful examination of numerous objects.

Overall, it's a fine game, but it had a little more unimplemented scenery than I expected, like the bread in the shop or the fence in one of the back rooms.

Overall, a pleasant experience.

This was a refreshingly well-designed game. There were a couple of things that didn't work out for me, but this game had the kind of smoothness I'd associate with experienced authors like Ryan Veeder or Zarf.

The conceit is that you are a space bureaucrat in a future technocracy. You are in charge of delivering a technical manual, but it's after hours and every chapter of the manual was assigned to a different subordinate. You have to track down each person's personal copy.

There was a lot of light office and space-bureaucracy humor, some fun romance, and a lot of little niceties (like the 'press anything' button being an ascii art anchor and having exits listed).

One nice feature was having all verbs listed, and once you found something using that verb it was crossed off the list. This was very satisfying.

The author seems to have found the lack of verbs a weakness instead of strength; typing the wrong thing too many times gives you a big apology about how they didn't have time to implement responses to everything not on the list. But constrained verb games are their own genre and are fun, and having the player get repeated errors isn't negative, it's just a fact of parser games; the errors are the 'boundaries' of the world, and having firm boundaries can make a game better.

I had a great experience with this. The main thing I disliked is that 8 cubicles are mentioned but you can only ever interact with two, despite learning the names of the others. I'd prefer it if it recognized, say 'Becher's cubicle' and just said 'that cubicle is boring' or something.

This game reminds me of bits of a lot stories--Armageddon, Sphere, Alien. But it's it's own thing.

This is a choice based game where you are a oil rig diver on one last job. You're told that something bad happened down there and you have to fix it. But things get...weird.

The game had a pretty small default font and for me only used about 25% of my screen. Most of the choices were between 2 or 3 options, and I felt like I had real interactivity. There were some weird repetitions in the text some times, like when asking questions at the beginning.

The story didn't really resonate with me the way the choices did. Instead of building up tension it revealed things early, then acted as if you didn't know them, and big plot events didn't have buildup while big buildups had no payoff.

Still, I'm glad I played and had a good time.

This is choicescript game entered in Seedcomp, based on a seed by Slugzuki.

You play as an artificial intelligence that has woken up hundreds of years after humans left the earth through flight or death. It is your assigned task to prepare the earth for humans to return.

However, your stores have been heavily damaged. Your goal is to manipulate several different factors to make the earth whole again. You may, however, encounter opposition...

The main gameplay cycle is to wake up after a year or so, consume a piece of Human writing, handle any alerts, and re-evaluate your priorities.

My game ended after about 4 or 5 cycles; there may be more endings.

The media were interesting; I encountered the writings of Du Fu for the first time, which was nice. Looking him up was fun, and I got to read more of his stuff, although most of it was more contemplative than the active poem featured here. There was also some larger writing not entirely meant to be consumed at one sitting (?) like a tylenol label, and some writing I couldn't find when googling, so either from obscure books or not from published works.

I liked the main overall cycle, I liked the writing and the vibes. I think the only thing I could have wished was either that it lasted longer with more cycles and depth or that it was shorter with a tighter focus on the writing segments. Many of the were poignant but I felt like the game was pulling two different directions a bit.

This was a fun game, as yet unfinished (I would definitely bump up the rating once/if it gets done).

You play as a down-and-out detective who gets a last chance at making rent--a client whose beauty is so great that it overwhelms you, a beautiful baker who has been accused of a grave crime.

You have to go an investigate the 'corpse', and get to poke around the 'murder' scene and interrogate the suspect.

The animations and text styling is excellent. The interactivity, though, left something to be desired for me; for much of it, it is a 'gauntlet' style game where one option ends the game immediately and the other continues it. Undo exists everywhere except at endings, so it leads to their essentially only being one option at a time, since you have to pick the good one due to being unable to back out of bad one (unless you save every screen). This is not the case in every scene as some let you have a wide variety of interactions.

For me, the writing and characters were fresh and fun, and I'm intrigued by the mystery of the client's effect on the PC (outside of the obvious ones). Would definitely play a finished version.