Reviews by MathBrush

This is a game in the vein of the Arcade Pack spoof that went around a few decades ago. It's a procedurally generated version of Dragon's Lair where your options are U/D/L/R and S (up, down, left, right, and sword).

It seems to go on forever. I used cheats and undo eventually and still never found the end, but the scenarios eventually looped (but not the same order). Looking at the Club Floyd transcript, they eventually just gave up, so I don't think it ends.

I love this concept and this kind of spoof. As a game itself it wears thin really quickly, but spoofing arcade games is funny.

This game is one in which you pursue a metaphorical world, like Alice in Wonderland or the Phantom Tollbooth. It relies heavily on philosophical implications and interpretations. It is also just a demo.

It uses a parser system, except you choose from words given to you. You can proceed through much of the game by just repeatedly hitting enter, but there are parts where it branches out. I thought the system was really cool; it was hard to use at first but I eventually got into a rhythm with arrow keys and entering.

I never played this back in 2018; there were several games from that year that I never got around to for some reason. But I like it; it's too bad no sequel ever appeared. I did think their previous game 'Niney' was cool, though!

I remember seeing this game in Spring Thing years ago and didn't play it because I wasn't familiar with the games it was inspired by.

But I thought I'd try it anyway just now, and it worked fine as a standalone piece.

It's a mostly-linear twine story about a guy named Nigel and his space-traveling alien friend. The two of you go together to a mysterious asteroid where you encounter a variety of aliens.

There is a long lead-up of linear story followed by a more exploratory section.

The writing was interesting enough to hold my attention, and I felt like I had real agency in the choice-based parts. This doesn't look like it was ever finished, but the part I've played is fun.

This is a Spring Thing choice based game from a while back. It's a choice-based story about your friend and your stepbrother (a trans man) who get romantically involved while in high school.

This relationship is not a good one. The boyfriend becomes increasingly possessive as your stepbrother draws away from society. Things get physically bad.

The writing is expressive and descriptive but has some typos scattered throughout it. There are enough options that it feels like you have some real agency in the game but that is of course balanced by the fact that you can't always make someone make the right choice in a relationship. Interesting read. Contains some strong profanity.

This was a Spring Thing 2012 game written in Quest.

The idea is that you have a spacious mansion with guests placed randomly in it at random locations, together with random items scattered around.

Your goal is to find the magnifying glass, then look at each item till you find the murder weapon. You also ASK people ABOUT their alibis until you know who killed someone and where. You then GATHER the suspects and ACCUSE the killer.

The game is, alas, largely unfinished, with the author describing several possible future improvements. There are lots of bugs that crash the game, such as when I accused the murderer.

People don't have descriptions and are often referred to as the incorrect gender; while you are meant to ASK them ABOUT ALIBI, clicking on them only gives the TALK TO option, which none of them respond to.

Overall, if the author ever came back to this and fleshed it out, I think it would be a fun game, and I would give it a much higher star rating. But for now, it's undercooked, although ambitious.

I helped test this game. This is a brief one-room parser game with a well-written atmosphere. You are in a carriage with your father who has come to a grim decision regarding your future.

The game lets you talk and look around as well as several other actions. The issue with parser games with puzzles in ectocomp is that it can be hard to correctly clue things in a way that people can naturally follow the puzzles; fortunately, while the main game isn't too hard, the author managed to fit in Story Mode, which you can activate by typing STORY and which basically types in a walkthrough for you. I found it to be useful even after completing the story itself since it helped me key in on important things.

I definitely like the setting and the nuances here, the focus on the details of the wood and cloth and expressions.

This is a twine game with visual novel-style controls. The game focuses more on story than branching, with one very important choice at the end.

The story is written in a way that is grounded in reality (with a lot of description of physical sensations) but also very disconnected from reality as it's difficult to sift out what is actually happening, what the narrator thinks is happening, and what the underlying meaning is. As the story goes on, details make more and more sense.

Visually, the game uses fixed-width fonts and (I'm only now realizing this) varies between left-justification and right-justification, with just a hint of center.

The story is about a woman who's pulled in different directions, between a new and exciting life and a life of respectable office work (these characterizations may not be those intended by the author). In this story, this difference physically manifests in two sides of the body fighting for control.

I thought the imagery in the game was unique, a blend of old folklore and modern technology.

Parts of it were confusing, but I think that's the intention. Noticing the text justification thing made a reread a lot easier!

I played the first GUTS game, which I remember liking, but I didn’t play the second.

I’m not sure what this third one is really all about. It does remind me of my favorite opera, the Hungarian opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, which is a surreal two-person one-act opera about 7 colored doors in Bluebeard’s castle. As each one is opened, some emblem of power is shown (strength, cruelty, wealth, lands, etc.) and more light comes to the castle, but each is also tinged with blood. The last two doors only bring darkness to the castle and the end is one of eternal suffering.

This is really four games in one. I started on the 3rd first and I don’t recommend that, as I thought the game was just being very silly (tons of links that do nothing but repeat the same text). It made way more sense starting from the first.

The fourth link doesn’t seem thematically or structurally related to the other three at all, or even really with the same vibes. It’s a cyclical story of inescapable enmity with amusing undertones.

The first three are all the kind of nightmare you have where something is hunting you but you never really see it, so you’re just nervous all the time and can’t explain why and your chest is pounding and everything feels helpless and hopeless.

While I can certainly identify with many emotions in this piece, the interactivity left me frustrated at times, wondering if I was getting the point or getting stuck. That fits thematically, yet I still felt frustration at times.

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 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!