Reviews by MathBrush

This game was written for Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

It's a short game with a simple structure, with a binary decision, each result being followed by a binary decision.

The writing is emotional, a metaphor for some form of neurodivergence (depression? anxiety?) as a beast. It takes events from normal life and makes an allegorical version in another reality.

It's well written, but the different endings felt a bit disparate, and perhaps could have been tied together more.

This game was entered in the Neo Twiny Jam, written in 500 words or less.

It has a series of encounters on board a space ship, each with custom art.

The individual paragraphs are well-written and the art is pretty good. Just not much happens, though. Of the encounters, only a couple seem to affect later ones, and there's not really any kind of overarching plot. There is a link to another, bigger game (one I've played before and is actually pretty good). So I think as an ad for the bigger game, this works, but I didn't feel especially strongly about this smaller one.

This game, written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam, is about a lost one who still thinks about home.

It can be read in many ways. It becomes apparent (and is in the cover art) that this is about a cat, but the sentiments can apply to a lot of other life relationships.

It goes through month by month, detailing the change, the hard variations between hoping for a return and mourning a loss.

I found it a sweet tale.

This game, written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less, describes the experience of looping dreams, trying to wake up.

It's a simple concept but executed well. Everyone knows (well, at least people that don't have issues impacting their dreams) that feeling of thinking you've already waked up and then realizing it's not true.

The game branches a lot, at first appearing like a time cave structure, but it's slightly more complex than that, which I thought was cool.

This game is a Neo Twiny Jam game written in 500 words or less.

It is a triptych of vignettes, each about a different birthday, each about interactions with a mother.

It uses both changes in artwork and changes in interactivity to signal the transition between the birthdays. I don't know if it is intentional, but I liked how (Spoiler - click to show)you started with few options to interact with mom, grew to have more, but ended up having no choices.

I thought this game was sadly sweet, and I'm glad I played it.

This game was written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam, using Ink.

It is brief and linear, but told with appropriate dualities. The design is stark white and black; the game is in either French or English; and love and marriage are contrasted with bitterness and funeral.

The story is of two men, wedded, who fight fiercely. Their story is told in reverse, from the end of the marriage to the beginning.

I imagined the envelope at the beginning to be divorce papers; I remember for my own when it became real enough to have papers to sign. That was quite the day! Overall, despite its simple structure, the strong storytelling shines.

This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words for less.

It uses some creative styling with black and white geometric figures (although it did overlap the text a bit on my laptop screen).

It presents three visions of anxiety: worry about the future, worry that the present is slipping by, and ruminations on the past.

Each is countered by a cat, though, which is sweet. There wasn't any wrapping-up at the end that I found, just three separate paths. Maybe there was one additional passage before looping, but it was hard to tell.

This poem was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

It is written using a variety of visual techniques, including spacing the poem very carefully using columns, lines, tabs, and spaces, and changing colors for both links and backgrounds, as well as hover.

The poem muses on the author's perception of the self; trying to understand why they look so different than others, which features that don't match the standard of beauty. They look to a distant parent, an 'other', unknown, who gave them these features, and contemplate what seeing their similarities would be like.

I definitely know how this feels! I too have been startled when looking in the mirror, realizing that I don't really look like people in the shows I've been watching or (now that college is a distant memory) realizing I don't look like the 18 yr old I imagine myself to be.

But like the author (except I don't need to imagine), connecting with family really helps. I have a big, bulbous nose that is very distinct. But in family pictures, you can trace the exact nose back to my dad, his mom, and her mom, passed on from generation to generation. When I see that, I'm proud, and I'm glad of this game for reminding me.

This game has an amazing concept with a few snags here or there.

It was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

You are a witch facing execution for the death of a boy. Your throat has been cut, but you are able to piece together words from those spoken by others in a form of mimicry.

These words are shown as golden, shinging letters floating in a void. Selecting them is simple, and it looks very nice.

The difficulty is the interaction; you can form sentences from words (and later words from letters) but there are so many possible orders and combinations (I think 1000 or so combos are available on one page) that it can be hard to figure out what works and what doesn't.

Definitely one of the most visually nice games I've seen in a while, would love to make my games look this nice (especially for a title screen or something).

This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

However, it contains a great deal of graphics and sound, making it a longer experience than its word count might as first suggest.

It's exactly what it states; you play as a character who keeps visiting a website called evisceratethisgirl.com where you make an avatar of yourself and then stab it.

The idea is to communicate self-hatred, loathing and despair. The graphics continually get more glitchy and dark.

For me, the narrative emotion arc was a bit off. It starts off grotesquely and with distorted visuals right off the bat. There's not much chance to identify with the protagonist because they're immediately displayed as an unusually messed up person. So when things progress, it doesn't feel like it's happening to me. Similarly, the graphics start out shocking and weird, so there's not much room for it to grow. But this is subjective and another person might have the opposite reaction.