Reviews by MathBrush

This game uses many full-color illustrations and background music to tell the story of a young inuit child, her relationship with outsiders, and an inuit legend.

The music and sound effects are well-chosen to establish the atmosphere. The illustrations are nice, too, with a couple of cool tricks with them.

The pacing of the twine story was effective for me, with appropriate use of fade-ins and repeated links.

Overall, a nice short creepy story.

This game is a spoof of Infidel by a teenage Andrew Plotkin, written in Basic and ported to Inform.

The opening part is a much easier version of Infidels opening story. Once you are in the tomb, though, you have to prove how bad of an adventurer you are by dying in 9 traps.

The traps are fairly simple, mostly just exploring each area and trying everything. They are very clever, however; the glue pit really kept me guessing.

The commentary is enjoyable. The game itself is spare, and not completely compelling, but it is valuable for historic purposes.

This game is truly epic. I felt like I was reading a novel as I played. It lasted long; longer than any of the other choicescript games I played.

I had trouble putting it down. A game about professional wrestling seemed so silly, but it's cinematic, almost like Rocky. There's a lot about second chances, betrayals, seeing the truth. It's so much better than it seemed from the blurb and art.

Subplots include a variety of romances, long term relationships with a rival, and so on. You can choose to be a face or a heel, and seeing the psychology about being a heel was very interesting.

Strongest recommendation.

In this game, you okay a shark like creature who learns the story of two humans through an unusual mechanic.

This is an Ectocomp game, and that means it was written in 3 hours or less. The author made excellent design decisions here by severely restricting the scope of your actions and then implementing the remaining actions with a high degree of polish.

This is a gory game, but I didn't really notice the gore. You have only a few basic actions, but they allow you to slowly develop the story of the two humans in an interesting way. I liked it.

This game was the winner of the 'Landscape' portion of the 2000 IF art show, the same art show where Galatea won the 'Portrait' segment.

You play as a woman who has second thoughts about her engagement, visiting a cove to be alone with her memories. Points are given based on memories remembered and animals examined, as well as for exploration.

The writing is peaceful and beautiful.

The game has a very small puzzle aspect that didn't really work for me.

Overall, I recommend this for fans of the IF art show. If you haven't tried any IF art show games, you should.

Soda 51 is known for making minimalist Twine games, like one that is a single sentence (the Are You Racist? one). This one is just a timer that lasts 24 hours and counts down.

You can look at the page source to see what happens when the timer is over. It's not very exciting; in fact, I've forgotten what it was as I write this. Just a simple message.

However, there is something poetic about it; maybe a reminder that every day will come, will last just as long as every other day.

This game has over 280,000 words, and is written in the 'time cave' style, where different choices lead to wildly different stories (80 different endings, in fact). Most time caves end up having each branch be fairly weak and underdeveloped, but this game does a great job on each branch.

The action is fast paced, and takes you through spy thrillers and possibly hell.

The feel is that of an old-time CYOA book, with sudden changes in genre and situation.

Recommended for fans of fast paced twine.

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.