Reviews by MathBrush

In this game (15-30 minutes long), you play as various PCs working on a new planet with dinosaur-like alien. They are so similar, in fact, that you can use them to study earth's own dinosaurs.

The highlight of this game is the new text input system, where you start typing and it autocompletes into various choices. The idea here is that it's still a choice game, but you can't see the choices unless you guess some. However, it's very heavily hinted, so it ends up being more like a regular choice game with longer input times.

Although each part of this game was a bit iffy, the overall experience was nice, and I would recommend this for others to try out.

In this game, you play as a magical writer married to a magical painter.

Your house has been invaded, so you have to gain inspiration regarding your wife's paintings in order to enter into the worlds of your books and resolve one issue per world.

This is a great concept, but the implementation falls flat. Its hard to guess what you need to do in each situation, and the game is a bit buggy here and there. The last few worlds are less well described.

Overall, though, I may revisit this game, because its concept was good.

Caveat: I was given a review copy of this game, but ended up playing the free public intro instead.

This game incorporates various multimedia effects including sounds, music, some animation and even apple watch interactivity, but I played it on android with the sound turned off.

So I'm just reviewing the graphics and story, and it's a good one. This is my favorite Fwlicity Banks game yet, perhaps because I just finished mistborn and I enjoyed the metal-themed magic vibe and the wilderness survival aspects.

In the free intro to the game, which by itself is quite long, you play as the unwilling holder of a special talent: "eating" souls. What that entails and its implications for you are slowly unraveled.

Your main nemesis at first is a ghastly creatute, a red eyed albino bear. The confrontations with the bear were exciting, and you get a lot of mileage out of the game before the pay/ad wall.

The visual styling is gorgeous. The choices were all binary, and the story 'felt' like the choices didn't matter at first, but I soon found that options that seemed unimportant led to dramatic results; the author must have spent a great deal of time working on the different threads to allow this level of choice.

As a final note, I've given this game 5 stars based on my judging criteria. I've reviewed several of Banks' games by her request, but I haven't been afraid to give less stars when appropriate. This game is polished, descriptive, gave me a real thrill of emotion, and made me want to play more, which are 4 of my 5 criteria. I didn't like the binary choices at first, but it fell into a rhythm that ended up working for me, which is my 5th star.

This game follows fairly closely the story of a song called Monkey and Bear, whose lyrics you can look up online.

You play as a dancing bear, muzzled and wearing dancing clothes. Your compatriot monkey helps you escape and run away to the hills.

This is a shuffle comp game, which means it was created in a fairly short time period. However, most of this time seems to have been used to take a short concept and make it very polished, with innovative setting and writing, an XYZZY-nominated NPC, and text effects.

A short game, and an interesting one. I had some trouble guessing commands, but that was my only hangup.

This game is hard for me to describe. It is a long Choice of Games work, polished, descriptive, with a well-thought out underwater setting involving a complex relationship between merpeople, whales, giant squid, and humans. The majority of the game deals with navigating and adjusting this complex relationship through diplomacy and combat.

The combat is centered on strategic choices rather than rng's or blow by blow play. All of the aspects I have mentioned so far worked well for me.

But I struggled with the story. I kept having surprises where I realized that the game was not going where I thought it would as a result of me misunderstanding what I had read earlier. I think the best way to describe the plot structure is that there are several major threads that seem like the focus of the whole story, which then get buried and resurface later. Each one is interesting, and each one I wanted to see the end of, but I felt like none got the screen time they deserved. Only by playing 3 times was I able to get a satisfying resolution to threads like the mermaids' past, the squid-whale conflict, and gender issues.

That said, there were many moments of brilliance in this game, clever plot choices that made me want to play it through multiple times. Its treatment of the nature of reality resonated with me, and the mythology behind the merpeoples origin was very well done. I feel like I paid a very reasonable amount for a lot of excellent writing and gameplay, and I recommend this game.

This was an ectocomp game where most of the time seems to have been spent on a charming setting. You are Maurice Ravel, and your friend Debussy has been zombified.

The writing is very descriptive, and I didn't encounter any bugs. The game is quite short, with just a puzzle or two. As a speed-IF, this is a decorative gem.

Recommended for fans of great settings or the impressionistic period.

The atmosphere in this game is great, an odd post apocalyptic trick or treat adventure et near a crater. With a 3 hour time limit, this game didn't get everything implemented, including hints for directions.

It is written in a vague style, with no capitalization in room names and allusive texts. This worked well for me.

There were two things that would have made the game much easier for me: (Spoiler - click to show)The verb Trick or Treat and the ability to go west at first.

This game is written in Robin Johnson's own engine, one of the best home-brew parsers available. It is a Scott Adams-style puzzlefest, with smaller room descriptions, lots of places to explore, and 0-1 items in each location.

Some of the puzzles are quite hard; this game is for fans of old-school design.

The game mashes up several Shakespeare plays, primarily Hamlet, but also Othello, Macbeth, Richard III, the Henry IV/Falstaff plays, Romeo and Juliet, and so on

Overall, this is one of the best theatre-based games available, and one of the best old-school games.

This is an ectocomps game, so it comes equipped with spare room descriptions and under implemented items.

The overall storyline idea isn't bad, but there wasn't enough time to implement everything fully. There are some well-done secrets, and for me, the highlight of the game was the dog.

Took me about 15 minutes to finish.

This game is a gunfight and/or conversation with someone who chased you down for shooting a relative.

You can select between a few preset verbs like attack, ready, explain, placate, etc.

There are multiple difficulty levels, some randomization, and an interesting story. Howver, the combat system didn't really work for me, and I wasn't drawn in by the writing.