Reviews by MathBrush

As I played this game, after Spring Thing had ended, I thought, "This is a lot of fun. I'll probably rate it at 4 stars, but I kind of feel like it should be 5 stars under my criteria."

Then I went to see what others had rated it as, and was really surprised to see that it had an average below 3 stars.

So I wanted to share my reasoning on it.

First, a description. This is a Twine game with a kind of central hub where you, a stowaway, are hiding in the cargo hold. From there, you can go to four different locations, each of which contains either an item to grab or a place to use an item, together with (Spoiler - click to show)a strange and fantastical world unrelated to the ship you're on. There are at least 5 endings, of which I found two.

As I write this, I reflect that this is very similar to the first Twine game I every truly enjoyed: Astrid Dalmdady's You are Standing at a Crossroads, which has a similar spoke and hub structure where you find places you need items first and use them later.

Perhaps it was this similarity which made me enjoy the game. Here is my breakdown on my rubric, which is not hard and fast, but helps me organize thoughts:

+Polish: The game was bug-free, as far as I saw, looked nice, and was complete.
+Descriptiveness: I enjoyed the descriptions of the very different areas, and I liked the feel of the pirate crew.
+Interactivity: I felt like I could strategize towards my own desired ends. Interactions were clear and intuitive.
+Emotional impact: I enjoyed the sense of wonder and the whimsy of the game.
+Would I play again? I was interested enough to play to two endings.

I like all of Bez's games, many of which recently have taken the form of voice-acted adventures with character illustrations set in a world where where people are a mix of animal and human.

This one is part of that larger continuity and follows on from past stories. It has three friends (including a cute snail human) that are doing Tarot readings and talk about the future.

I like the writing and the authenticity. Like some other Bez games, the story here models being open with friends and overcoming social challenges through honesty.

So why three stars? Well, with Bez being a prolific author, I've started sorting through the games in my mind. I prefer the stories by this author that have choices and also those which have a bit more content.

This is the author's first game. I'm giving it 2 stars right now but it could easily be 3 or 4 stars with just a few small touches, if the author wanted to revisit it.

This is a short branching games with some neat tricks including colored text, briefly timed text, and a countdown timer in at least one part.

You are on a train, contemplating your beloved child named Lila, when a visitor comes and surprises you. The game reveals that (full spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)you are a vampire, and this stranger is set on killing you.

I like the setup, and there are real choices. On the other hand, the game is really short, and there are a lot of typos that detract from the game. In Twine there's an option at the top to print out a 'proofing copy' of the game that's one text that you can run through a spellchecker; doing that would improve this game quite a bit.

I definitely like the author's storytelling ability and think that they're already doing great at writing, and I'd be happy to play another game by them.

This is an exceptional story, a part of Fallen London that is extra "DLC" type content for subscribers.

I really expected this Exceptional Story to be awful, as its description was pretty generic (woman overused honey) and the beginning of it wasn't very inspired (go to these three locations and examine stuff).

But it turned out to be about red honey, one of the best moral dilemmas in the game. Red Honey lets you see someone else's memories, but only at the cost of causing them extreme agony.

This story also uses interesting mechanics, like a complicated hidden lock and key mechanism. And the ending felt like I had real agency.

This is a short Twine conversation with some nice styling and neat CSS effects (like hover-over color changing).

You are talking to a friend and you have deep conflict in your heart about your interactions with them. They are a knight, the Hound of Ricsige, and they also don't really consider your feelings all the time (that's the impression I got).

The story makes use of tastefully timed text that doesn't take up much time (and the game itself is short enough that time text isn't a big deal).

I feel like I'm being vague with this review, but the way the game was written, I felt like either:

a) the author was writing in a purposely vague way to make the game more relatable, with its tropes of angst and difficulty communicating, or
b) the author was writing about pre-existing OCs and didn't feel a need to provide more context as the context already exists in their mind.

I'm guessing it's more a), and as a relatable conversation, it works pretty well.

This is a ren’py game with an anthropomorphic animal character. It features pretty strong language, so I wasn’t going to play it, but I found the script file and searched and replaced it and it was just fine.

This game has you play as a cat-like human who wakes up a little later than they’d like and has to make some cookies for an event later.

The character is self deprecating and funny, and their life is filled with both good things and challenges like an annoyingly broken phone.

As others have mentioned, it does cut off suddenly, which is why I marked it with less stars. It’s a pretty good story already; just adding a short conclusion to it would make the whole package pretty satisfying.

I should preface this by saying that this game (and the game it’s a sequel to, set in Germany) are fantastic educational tools. My school’s IB history teacher plans on using them for assignments next year.

This game is a card-based simulation game where you take control of one faction of the new Russian government directly after the overthrow of the aristocracy.

