Reviews by MathBrush

This is a game with a fun little idea for the speed-IF portion of Ectocomp. It's hard to write a parser game at all in 4 hours, let alone a time loop, so this one is pretty impressive.

I thought at first it was set in the world of Gravity Falls, since there's a guy with the name Old Man McGuffin that sounds like the gravity falls scientist guy, but the names aren't entirely similar (McGuffin vs McGucket). Either way, the game has the old scientist offload a weird time-loop device on you as a 'trick' during trick-or-treating.

The game has a pretty big map for a small game, but a lot of it is red herrings. Once you find the areas that are 'real', you can piece together what to do.

This game wasn't polished or fully descriptive (which is usual for speed-IF, including my own), but was fun and the puzzles were neat.

This is an impressive game for one made in 4 hours.

It features a kind of cult or religion that has 22 members, one for each of the major arcana. You are death. One of the highlights for the game is the custom art of each member (one of which features the non-sexual nudity mentioned in the content warnings). My favorite was the high priestess, with a symbolic-looking pose.

There is also music, background images, etc. The gameplay style is Visual Novel style, with several pages of text interspersed by few but impactful choices. I only saw a few choices, and it was hard to know the outcome, but I know there are multiple endings (I got ending 2).

The story is that your cult is horrified by Halloween, when the devil's servants are allowed to walk around unless placated by candy, so you go to a house whose owners have died and decayed in order to try to hear God's voice on the radio.

Overall, the writing is well-done, descriptive and evocative, and the game is well-polished for being made in such a short time. My current preference is to have more agency in a story (or to be able to read more quickly for replays for endings), so I wish I had a bit more to do. The worldbuilding is done well, and I'm glad I played.

This is the the first Petite Mort game I've played this year (games writtern in 4 hours or less) and the fifth entry in Schultz's series of rhyming pair games. It has less of the glitter of the other games, but has some nice coherence.

You play as someone summoned to aid some ancient beings in a great battle. To help them, you need to gather allies. The map is small, basically a cross shape, with a central area and a room in each of the 4 cardinal directions.

The story here is much more coherent than most of the games in the wordplay series, and it's nice having concrete goals and an honestly cool backstory.

The rhyming pairs are a bit tricky, though, and due to speedy implementation there are a bunch of rhymes that didn't make it in, especially in the main room. I eventually turned to the walkthrough.

The game is not yet polished and because of that I had some trouble with interactivity, but was emotionally impactful and had some fun descriptions. I would play again after more polishing, it was pretty fun.

This game is the first released by fos1, a long-term supporter of IF through helping to organize ParserComp and other IF writing competitions and moderating IFDB.

It starts off with a gentle, fun recreate-real-life experience; there is a house that seems modeled off a real-life house, and you're asked by your wife to carve a pumpkin with your son Greg. The house contains things where you'd expect them (in drawers and cupboards), but it thankfully avoids a lot of clutter by not implementing a ton of red-herrings.

After working on your tasks, though, things change drastically and you find yourself in the Pumpkin World (as the description says, Be careful in the dark side of Pumpkin World!). Pumpkin World has more puzzles and some interesting characters.

Overall, I ended up making my way back. I had to use the walkthrough for the final command.

I think this is a promising first start. Some things I think could be improved, given more time. Probably the biggest thing I would do is add some flavor to parser errors and default responses, since that's what people see the most when playing. I find it helpful when writing games to type RESPONSES ALL during a game; it gives you a list of every default response in the game. You can then rewrite them yourself (like, The standard report waiting rule response (A) is "Okay, Dr. Law. I'll wait."), which I think is a neat effect.

Because of that, I think the game could be more polished; while the descriptions are minimalistic, they are heartfelt and positive; the puzzles were fairly well-clued; the overall emotion was cheerful; and I think my one playthrough was enough.

This Inform games looks very polished and refined, unusual during Ectocomp, which often features quickly-written games.

