Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

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.

This game follows fairly closely the story of a song called Monkey and Bear, whose lyrics you can look up online.

You play as a dancing bear, muzzled and wearing dancing clothes. Your compatriot monkey helps you escape and run away to the hills.

This is a shuffle comp game, which means it was created in a fairly short time period. However, most of this time seems to have been used to take a short concept and make it very polished, with innovative setting and writing, an XYZZY-nominated NPC, and text effects.

A short game, and an interesting one. I had some trouble guessing commands, but that was my only hangup.

This game is hard for me to describe. It is a long Choice of Games work, polished, descriptive, with a well-thought out underwater setting involving a complex relationship between merpeople, whales, giant squid, and humans. The majority of the game deals with navigating and adjusting this complex relationship through diplomacy and combat.

The combat is centered on strategic choices rather than rng's or blow by blow play. All of the aspects I have mentioned so far worked well for me.

But I struggled with the story. I kept having surprises where I realized that the game was not going where I thought it would as a result of me misunderstanding what I had read earlier. I think the best way to describe the plot structure is that there are several major threads that seem like the focus of the whole story, which then get buried and resurface later. Each one is interesting, and each one I wanted to see the end of, but I felt like none got the screen time they deserved. Only by playing 3 times was I able to get a satisfying resolution to threads like the mermaids' past, the squid-whale conflict, and gender issues.

That said, there were many moments of brilliance in this game, clever plot choices that made me want to play it through multiple times. Its treatment of the nature of reality resonated with me, and the mythology behind the merpeoples origin was very well done. I feel like I paid a very reasonable amount for a lot of excellent writing and gameplay, and I recommend this game.

This was an ectocomp game where most of the time seems to have been spent on a charming setting. You are Maurice Ravel, and your friend Debussy has been zombified.

The writing is very descriptive, and I didn't encounter any bugs. The game is quite short, with just a puzzle or two. As a speed-IF, this is a decorative gem.

Recommended for fans of great settings or the impressionistic period.