Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

Well, I guess marketing works. After seeing months of promotional materials for Strayed, I decided to try it while it was on sale out of curiosity.

This is a longish hyperlink game. Although the ads seemed to show graphics for the pc version, the android version was, as advertised, pure text.

The game has a strong central horror narrative, with several detours allowed on the way, with many of the choices being flavor choices.

Just before this game, I had played Abyss, which is a similar game (twinelike without stats, on the play store). This game has better writing, less typos, and is more mature than Abyss, but is of comparable size. Those differences, though, make the difference for me between a free game (Abyss) and a commercial game (Strayed).

On replaying Strayed, I found quite a few new areas I had not previously explored, and the grand finale was different in a way that ties into the nature of the horror.

However, I did not find the horror gripping. It reminded me the most of some creepy pasta stories, where some reactions of the participants don't reflect reality (an example not from the game: "You see an airplane that morphs into a fluttering leaf. You shrug it off.")

I guess I was hoping more for emotional investment (like Hana Feels) or persistent consequences of actions (like Choice of Games), both of which the authors had written for. But $1-$2 is an appropriate amount for this game.

Edit: I added another star when I found out the underlined text showed you what your choices had affected; I really like this in a game.

This 1997 IFComp game shows to me how Twine didn't ruin parser games and IFComp; if this game had been entered in the 2010's, it would certainly have been a short twine game. I feel like authors are writing the same games, just on more appropriate platforms.

You spend most of the time typing well-clued commands and pressing enter a lot, and it's short. Its clear the author just wanted to write something short and fun. You play as a digital avatar near the digital highway, opening your digital mailbox for the first time.

This game is like a DnD or serious Munchkin game: door, challenge, reward. You select some attributes about yourself (like luck, strength, etc.).

Then you are shown two doors, and you have to pick one. Behind each door is a text scene with some sort of dnd-like encounter, like a feast of food you can eat or not, or a chest that is obviously trapped.

The font, colors, and atmosphere were very good, and the writing was good.

I had to download the entire ifcomp 2016 file to get all the files for this game.

Marco Innocenti has come up with a good story here that reminds me of Walking Dead in good ways.

There is some sort of incident that prompts a destructive release of a virus, and you are being interrogated as to your role in its release.

This would be a 4 or 5 star game in Italian, but the 3 hour time limit made the translation more choppy, breaking up the flow of the story and distancing the reader from the game. I would actually like to play this in Italian.

This was a speed-IF game for Ectocomp 2016 that is framed as a series of vignettes from historical documents about a witch.

I found the old-style writing charming; searching for one of the main characters (Ezola Midnight) has no hits besides this game, so I assume that this wasn't copied directly from source texts, and that some sort of fusion was going on.

Short, and interesting.

This is a short game about a creepy alternate world where there is a very different form of punishment for tasks.

I found the writing to be good/descriptive, and the setting was original and creative.

However, the ending, though cool, needed just a bit more of a hint or more setup. It felt abrupt.

This game has an original story, good writing and a nice sense of drama. You play a mom having a terrible dream, and the next day the events of the day are eerily similar.

This game is good, but it could have benefited from more plot development and better implementation. Because the author only had 3 hours, though, it's good in its sphere.

In this game, you play a sorceror's apprentice who works with potions and plants.

Something is off, though, and you're forced to make some important decisions. The game has some good dramatic timing that I think could really be emulated.

This is a zombie game with a fairly gruesome ending.

You play as someone caught in a zombie invasion. The game has a fairly clever gimmick of having your choices all be zombie-language, making the links a sort of maze to get out from. But overall, its short and underimplemented, which makes sense for a speed-IF.

Opening this game in the adrift 5 development tool, you can see it has 4 commands to win it, one of which is a strong profanity.

Virtually nothing is implemented, and the story is disjointed and bizarre.

But, as Billy Mays said, this is not the worst game I have ever played.