Also unusually for Inform, most of the machinery of parser games is omitted in favor of essentially binary choices.

You are Bone Villa (a riff on Bob Villa), working with the Property Boo-thers (a riff on the Property Brothers), and it's your job to select the perfect haunted house. You walk through ten rooms, in each of which the two brothers, Hoary and Terry, present competing alternatives to the design. At the end, your choices are summed up as one of 33 different possibilities.

The first playthrough was pretty fun, seeing the different possibilities and coming up with strategies in my mind. It was longer than I thought, since 5 rooms with 2 binary choices each would have been enough for 32 possibilities, with the 33rd being special. So it wasn't just a binary tree, which was interesting. It said I should try to find more possibilities at the end, so I replayed.

Replaying shortens some descriptions but is the same material, same choices. Eventually the game can give you hints, but it wasn't until I had played several times that I realized there was an 'ideal' house. That was confusing to me, because both descriptions just seem contrasting styles; at first it seems like they're going for an 'over-the-top vs restrained' thing in the choices but that turned out not to be the case. I was puzzled on how you could have a best house when there was little chance to distinguish between them.

Eventually, you can summon help, which helps you find out that (moderate spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)different choices correspond to different 'colors'. But even with that hint I was a bit bewildered.

I think 10 choices is a lot for a game that is intended to be replayed quickly and has no other new content between rounds besides finding out your score and placement. I think more clues as to the system could have helped as well.

I played about 5-6 times through, then decompiled to see what a perfect game would be like. I saw in there that this game is actually (Spoiler - click to show)based on an earlier 10-choice game by the author, reskinned to be haunted.

Overall, I think experimentation like this is what drives IF forward, but as an overall game experience I felt an imbalance between the rewards for success and the effort required to achieve it.

This game has really high production values. It's even got a custom loading icon! There are nice custom-styled fonts and colors and background images, and the text is rich and subtle. It includes cyrillic letters in cursive (I think) which say 'Welcome, sister' or something like that.

The story is about Rusalkas, water spirits that are created when someone betrays a woman and she drowns afterwards. There is a prelude, telling the story of a rusalka, and then a longer story with more choices about a young girl and the boy in the village she broke up with.

I was very impressed with much of this game, but I had some trouble, too. The text is complex, and I had difficulty following along between figuring out what's implied, jumping between multiple narratives without clear indications, and following the allusive language. And, for all the setup, the game feels incomplete; we only see the story of one rusalka, when the game seems set up to tell more.

In any case, this game could serve as good inspiration for people wanting to see how they could style Twine, it looks great, similar to Grim Baccaris's work.

This is a prototype Twine game entered in the Ectocomp 2022 Grand Guignol competition. It is kinetic fiction, which means it currently has almost no choices besides going to the next page, where the main choice is pacing. The current stated plan is to expand it to include more choices in the future.

You play as an ornithologist who is also an alien assigned as the only alien in the area of earth you're in. Everyone stares at you, because you're literally from Pluto. You've managed to get some good work done and make friends, but your existence makes others uncomfortable and you just can't fit in with human traditions.

Especially gender, which your planet doesn't have a conception of. Most of the game consists of dealing with good and bad reactions to your conception of gender and self.

I said the game contains almost no choices; one that I appreciated a lot is the ability to skip the sex scene. I honestly wished this became a standard in choice games, as I was able to enjoy the genuinely sweet romantic buildup while avoiding content I'm not comfortable with.

I had a strong emotional reaction to this game for a couple of reasons. [Apologies for the long, unrelated personal story]. One is that I almost didn't play it because I was having stressful flashbacks. I used to be a math professor, but I always struggled. I had done all of my undergraduate and graduate work in the same math department where I had a lot of friends among the professors and staff. I had done well, and people had always supported me.