You track stats like party support for all the parties, resources and budget, and so on. You can place ministers in different positions. You can affect food supply, propaganda, the war effort and more. You also react to frequent new events.

I think this is a fantastic game. My only reason for four stars instead of five is that even on easy setting the game is pretty overwhelming; with the German game I had some idea of the background and events but coming into this cold I felt confronted by a mass of new people and parties and policies, and it was hard to know what to do. My people starved and revolted and the Bolsheviks won.

I feel like the game is fair, and that repeated play would make what’s going on apparent, but I did like the emotional impact of seeing my empire crumble and it made me imagine the stress and fear early Russian officials must have felt.

In this game, you play as an explorer searching in the ruins of a dystopian civilization. In this world, a cruel Caretaker manipulated both humans and animals, inserting cybernetic implants and controlling society.

The online play version has sound and AI-generated images. I originally played just the downloadable gblorb without the image features. While I typically don't find AI images enlightening, playing the version with graphics was useful as it gave me a quick reference point to know where I was and what the author thought was most important in a given room. It did break down at times, producing images that didn't really make sense in context.

Gameplay mostly revolves around exploration and conversation, with a few puzzles here and there. There are a ton of random deaths. I ragequit at one point because there is a timer on the surface that kills you if it's night and some kind of timer underground that kills you if you stay too long, even while wearing a disguise, so I ended up in an unwinnable state after a couple hours of play. I came here to review and saw other people mention graphics, so I tried the online version and completed it. I don't feel like the random deaths add much storywise. I also found a bug: (Spoiler - click to show)covering the solar panel doesn't give you the beetle until night has fallen I also felt that puzzle in particular was not enjoyable, as it relies purely on random coincidence; I prefer puzzles where you can see a goal and make a plan to achieve it yourself.

Storywise, it's clear a lot here was written by AI with some parts seemingly handwritten and then restructured by AI as well. Fortunately, the author seems to have a strong vision in some parts and managed to write genuinely interesting stuff, but overall this has the same problems a lot of AI-written things do:
*overly-complex descriptions of boring and mundane things (if you are so bored by an object you have AI write the description completely, why have a description at all? The player won't want to read it either)
*misunderstanding of plot arcs and appropriate emotional responses (we find the main villain just chilling in the middle of the lair with no build-up. You can just wave hi as you walk by. Wild events are described mildly: "As the cyborg drags you away, you are filled with fear and defeat." and mild events are described wildly: "Your heart pounds as the projector accepts the sleek metal device, and the display fills with text."
*the story follows mostly generic plot beats. Is there any surprise that (Spoiler - click to show)the robot overlord is evil? Or that society (Spoiler - click to show)collapsed due to a rebellion?
*The logic is often off; at the end, we discover the (Spoiler - click to show)a spaceship is seemingly prepared for us to an uncomfortable extent: air, gravity, etc. It's clear we're being welcomed here and it's uncanny. But there's randomly a door that won't let us through unless we put on a tarp to block it? It completely spoils the whole 'walk into my lair' bit.
*The walkthrough contains a lot of weird self-analysis too, explaining in a list the various forms of irony the game presents. What is the purpose of this? To tell people how to feel about the game? Would my reviews be more enjoyable if I told people "This review is well thought-out. It uses critical analysis to highlight several failures of AI writing in a thoughtful and cheerful manner, inviting the reader to ponder on the benefits of original thought and action."?

It's clear a lot of work went into the coding, which is enjoyably smooth in most parts.

I genuinely don't like most RPG maker games, as I enjoy reading text more than seeing game cutscenes or walking around mostly non-interactive worlds. Fortunately, this game keeps most of the annoying parts of RPG-Maker to a minimum, with well-controlled text, relatively fast walking speed, and plenty of options.

You play as a scammer coming to an island to steal sea eggs. You can pick what to explore on the island. As you do so, you can change your character's sprite, and you find out more about what is happening on the island.

The game has multiple paths, with at least 3 endings and a few buildings I never had a chance to explore.

The story is short and a bit quick, but I prefer that in RPG maker over something drawn out agonizingly long.

This game features the same story in three languages (Italian, English, and Slovak).

The story has a strong environmental message. It seems to branch at several spots, so I may have only seen part of the story, but in my version, I received a message warning me about devastating environmental impacts of current human activity, and was able to visit Atlantis to see what happened to them in the past.

The game is primarily focused on a sense of wonder and on hammering in the importance of keeping the environment safe.

The game uses a variety of colors and background images as decorations. I found these to be a little distracting, as sometimes they were so detailed or bright that it was a little hard to read.

I think this might be the author's first effort, in which case it is impressively polished.