Reviews by MathBrush

This game was shorter than I though it'd be. You select one person out of 9 on a raft, and you have several turns to choose who to talk to and what to do with rations. I don't believe the choice of character influences much.

This seems to be a weighty political allegory, but I found it difficult to see exactly what the messages were meant to be. There were parts against Nike factories, and parts for supporting refugees, but it seemed like there was much more that I was supposed to see that I just couldn't parse.

Overall, it was entertaining.

This game is a humorous story about a fly that notices a human up to no good.

It is surprisingly complex, and I found myself chuckling several times. It really seems to capture the essence of being a fly.

There was at least one link that didn't work (when I tried to SPLASH in the wine bottle), but otherwise it seemed really smooth.

There is some mild profanity.

This is an ambitious but incomplete game. The idea is that you have standard RPG stats, and by switching characters, you can get their stats.

The writing has seen a lot of effort by the author, but the interaction is a bit wobbly. I wanted to be the cat lady and find her cat as her, but I couldn't finish her quest as her. No one could recognize that I was her, either.

Interesting concept, but needs more work.

This is a shortish but heavily replayable game.

You are at a Halloween party in a haunted house. It's your job to watch 5 monitors to look for spooky activity.

There's a death, and the explanation for that death depends on which monitors you were watching.

I found the writing good, the sounds polished, and so on, but the core mechanic just wasn't clicking with me. Sometimes you were supposed to be looking, sometimes listening, sometimes talking; I felt like I would have preferred more segregation between the various activities you can engage in.

This game has the same design philosophy as the authors' last games, but with a very different set of mechanics.

The opening sequence is thrilling, with a strong buildup to... something extremely odd.

This game discourses at great length about advanced mathematics and philosophy while you are engaging in something utterly trivial, but it manages to blend the two together.

It was a trippy and surreal experience. I played until the game said I had no more to learn, but I didn't get a high score. If you get lost, shoot the magnet.

This is the first chapter of a longer game. It is written in free form verses, but they are quite easy to read as normal paragraphs, and the broken up style is quite nice.

The game has a sort of pagan witch style of magic, with archetypes like the crone, the elder, the maiden, and the mother, a shadow world, etc.

The game focuses a lot on mating and dating, but not in any explicit form; the society just has a more free form culture, a lot like the fictional society in Friends where there are few consequences.

Overall, well eone, especially in setting-building.

This game is in the spirit of the Problems Compound and Slicker City. It's a surreal adventure about self reflection and mean people, where everything is written using common phrases turned backwards (which reminds me, Andrew should write a game where every puzzle solution is a palindrome).

The puzzles were more interesting this time around, though I had the hardest time getting initial clues on how to solve them. I enjoyed the postponed mechanic, for instance.

These three games are all of one cloth. If you liked the others, you'll like this one.

Riot is a game that I thought I wouldn't like but which improved as I played it.

It's a longish twine game about a police officer who runs into a sticky situation in a Riot. It uses some basic styling.

The pages are pretty long with binary choices whose effects only carry over to the next page. This isn't necessarily bad; Ash had the same choice structure.

But a lot of the text seemed extraneous. I found myself skimming the text and focusing on the choices. The choices got more compelling as I continued to play, and I enjoyed switching characters later on.

I think that cutting out a lot of the text per page to focus on the raw story could have really helped this piece. I would definitely play another game by this author.

This game is quite a bit like the old Unnkulia games: snarky or rude to the player at times, obsessed with unfair puzzles, filled with little 'male gaze' comments about women, arrogance about religion and philosophy, and full of 'goofy humor'. I didn't really like it.

It is big and mostly polished, but the puzzles are pretty opaque, more of a 'look how clever I the author am' than 'look how clever you the player are'.

You spend much of the game travelling back and forth through time and your own mind.

I am a fan of opera, including experimental opera, so this was a really enjoyable game. You play as a woman in space investigating a planet and dealing with a recurring sequence of visions.

I found the game quite beautiful, especially Chapter 1: Sunflowers. I would listen to other interactive operas in the future.

There are only 2 or 3 chapters right now, so total listening time is about a half hour or so.