Reviews by MathBrush

This game, written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less, takes a twist on multiple meanings of the word 'correspondence'.

Rather than using the word limit to ration small paragraphs into multiple branches, it unloads it all in one linear story.

There's a nice twist halfway through, which is executed well. But a lot of the phrasing in the letter felt very vague to me. I realize that they may have helped the twist, but I'm not sure. Overall had some strong moments.

This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

It has two segments. The first is a slow, timed text description of being at a party and leaving. It focuses on visceral details rather than overall storyline.

The second is a series of elevator stops, each presenting the reader with an image (which sometimes requires you to zoom out; I think enabling scrollbars on itch would fix that). You can choose to enter that level, or not.

I replayed twice, but no more, as the timed text was really very slow and all had to be repeated each time. But the atmosphere was effective and moody, which was nice.

This is a Neo Twiny Jam game written in 500 words or less.

This is a kind of a gauntlet-style game, where a wrong choice can end the game in an instant.

The concept is intriguing: negotiating with an invading force much stronger than yours, with your only options being death or appeasement.

But it's slight obnoxious to play, as it simultaneously types out text a little bit slowly and also urges you to click as fast as you can. Kind of like having an escort quest in a game where their speed doesn't match yours and you constantly have to go in spurts to keep up.

This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

I like Vampire stories in general (original Dracula, Twilight series, VtM and its associated Choicescript Games, Interview with a Vampire when I was a kid). This game plays on the relationship between a vampire and her Creator, and their back and forth pain.

It was well written in general, but there was so much left unsaid. A lot of the descriptions are vague generalities that hit the right notes but might (for my personal taste, maybe not same as author) benefit from having a bit more specificity from time to time. I feel like this author must be good at writing dreams.

This is a Neo Twiny Jam Game, written in 500 words or less.

This game has a nice setup. You have a variety of alien ships you can target, each with a varying amount of health and damage. Attacking them nets you scrap, with which you can buy upgrades.

It's a cool idea and has some fun backstory, and looks like you can unlock more as you go on. But I will not see those, because it is too hard for me, even on easy mode.

For me, the issue is that if you're hit even once by the enemy, the damage they do is almost exactly equal to what you can heal with the rewards. That means at best you get no upgrades and exist in stasis, and at worst you slowly get damaged each turn. Someone suggested doing easy mode and buying a bunch of drones, but those got vaporized in one hit when I tried going up against a harvester.

So if it's a 'there is no hope' simulator, it works well, although some kind of 'give up' ending would be nice. But as a battle simulator, for me it is not one I can imagine trying more at.

This poem was written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam.

It's written with a neat interactive structure with little triangle to expand or shrink the text, all nested within each other. Inside the nesting are some other types of links that manipulate the text in various ways.

The poem is a nostalgic one, talking about memories with a friend that have a different shade of emotion looking back.

Overall, it's well executed.

This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

I played this game the day after Pioneer Day. This holiday is only really celebrated in Utah, where I don't live right now, but I celebrated it by telling stories about my pioneer ancestors to my kid. They journeyed west over the plains in the 1840's and 50's, and lived western lives, like being a coal miner in Nevada or running a farm in Utah.

Growing up in Utah, a state with a religious majority, we were required to learn Utah history every three years but religion was not allowed to be mentioned. So besides the occasional Native American history, we spent almost all of those years learning about Mountain Men like Jim Bridger.

So this game brought back a lot of thoughts. It's pretty short. You play as a kind of mountain man who lives through multiple stages of life, each with a varying amount of its own branches. Each life drives you further, inexorably west.

If this was just a straight-up western, I'd probably give 3 or 4 stars. But little bits of deadpan humor are slid in that really enhance it. Sometimes I had to read it twice before I realized how funny it was. And some of it is almost not humor but just an unsettling inconsistency, a literary uncanny valley.

Anyway, the game itself is quite small and I have a whole cloud of baggage attached to it so if someone reads this and plays it and thinks 'That was it?' yes, that was it, I just liked it.

This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

It has little in the way of branching or complex mechanics and so relies entirely on its capacity for storytelling and the momentum provided by links.

The links work pretty well; a series of moral dilemmas in the middle and a nicely paced denouement at the end.

The writing is evocative, reminding me of all the old sci fi anthologies my dad had from Philip Dick and Isaac Asimov. However, the writing was very 'skirting around the edges', asking people to fill in the blanks, and I just couldn't fill them in very well. There are some clear and strongly hinted/described aspects, but I didn't see how they gelled together. (Edit: Like (Spoiler - click to show)the dramatic birth moment indicates a story of extreme drama and prowess; the moral choices just seem like a run of the mill utilitarian AI; and the finale indicates unimportance. All of these can exist in a self-contradictory story with no single interpretation, but there's a consistent negative viewpoint on the AI's interactions with humans that makes it difficult to imagine wildly different interpretations.

This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

It has an unusual mechanism for telling the story. It is a page with just three short lines, with two cycling links. Clicking to the next page gives just a sentence. Very barebones...

Except each set of choices gives different results, building up a larger story and eventually providing some differences. Very neat way of utilizing the mini theme.

This is a short game about 350 words, written for the Neo Twiny Jam.

It has two parts. In the first, you pick from several sports superstitions like food to eat or clothes to wear.

In the second, it tells you the results of several randomized playoff games. This is repeated over multiple years, although you can skip a bit if it takes too long.

The randomization is impressive. At first, though, I was not a fan of the interactivity, as there's not really any indicator that your superstitions do everything and my teams usually didn't win.

But then I reflected and realized that that's actually the real experience with superstitions. It doesn't matter if you wear dirty socks on game day. And in play-offs with 16 people, 15 will lose, so losing is a standard experience.