Reviews by MathBrush

This is a surprisingly polished game for 4 hours (I've said that a lot this comp, I wonder if this shows that I don't use my time as wisely as others do).

You have a job interview coming up, but you also have a massive zit! It's described in excruciating detail. You're in a bathroom with a little but a few things in the drawers and your cell-phone.

To me, the real appeal of the game is in the insight into your loved ones. Each one you call has a different reaction, some of them showing off a poor moral character, others a sweet or charming one.

The other big component is dealing with the zit itself. I had some trouble near the end with the game saying I hadn't done something when I had already done it, but it fixed itself pretty soon. Overall, a strong entry.

This is a pretty surreal Adventuron game with images and a little music about confronting a giant Zombie eye in the London Underground. It involves a lot of sensory details, including sound and touch, in ways I found pretty poetic.

Dee Cooke is perhaps the adventuron author I know best, having made several excellent games before and winning or placing high in a lot of comps. I was surprised when this game was so small, then impressed when I realized it was in the 'made in 4 hours' division instead of the 'longer than 4 hours' division it seemed like it was in. This is pretty great for a speed-IF, with conversation, a reactive NPC, and graphics and sound.

Overall, it's a nice little treat with good atmosphere and some perspective shifts.

This is a charmingly complex game for one written in less than 4 hours for a speed-IF.

You are essentially a protagonist in a gothic novel, writing to your sister about your husband whose previous 6 wives have mysteriously disappeared. You can choose several different versions of each letter you write to communicate different tones, leading to different endings.

This rewriting mechanic is reminiscent of Emily Short's First Draft of the Revolution, another letter-writing game that involved cycling through different options; in fact, that game inspired the cycling mechanic in Twine!

The mechanic here hovers between too simple and too obscure but lands, I think, in a happy medium. The writing is a pleasure as always from this author, with many references to well-known tales (and some less well-known; I was glad to see Ann Radcliffe mentioned, as Mysteries of Udolpho is one of the few gothic novels I've read). Very neat overall, especially for such a short time-period for game writing.

This gave me a chuckle, especially as a high school teacher. The game consists of two parts: a 1000-line text manual and a 35-question multiple choice test.

The game encourages you to do exactly what most students do when studying: start the assignment first and only look up answers as you go along.

The text is dry, an imitation of standard technical writing, but sprinkled with a variety of frightening or hilarious spooky situations, like scissor lifts made of solid flesh or horrifying accidents brought on by improper rituals.

Overall, there's a lot of effort here and the extra flavor is good. But a simulation or parody of a boring thing is often, itself, boring, and while there's a huge effort here to alleviate that, it doesn't fully succeed. As an idea, though, the whole setup is very clever.

This game, written in Ink in 4 hours or less, has you, apparently a psychologist, interviewing a cold, emotionless killer.

You have to ask about his life, his actions, and his dreams. He is emotionally unstable, so you have to be careful what you say. Your comments can make him shut up or open up.

The game uses a variety of charged language and imagery, including strong profanity, descriptions of violence, incest, misogyny, and violent death, and strong hatred.

It's all very grimdark. This man is irredeemably bad, and seems to hate himself or everyone around him.

It has some interesting narrative twists and the craftmanship in the choice structure really spoke to me. But the content did make me feel deeply uncomfortable, which is a subjective thing that of course differs from reader to reader.

I had a lot of fun with this game. Modeled on Untitled Goose Game, your goal is to cause trouble. Specifically, you have 6 hours before the new owner of your house arrives, and you have to make the house as scary as possible before then.

It's a cost/benefit analysis thing that requires trial and error: some actions take a ton of time but provide little benefit, others are short but trivial, some are heavy hitters. It requires some replay, but fortunately the choices are really funny and the text is enjoyable to read.

This was made in 4 hours, so it doesn't have huge depth, but it felt complete as a game. According to my rubric:

+Polish: I didn't see any errors, and the human-voice sound effects were really funny.
+Descriptive: The game had fun descriptions of everything.
+Interactivity: I felt like I could strategize and that the game was both responsive and not too easy.
+Emotional impact: it was funny to me.
+Would I play again? I played through three times.

This is a Twine game where you have three dreams in order, over and over again, about dying.

Each dream is fairly brief, with 2-3 or 4 choices per dream. There are a lot of options, though, so it's hard to know what to do to be safe.

Fortunately, if you explore each dream enough, you find hints about the other dreams. Phrases that don't make sense at the time but later you look at options and go, 'Oh, I get it now!'.

Even after playing a couple of times, I didn't always understand why some things happened (like why the kitchen just kind of disappears or what triggers the ending for the final dream).

The writing is on-point and covers some frightening situations. I didn't feel sucked in emotionally, maybe because I was focused on the puzzle-aspects and felt safe as it was all a dream. But it was very descriptive.

Excellent work for a 4-hour game, and a neat way to do choice-based puzzles.

This game is based on cosmic horror. You and two companions have been trapped in a shifting labyrinth for days, trying to find your way out. Tensions are rising, especially between your pushed-to-his limits friend Vlieg and your deeply-fascinated friend Tia.

The game is written using Binksi, a combination of Bitsy and Ink that uses tightly-constrained pixel art and the dialogue capabilities of Ink. You sometimes move around, running into things to talk, and other times have pure dialogue.

In the ending I reached, there was a massive shift in perspective. It was a clever concept and I enjoyed it quite a bit. However, it also brought a ton of profanity for a long time that honestly wasn't that fun to me. The big twist doesn't quite make sense conceptually, looking back, but it does make sense in terms of cosmic horror.

This game is quite complex, and I think it really shows off just what Binksy can do, for those interested in the engine.

This is a Twine game with a neat little map in the corner showing all the rooms in a kind of maze. You navigate around with a score described as 'Survival Chance' which goes up or down depending on what you do.

It's a lot like gamebooks in gameplay style, except without randomized combat. You have different encounters with people and need to pick up various keys and tokens and other items in one area to progress in another.

Story-wise, you have to go to the help desk, but you get trapped, because it's haunted. All your coworkers are skeletons or werewolves or other wild things, and the humor is pretty goofy.

The game could use a little more polish; there were a few typos here and there, and I never really connected emotionally. But overall it was a pretty strong game and amusing while I played it. The author did add several features that improve gameplay, like the map and back button.

This is a fun little whack-a-mole game written in Choicescript for Ectocomp in the Grand Guignol division.

In this game, you have a four-room house, with the baby in one corner and supplies and windows in all the others.

Your options are to forage for supplies, or rest, or, if zombies are approaching a window, to attack with shotgun or axe.

I passed one horde and leveled up, but didn't pass the next horde. It didn't seem like there'd be a lot more variety, so I didn't replay. Overall, an interesting concept.

+Polish
-Descriptiveness
+Interactivity
-Emotional impact
-Would play again