Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

In this game, you play as a character waking out of a deep sleep before interacting with an alien species.

This game relies a lot on heavy front-loading of information, most of which is not actually necessary for the game, because it generally teaches commands and the most common commands are listed in the Quest interpreter as drop-down boxes.

After the front-loading, there are a few actions you need to take that are more fast-paced.

The storyline is interesting, but I feel like the different parts of the game could have been incorporated more smoothly, perhaps with the manuals spread out more. However, the game is implemented well, and doesn't seem to have any bugs as far as I can see.

Recommended for fans of hard sci-fi looking for a short parser game.

This game consists of 7 chapters in a scifi setting with heavy Greek mythology references.

This game is very dense with invented words and phrases. It reminds me of To Burn in Memory from 2015; both games have text that makes subconscious sense but whose meaning is hard to grasp.

I think the issue is that none of the setting or mythology matters; the game might as well be about someone getting dressed for the morning. This is because you never need to use your knowledge about the setting to progress. Almost all links return to the previous page, and there are no opportunities for 'missed chances'. If the game made you make some tough, clearly marked irreversible choices, with delayed consequences, or used the knowledge it dispenses it dispenses.

This author has written several very good games in the past, but I feel that this one doesn't live up to their reputation.

You pick to be one of several magic using Australians in the 1800s during a heist. The game is very similar in style to choicescript, and overall feels like an opening chapter from a choicescript game.

I think overall, this game and another game from this comp (the Eight Characters game) spent a great deal of time on front loaded back story, which involves a lot of reading that does not translate into gameplay. This isn't bad in itself, but the rest of both of these games focus on quick-action gameplay, so it conflicts with the earlier play style.

This is an entry in the 'I'm so wacky!' class of games. The text is a garish yellow, and the plot is disjointed and wild. It lasts for a respectable number of turns, and has some basic puzzles.

The author is completely committed to their writing, though, and they did a good job conveying the emotion that they wanted. This game is not really a bad little 'snack' if you're just looking for something quick and mildly amusing during a lunch break.

I helped to beta-test this my little pony inspired game.

This game is accompanied by many hand-drawn illustrations of various bizarre creatures and locations. You walk around an island, exploring with your pony companion, and try to discover a patron saint of diplomacy to help your quest.

The illustrations add a lot to the game, and the writing is inventive and descriptive.

The game was fun, but didn't draw me in with an emotional connection. It is fairly long, but ends seemingly mid-story.

In this game, you choose one of three options, then click through a few links in a row.

The game uses the standard twine style without customization, although each of the branches ends in a picture.

The stories are about bizarre and violent dreams. One of the branches had an explicit sexual encounter, at which point I stopped playing.

This game is a sequel to The Problems Compound. It is not one of my favorite Andrew Schultz games. Schultz has made some brilliant games, like Threediopolis and Shuffling Around, that are based on wordplay and puzzles, where the player has to use wordplay tricks to come up with commands.

This game and its predecessor have some small elements like that, but are mostly big set-pieces there to show off silly word reversals. These word reversals, while clever, are difficult to understand at times, and lead to a disjointed game world. This game was polished, but shorter than Problems Compound.

This is a pretty long twine game with some dark humor, all about a conspiracy and a new shoe.

This game is well-coded, and includes difficult twine constructs and handles it well. The text seems mostly error-free.

The game handles puzzles much better than most Twine games. The annoyance of lawnmowering links was offset by the creativity of the puzzle design.

The writing wasn't especially polished, and the story was hard to follow in places. It has a single and unnecessary strong profanity near the start.

This is a fairly long ifcomp choicescript game (about 5 chapters, though more are planned) about a world where superheroes have to be contained, like X-Men or the Incredibles.

This game seems to hit up all of the classic stereotypes of its genre, so I found it easy to just skim the text, the details all blurring together. The writing didn't pop out, and the text seemed to just do the job without excitement.

I was pleased by the interactivity, however; I tried to play as a rude brute, to see if the game could handle different styles of play, and the game really seemed to handle my input well. I would play it again; I feel like it has good bones, but it could use a few rewrites to get it to pop.

This game is sort of like Babel without beta testing. You play a psychic detective walking through a destroyed lab, and you have to relive a man's memories to determine what happened.

The memories are really interesting, and the general story is very good. However, as others have noted, you eventually reach a place where the implementation is completely spotty and the walkthrough is your only help.

Recommended, with a walkthrough, for fans of intense science fiction.