Reviews by MathBrush

This was a fun little game that involved writing a text that varies depending on your inputs. Given that the game was written in 4 hours or less, I doubt it uses full procedural generation, but there is at least some visible variation in text and it gives the feel of procedural generation in a good way.

You play as Edgar Allan Poe (or equivalent) and you're trying to compose what is essentially *The Raven*. You get distracted, so you you have to battle to be either gloomy or happy. Whatever you pick, it affects your writing.

I love the idea, although there's not enough time to really expand on it, so we only get a couple of stanzas. I had difficulty making and executing plans, as I couldn't figure out how to maximize gloominess or cheerfulness. I did get 2 endings, and had a good time.

This game was a wild ride. I don't recognize the engine used at all; you can cycle through choices by clicking, but then scrolling down counts as a choice. It is visually dramatic and fun, although occasionally I scrolled too far and missed a choice.

The setting is dramatic and the narrator voice fits it. You play in a world where the long peace between animals and man has fallen, and every living creature is out to destroy humanity. You have to escape dangerous krakens, rampaging birds, and murderous apes.

The game is zany and wild, but somehow still coherent, and it ends just before the concept could become tedious. Overall, very well done, and stunning that this was achieved in 4 hours.

This was a mournful, reflective, and gross game by KADW. And not gross in a bad way, gross in a cleansing way, like popping a zit or rinsing a filter until it’s clean.

You play as a wanderer in space who feels listless, uncaring of the outside world and desiring to be completely alone and shut the rest of the world out.

The prose is beautiful. One part made me think ‘I bet the author researched this and thought it was cool’; at least I thought it was cool (talking about approaching the sun):

"No. No one would see anything. At the distance where objects start to burn from approaching a star, they are already close enough to be indistinguishable to faraway observers."

The gross parts happen later, but it’s not so much a bad thing as a transformation, and it ties into the overall themes. There are two endings.

This game reminded me a bit of a fiction story about cordiceps fungi infecting humans, which I heard on the Creepy podcast as the story “madness, mutilation, death”. Very intriguing stuff!

This is an Adventuron game that is a nice small nugget of a game, with classic adventure gameplay (TAKE and DROP feature prominently).

You play as someone who often walks by an abandoned house at night but who finally decides to break in and see what’s going on inside.

The game was written in 4 hours, so many things aren’t perfectly polished. The author does foresee this issue and says ‘You won’t have to ____ in this game’ a lot, which helped reduce frustration by reducing verbs. It would take substantially more work to implement every reasonable action, but this approach isn’t bad even in a polished game.

The font and color combo was hard to read for me; I’ve seen some Adventuron games that have a font selection option, and that would have been nice here.

Fun overall!

This is a haunting twine game set in an apartment building. Every day, you can wake up and wander around the building, surprisingly being allowed in all your neighbor’s rooms. There, you can try to help them out with their problems. But, for all of you, life is kind of ‘meh’.

This is the kind of game that transforms the more you play it, which I found effective. I liked the game’s use of color and its gradually increasing use of mythological references.

I’m still not sure if I figured out the theme of the game in terms of the artwork we see at the beginning. The number 3 comes up a lot in the game, but given the prominence of that number in mythology, I’m not sure which 3 it was referencing, and would be interested in hearing others’ theories on it.

A brief but time-worthy game.

Ruber Eaglenest has made several games before with serious themes written in sensitive and poetic ways.

I found this game beautiful as I started it. The emphasis on colors and nature felt soothing, mixed with melancholy at being a ghost.

Interaction was confusing at times, perhaps to show what being a ghost would be like. You have three options most of the time, but they change as you select things, possibly in a pattern, possibly just based on how long you've waited. I never had too long to feel frustrated.

The ending was moving, and a reminder of (Spoiler - click to show)the horrors of war, and our responsibility to seek peace throughout the world. A very effective piece.

I saw the name of this and thought, ‘sounds like a Damon Wakes game’. Then I saw it was a Damon Wakes game.

What can I say? This game was longer than just one room. It seems based on Clue, with a bunch of different secret passages connecting different parts of a map.

The only real question is…when will the jumpscare come?

The actual jumpscare noise sounds like the FNAF ones but slightly different; was it homemade? Overall it reminded me of playing Ultimate Custom Night a bit. It seems like it acheived all of its goals (if its goals were to make players sigh, open up the game anyway, and then click through until jumpscared).

This is a Spanish Grand Guignol game about waking up in a seedship on its long journey through the stars.

It uses what is either AI or modified stock images for its scenes.

It hits on the most exciting time for a colony ship, the kind of time where you have to wake people up and make big decisions.

The system is choice-based, with an inventory (which, for me, wasn’t used) and a little space below the room description to describe the results of various actions.

It was neat, but ended very abruptly for me. I’ve asked others for confirmation, but it looks like right now the game just ends after a surprising reveal. If that was the whole game, I would have wanted more; if it’s a bug, I hope it’s fixed!

paravaariar, the author of this game, is (in my mind) well-known for literary, high-quality spanish Parser games.

This game uses fi.js, an interactive fiction parser platform for web. It uses a small number of verbs (provided in the ‘manual’) which makes gameplay easier than most parser games.

The background image of the game is a beautiful field of stars. The story of the game is that we have woken unexpectedly early from cryogenic storage on a kind of space station. We need to explore to understand what’s going on, but, more importantly, to understand ourselves.

The game is compact, both in design and in story. In the game, a repeated idea is that there is no room for wasted space, and nothing is wasted in this game.

I think the main idea could have supported a longer gameplay, but I think the game as it exists is well-done and very poetic and literary.

This is a German Grand Guignol game that is about Ghostbuster’s in everyway except the name.

It’s a simple, lovely tribute game. You’re in a Ghostbuster’s museum with wax statues, but every exhibit is missing an important object. Your goal is to find all the objects and return them to whence they came.

Size-wise it feels like a game that started as Speed-IF but which the author turned into Grand Guignol (I can’t confirm this). The detailed descriptions of the Ghostbuster’s equipment and objects were fun; you can tell the person who wrote this really likes ghostbusters.

There is some sparseness, which is what made me think it might be upgraded speed-IF. At point point it is said we see a distant Universe, but this cannot be examined (as far as I can tell).

The game does have an independent NPC in addition to the mannequins.

Overall, this game gave me fond memories of Ghostbuster’s and was easy to play as a non-native speaker (needing just NIMM, X, GIB, SCHIEBE ___ [direction], and WIRF, as well as directions).