But once I left to be a 'real' professor, everything changed. My research faltered, and I encountered a lot of pushback from professors in my very narrow field. I was told that I had misunderstood major parts of the research topic or left out key parts of theorems, that my research didn't really have any applications, and the most hurtful, that my writing was just bad and/or sloppy. I started having papers get multiple rejections, and since that's the main 'currency' in the math world, I lost my chance at getting a permanent job, and ended up in limbo for a few years. And my refuge, the school I graduated from and where I liked everyone, had implied they would hire me when I came back, but ended up going with other people, only hiring me for a temp job, out of pity, I thought.

I eventually left academia (which is really looked down on in the field, like complete failure), and I've suppressed those thoughts. But I started fooling around with an old research problem today for fun, and I felt so many bitter, jealous, sad, and stressed thoughts remembering those times.

So I almost cried reading the story of Beckj, because even though the setting and reasons were so different, I recognized the feeling of everyone around you just feeling judgmental or looking down on you, and feeling like everyone just wishes you would be different than you are (I remember my postdoc advisor telling me I should never have become a father, because I took so much time off to be with my disabled ex-wife and newborn.). This story is a very specific story, but I think the author has done a great job of tapping into universal experience.

It also resonated with me because of the experiences I've seen with my trans friends, both Bez emself and also the numerous trans people I've met locally. I've seen how hurt they feel when people misgender them or feel uncomfortable using their chosen name (which is odd, as so many other people have nicknames completely unlike their birth names and no one cares), and the positive scenes between the MC and the love interest seemed completely authentic.

I do think adding the extra choices in could enhance the game, so I'm glad that's in the works.

I liked this short spanish Ectocomp game entered in the '4 hours or less' part of the competition; it's brief, but longer than you'd think for a game made in 4 hours. It is in visual novel style, with some white-on-black lineart and relatively few, but impactful, choices.

In my playthrough, I had 5 days to live after I crash-landed on a planet, since oxygen was running out. The main theme was discovering nature on the planet, both good and bad, and deciding to interact with it positively or negatively.

I never felt super invested in the stakes, but I thought the game was charming and glad I played it, and since it doesn't take long I think people should check it out.

This game was interesting. I thought it was Twine, but it seems like a custom engine made by the author on github. It has regular links but includes a row of buttons for common actions like dropping, pushing, attacking, opening, etc.

The game has a world model with several locations and items and NPCs in them. You start with a dramatic opening: a note to yourself saying that you must kill Rodrigo.

The story is interesting and is based on a scene from a movie that left a deep impression on the author, but I wonder if it isn't a perfect fit for the UI here. I had trouble figuring out how to use a bank card to pay for food, for instance; do I click on the card itself? Open the card? Attack the card? Similarly, there were a lot of background red-herring items that had no real story use.

I felt like the story got progressively creepier, and the ending was impactful (literally). The engine overall seems very solid; I could see it working great in a larger game that was more puzzle-based.

This game is fairly complex and its a good chance I didn't understand it completely. It involved quite a bit of folklore and older time things that were hard to translate (and copy and paste doesn't seem to work for google translate), and it is written in a dialect that drops the 'd' at the end of words (like tablao for tablado), which was a bit tricky for me. It's written in Adventuron, and is actually a well-implemented example of the engine.

You play as a man in a Romani family whose name I couldn't quite understand (I think it means something like the evil eye?). The game is divided into two sections; the first involves obstacles in the path of a wagon trip, and involves both conversation and some standard fetch quests.

The second part is a loop where you sing or play guitar for money in a cafe, each time receiving feedback on how to improve. I started off with horrible music but eventually got much better. That unlocks some ending scenes that are quite shocking and weird at first, but, upon reading the beginning quotes of the game again, seem to represent a kind of catharsis. I got kind of stuck on this second half of the game, to be honest.

Overall, this game is incomplete, according to the author, but I found it complex and descriptive. I appreciated the manual and the suggestions at the bottom of each page.

I debated for a long time between 3 stars and 4 stars, but I'd rather be nice if I can't decide so I'm going with 4.