Reviews by MathBrush

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

I played this game the day after Pioneer Day. This holiday is only really celebrated in Utah, where I don't live right now, but I celebrated it by telling stories about my pioneer ancestors to my kid. They journeyed west over the plains in the 1840's and 50's, and lived western lives, like being a coal miner in Nevada or running a farm in Utah.

Growing up in Utah, a state with a religious majority, we were required to learn Utah history every three years but religion was not allowed to be mentioned. So besides the occasional Native American history, we spent almost all of those years learning about Mountain Men like Jim Bridger.

So this game brought back a lot of thoughts. It's pretty short. You play as a kind of mountain man who lives through multiple stages of life, each with a varying amount of its own branches. Each life drives you further, inexorably west.

If this was just a straight-up western, I'd probably give 3 or 4 stars. But little bits of deadpan humor are slid in that really enhance it. Sometimes I had to read it twice before I realized how funny it was. And some of it is almost not humor but just an unsettling inconsistency, a literary uncanny valley.

Anyway, the game itself is quite small and I have a whole cloud of baggage attached to it so if someone reads this and plays it and thinks 'That was it?' yes, that was it, I just liked it.

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

It has little in the way of branching or complex mechanics and so relies entirely on its capacity for storytelling and the momentum provided by links.

The links work pretty well; a series of moral dilemmas in the middle and a nicely paced denouement at the end.

The writing is evocative, reminding me of all the old sci fi anthologies my dad had from Philip Dick and Isaac Asimov. However, the writing was very 'skirting around the edges', asking people to fill in the blanks, and I just couldn't fill them in very well. There are some clear and strongly hinted/described aspects, but I didn't see how they gelled together. (Edit: Like (Spoiler - click to show)the dramatic birth moment indicates a story of extreme drama and prowess; the moral choices just seem like a run of the mill utilitarian AI; and the finale indicates unimportance. All of these can exist in a self-contradictory story with no single interpretation, but there's a consistent negative viewpoint on the AI's interactions with humans that makes it difficult to imagine wildly different interpretations.

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

It has an unusual mechanism for telling the story. It is a page with just three short lines, with two cycling links. Clicking to the next page gives just a sentence. Very barebones...

Except each set of choices gives different results, building up a larger story and eventually providing some differences. Very neat way of utilizing the mini theme.

This is a short game about 350 words, written for the Neo Twiny Jam.

It has two parts. In the first, you pick from several sports superstitions like food to eat or clothes to wear.

In the second, it tells you the results of several randomized playoff games. This is repeated over multiple years, although you can skip a bit if it takes too long.

The randomization is impressive. At first, though, I was not a fan of the interactivity, as there's not really any indicator that your superstitions do everything and my teams usually didn't win.

But then I reflected and realized that that's actually the real experience with superstitions. It doesn't matter if you wear dirty socks on game day. And in play-offs with 16 people, 15 will lose, so losing is a standard experience.

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.