Reviews by MathBrush

This is a mystery game, one of my favorite IF genres.

It's a cozy mystery. No murder here--instead, a cake competition is sabotaged when one person's overnight dough goes missing.

You are called in as a professional to investigate what happened.

First, you go through and ask everyone questions, which can be done lawnmower style (i.e. just picking every option). Occasionally something you do in one branch will unlock something in another.

The characters include two long-term competitors, one of whom favors style over substance and always wins, vs a more traditional baker. There are also the competition organizer and the security guard to question, with another person coming in later.

The 'deduction' phase consists of filling in drop-down menus with the crime, the motive, and pieces of evidence.

This is where my experience with the game hit the brakes and sent me running for hints. The possibility space is huge; there are like 20 options in the dropdown menu, which is the same for most options, so there are like (20^5)/6 possibilities to guess from for the right answer (the /6 is because the order of the last 3 don't matter).

So the game would have to have strong clues to make this doable. And I think it could be for the right person or persons; this would be a great game to do as a group. But for me, the clues were often very far back in the game hidden as incidental details. And there are multiple solutions that aren't accepted. For instance, the first thing you can deduce (mid-game spoilers) is (Spoiler - click to show)that the security guard ate some of the cake. You find goop in a paper cup. There is also frosting on their uniform. So you'd think that the crime is he 'ate the frosting' and the evidence is 'paper baking cup'. But actually the crime is 'ate the cake' and the evidence is 'rainbow frosting.' For similar reasons, I had difficulty and basically ran to the solution for the rest of the game.

Does this mean I'm dumb? Yes. Most people play games not that require you to be smart, but make you think you are smart or good or that you learn over the timeframe of the game.

I think someone that takes careful notes and/or plays with others may get a more satisfying end out of this.

I liked the characters and the setting (circus is always fun) and the baking description made me hungry.

This is a visual novel that is a bit more complex than appears on one playthrough.

You play as a young person in a relatively small town or suburb whose friend is leaving. You're part of a friend group with girls (I believe, from the art) named Clover and Iris. You have a thing for Clover, and Iris is beginning to notice. But Clover is moving away.

The game mixes weather and feelings into a metaphor with the snow kind of being like the relationship.

There are several dreams as well.

Overall there is a melancholic goodbye feel. It reminded me of several similar situations I had when I was young and didn't have control over my location, or when I did have control but it meant saying goodbye to people.

There are multiple endings that depend on your choices throughout the whole game, I think 5 or 6 total.

This is an unfinished TADS game with some good content and promise.

You get isekai'd by two weirdos into a purple portal. The world you enter has lots of pipes and knobs and rust (feels kind of mystlike) as well as a critter (doesn't feel Mystlike).

The cool thing about the game is all the mushrooms (which you can take multiple chunks of for each fungus). Through experimentation and consultation you can determine the unique properties of each, which are quite complex. The game models liquids, multiple objects, movable 'door'-like objects, and NPCs.

A more full version would definitely benefit from hints and from a general pass of bugfixes and better implementation. I had to read two people's transcripts to see how to progress. Overall though I had a good time, it feels like fun interaction.

I helped a bit in the creation of this game and am mentioned in the credits, so this is not an objective review.

I gave a higher score than I had anticipated doing when rating this game, considering I had played it before. That's because I've been moderately burnt out on IF for a few months or a year, but somehow playing this unfolded the old magic and made me think, 'oh yeah, this is why I like IF'. So anything that can do that to my brain ought to be rated highly, I think.

This game is tiny, and very polished, like a .01 carat diamond in an elaborate setting. You basically are in a room and look at 4 things and the game ends. But, other responses for attempted actions are handled well, and there's a nice custom actions bar, and a very complex credits section that almost has more structure and words than the rest of the game.

The content is a malicious narrator talking in 2nd person, like the narrator in Eat Me. The implication is that the character has passed on and a narcissistic parent has remained, making everything about them and revealing some of the possible burdens the person had in life.

I like stuff like this because it feels real and personal, as opposed to being manufactured for mass appeal (which most of my own work is).

