Reviews by MathBrush

This is a choicescript game with several short chapters and 2 longer chapters that involve cycling through similar events.

You start out as a small being in primordial ooze, then grow into a creature, then a tribe, a city, and a spacefarer.

The game is well polished and has a consistent tone that's not bad. Some of the cycling of similar options seemed a bit tedious at the end.

Overall, I would put it in the top half of the competition.

This is an entry by Megan Stevens, who has been doing her own thing in IFCOMP for several years. She doesn't focus as much on styling or complex link structures. Instead, her games focus on serious life events and a sort of grey evocative feel.

This game is about depression. It's short, but I found parts of it effective, especially the scene displayed in the cover art.

This game has a single, pretty much unnecessary strong profanity. It also references depression, obviously. If you like this game, you should try her other work.

In this game, you face a series of combat challenges, one after another.

Each challenge is in one location, and you use a variety of methods to attack your opponents.

Before Superluminal Vagrant Twin, this was probably Pacian's best known game. It has some violent and suggestive elements. It features a romance and several friendships, often with the people you are battling. The setting is rich and evocative.

In this game, you play an evil genius taking over the world. It's a Twine game with some hand drawn graphics, an invebtiry, and non-trivial branching.

It's a goofy humor game. The author did a good job with descriptive language and polishing up the links and graphics, and the interactivity is definitely non-trivial, but overall it didn't gel for me.

I've played this game 3 times since IFComp, each time trying several endings.

It uses Texture, which is a mobile-friendly app which seems like it could work well with screen readers.

Each page, though, is just two choices, which split into 2 choices, about 8 times. Or 6, actually.

The writing is good, but pure branching just isn't my style. I did enjoy it more on my 3rd playthrough, though.

I beta tested this game.

This game is a short surreal story where you wander about an office place that is somewhat fantastical, and is both familiar and not.

It's hard to know what actions will have what effects, but that too is part of the story.

The best part of this game is the unusual culture of it, different from the male-powered white American setting assumed for so many games.

This is actually a pretty good game, but just a bit odd. You are a squid.... sometimes, in a development that reminds me of the old game Delusions, although I'm sure the resemblance is a coincidence.

The game has a nice world model, with different locations and the ability to take and use objects. There are some fun graphics and cool timers and text effects.

It's a bit odd that you have to undo at times to move around the game, and there was an occasional typo (I saw the word maintenance room with two brackets after it), but overall it was a fun game.

This game has an entertaining premise: zombies have attacked Vigamus, the video game museum, and you have to use video game powers to save the museum.

But it falls flat with missing synonyms, sexist humor, and an overly zany plot. Others have definitely enjoyed it (it has some great ratings on textadventures.co.uk) but it didn't suit me personally.

This game shows, like Stone Harbor, the power of a great story mixed with good physical and visual interaction. Both games are strongly linear, with fewer interactions, but with a great effect.

Ash tells the story of the death of the authors mom, a lingering death in the hospital. There are some interesting choices in the story with subtle effects later, but it's mostly linear. The beauty comes from the tight writing, the smooth visual effects, the appropriate font, and the way that the choices seem to reflect thought and intent more than actual decisions. You are choosing how to feel, not what to do. This worked well for me.

I finished both times with goosebumps all over my arm. This game is on the opposite end of the also great Cactus Blue Motel in terms of world model and interactivity, but both are great. Neither game resembles the super-branching wild stories that the lower-placing entries have. I love this game.

I am a fan of poetry, but not generally of procedurally generated poetry, except for the Mary Jane of Tomorrow. This program generates random, disjointed ghazal-form poems based on some input.

I think more could have been, for instance with rhyming procedurally or otherwise using the stricter forms of Ghazal.