Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

East Grove hills tells the story of a group of friends who go through a school bombing/shooting. Like photopia, it is told using non linear time, and it uses Photopias conversation system.

Unlike photopia, it is told through large text dumps, and doesn't provide many natural actions for the protagonist to take.

Overall, a good story.

This game is small, but relatively neat and tidy. You have to go out and get groceries and check on a book before a meeting.

It's fairly typical for a 'My apartment' type game. There are a couple of guess the verb issues, but on the other hand the writing is very good in places, especially crossing the road.

It turns out the game has a hidden aspect to it, described in the ABOUT text, that puts an interesting spin on the action. I took about 10 minutes to play it.

This game came in 22nd out of 27 or so games in 2007, and that surprised me at first. It's a fairly large game with some nice writing. However, the concept is kind of jumbled. You are wearing a spacesuit, but you are also in a world of thoughts, but you may be dead or may be not dead. And then the game ends mid-story!

There are some problems with guessing the verb and figuring out what to do.

The general story was interesting, and the writing was descriptive, but the implementation has numerous issues.

In this game by Porpentine, an author known for creating bio-mechanical worlds that are almost hallucinatory. This game is a great example of her world building power.

You play in a dust-covered world of raiders and scavengers. You can create yourself, but also destroy yourself, and both are necessary.

This game is unusual for Twine in that you have to enter city names in text when traveling. This gives more of a riddle aspect to the game. However, you have a map storing names you've met. There are less than 10 total cities.

The game ends in a sort of transformation that is best experience rather than described. Overall, it has a feeling of exploration and of 'just living'. One of the least disgusting porpentine games, and one of my favorites of hers.

This game won Spring Thing in 2014. This game is written using ChooseYourStory, which focuses on half-pages full of text with a few small choices that then affect your stats, like Choice of Games mechanics-wise but a bit different stye-wise.

You play one of two brothers betrayed into slavery. You enter a slave ship and train in Rome. You might a variety of people whom you have relationships with, and you have a few skills like strength and speed.

The writing was okay, but the story was interesting. It does suffer from some stereotypes; there are african slaves who speak in broken english, and are all strong and athletic, while the white slaves are praised for being intelligent and good at strategy despite their weakness. A fair, blue-eyed redheaded girl is a main love interest, and so on.

This game is a large and ambitious fantasy adventure with a lengthy prologue, a lot of dialogue, scenery changes, colored text, etc.

However, the game was translated from italian, and the translation has many problems. Fortunately, a walkthrough was provided, but at one point it becomes useless, and no amount of wandering could help me find the exit.

This game exists in an Italian version; given the promise of this game in english, I can only assume that this game is quite good in italian. I don't know if the other bugs still exist in that version.

This is a game in 3 parts that would reasonably take a couple of hours to complete or more.

It starts out with good programming and a good concept: you receive a package with a device that gives you mysterious instructions. Following it gives you the ride of your life.

However, it quickly devolves into impossible situations where you have to guess what the author was tbinking, and the writing quality goes down.

I recommend the first scene or two.

John Evans creates games that are very ambitious but generally not thoroughly tested. This gane, though, I really enjoyed.

You are a spirit summoned to a floating magic castle island. You can create anything! Well, actually, you can create whatever the author implemented. You are presented with six challenges, and have to guess what to create. I beat about 3 and a half on my own. At least one depends on you seeing something not in the room descriotion, which I thought was unfair.

This ifcomp game was a demo for what was apparently a beta parser system (version 0.75).

In this game, you are a cat who helps their owner get dressed and go out, and nothing much else.

The parser is okay, but not equal to inform, tads, or Robin Johnson's parsers. An interesting artefact for those interested in various parser systems.

This game was entered in a 24-hour speed if competition. For a speed if, it is surprisingly detailed and polished, on the order of Emily Short's Lavender or better.

In this game, you play three different characters. To do so, you use various props in many ways.

The writing is descriptive. The puzzles are tricky but fair; when I resorted to the hints, it turned out that my next idea would have worked, so I just should have tried a bit longer.

My one caveat is that the difficulty of the puzzles and the frequent motion on and off stage drew me out of the story of the play itself.