I started playing through all Spring Thing 2026 games in reverse order by IFDB rating. I saw this one had a 2.5 rating, and so I had low expectations going in. The first screen really surprised me: fun, inspired text, nice layout, a comprehensive help system. How could this be rated low?

Then I tried the game itself, and now I can see. There's little to no connection between individual events, and almost no wrap-up at the end. You are placed in a variety of class villain situations and act against the protagonists, but they retain no memory of events, there is no plot arc, the characters are different every time, etc.

Love the writing in this but not the mechanics so much. I'm glad that what is there is polished. I've liked work by this author before, who's done some fun forum games.

This is a very short twine game that serves as the first act of a larger game.

You can play as two characters. There is a rich businessman involved in a memory transfer exchange, putting his mind on a hard drive. You can play both as the businessman and as the doctor.

There's a lot of promise here; in fact, if the ending was left as-is, it could be seen as a complete 'lady or the tiger' type story where the ending is implied.

But it's labelled as incomplete, thus my lower rating. If this gets finished I'd love to play it, there's a lot of nice sensory details and the perspective switch completely changed my mind on what the right choices are.

This is a Twine game where you pick from 8 or so characters to form a team of 4, then investigate rooms in a house one at a time to get a key and experience an attack plus some backstory, followed by a final finish.

Each character has different thoughts and reactions to the events. On my first playthrough, I was a time travelling powerful wizard lord. On the second, I was a cyborg assassin.

One character is just a regular woman, which was a surprise. She related a lot of things she saw to romance films (which reminded me of my mom, who watches Hallmark all the time and who I've started to consult about romance tropes when I write to see what's popular these days).

A lot of the writing was funny. Much of it was also a non-sequitur. The rewards at the end made me chuckle a bit.

Overall the story didn't have much cohesion, but the concept is a fun one. Extending it further could possibly result in combinatorial explosion.

This game feels more like an unfinished prototype than a fully-intentioned game. I have no doubt it could be completed into an enjoyable game, but it has yet to be so completed.

You start with no explanation in a room in a building that has 4 floors and a basement. Items are listed in each room in the default 'you can see' listing, and most have no description. Some items are not implemented at all (like the desk in the office whose description is 'This is an office with a desk').

I am so grateful for David Welbourn's walkthrough. Most of his work is with more polished games but there is real value in a polished and complete walkthrough for an incomplete/rough game like this.

If this is ever updated I'll update the score for sure.

This is among the larger french parser games I've played.

In it, you play as a doctor in a medieval type town that has left after a dispute with locals. But the mayor comes to beseech you to rescue people who have been consumed by a kind of dancing disease.

You go to investigate, and find a huge world filled with a ton of people, all of whom want help. Your main quest can be found far away in a big city, where four people can give you their idea of how to help the dancers.

In the meantime, you can find the 'true' way to help the dancers, or solve numerous side quests.

The parser has a lot of difficulties; synonyms are missing, 'S' doesn't work as a shortcut for going south, many things have no description, most items are listed both in the room description and as 'you can also see ____', there's no response for 'parler avec...'. Outside of that, the room connections are asymmetrical and it's easy to get lost.

Fighting both the parser and the French, I finally achieved the method of curing the dancers, only to realize I couldn't find them anymore. I ended up finding them all gathered in one spot where I was unable to free any of them, making me suspect the game has a timer of some sort, at which point I definitely stopped playing, as while I enjoyed my playthrough I do not have the desire to repeat all my actions.

This is a collection of poems in French, mostly written with lines of similar length and not much rhyming (which is pretty normal for most French poetry I've read/memorized). Most of it seems self-reflective and analyzing.

I think the line I like best is "...car j'aime peu de choses, pour des raisons que je ne partage avec personne." It means something like '...since I don't like many things, for reasons that I share with no one'. I like the sentiment and the way it sounds in French.

I don't know if I saw the whole amount of content but it looped a couple of times. There were poems with cursive text and blue background about cats, black and white poems about technology (I think), a list of ages and things that happened at each age.

The variety of presentations and uncertainty of the link structure made me feel engaged by the content, more so than if it were a standard collection of printed poetry.