Reviews by MathBrush

In this game, you meet a group of new friends and decide to hang out with them. Unfortunately, you end up trapped by one friend in their own treehouse which has a collection of bizarre puzzles to keep you inside.

I liked the balance of this game; it's complex enough that it gave me pause but forgiving enough that I could complete it without ever feeling really stuck. It has a lot of charming parts but also manages to be really creepy without ever insisting that you be afraid.

Gameplay revolves around exploration, information gathering, and object collection. The coding looks like it must be complex at parts, like with the random comments from your host as the play games or with the way the rope is handled.

The game isn't perfect; at times the layout can be confusing and its not clear which clues connect to which puzzles. But it satisfied all my criteria for a 5 star game: polished, descriptive, emotional impact (creepy mixed with pity), would replay, and interactive).

I remember hearing stuff about this game from other people who were judging the Short Games Showcase. Even though that's over, I wanted to try it out.

It's a multimedia-enhanced, well-written visual novel that is (I think) entirely linear, but which has good pacing and has the amount of text per click and screen tuned well enough that it never felt like a chore to click through (also because the writing is compelling).

The protagonist is cool (a writer who is passionate about visual novels and indie games with plenty of experience and education who gets a shot at working on a popular franchise), and its fun to see things from their perspective.

But they're also problematic. At first, it felt like we were meant to sympathize with her 100%, but as it went on I could see the issues coming up, things very similar to ones I had in my first job(s). Amy, the hero, focuses her workplace happiness on romantic relationship with coworkers rather than the job. She zones out in meetings, feels like everyone is fake and not real LGBTQ allies, and doesn't bother to try the games of the company she's working for before getting hired. She makes radical suggestions to gameplay to the experienced team and gets mad when they won't make them, and when the team comes up with a project suited exactly for her skill set, she is upset because it's designed to be catered to the audience rather than her own ideals.

I know exactly how she feels, especially with having to write what others want than what you want. One thing that helped me so much with that was someone's advice about writing (looking up, it was an author named ferkung):
"It's just very "I know what works, I am a professional, if you do not want what I think is 100% right, then I can offer 80% right and meet your goals."" And as for hating that the team poo-poos her ideas, I remember a lot of early teams I was part of where I jumped in and criticized what they were doing, only to find out later that they had tried my ideas before and found failure (as I did) and just didn't want to rehash it.

So I expect the fictional Amy will be a lot happier if she survives in the industry and finds a team she loves (or grows to love the team she has). It's like a coming-of-age story for a working professional, and a great representation of one at that.

I was struck when starting this game by how lovely the visuals were. The colors were rich and vibrant and the style was kind of impressionistic, allowing some flexibility in how to interpret things.

Most of the game is a series of conversations with 'Elias'. I don't want to give spoilers, but I don't think that would even be possible, since the game is not definite about what's going on.

'Elias' looks like a kind of plant monster. The real Elias was your boyfriend, but this thing can talk like him and seems to have some of his memories and feelings.

You are someone living out of their car, where everything is, and no other person is visible anywhere in the deserted areas you drive through. It's just you and 'Elias', whom you've trained or asked to re-enact your past memories with.

The art, music and lyrics are haunting. I thought at first it would be a shorter, poetic piece, and thought it was coming to a close, so I was surprised when it went on for quite a while. The ending was transcendent in the literal sense, as it passed from clearly understandable phenomena to something more. I didn't fully understand.

The game is mostly linear, with some choices along the way that may have had story impact but felt more like (good) flavor. I felt like the goal here was to write a game that gave a certain strong impression or feeling of combined nostalgia and alienation, and I think it achieved its goal.

One thing that could have been nice would have been a way in-game to know how much of the game I had completed or a way to save (maybe there was one; I didn't know any UI) to ensure that I could plan to experience the whole thing at once. But it was a charming experience and I found it really beautiful visually, one of the nicest-drawn games I've played in a long time.

Binksi is an engine combining the minimalistic graphics engine bitsy (which allows sprites with few pixels, 2-frame animations, 1 or 2 color palettes, and text interactions when you run into things) with Ink.

This is not a game with a set ending, as far as I can tell. Instead, you explore Manon's desktop while putting off making a game.

There are funny things and serious things. There are communities that are slow and become uninteresting and others that are outright cruel and hostile. There are fun times and fun friends and the ability to help others.

It was fun to explore. Some places have multiple interactions, but I only did 1 interaction for most objects.

I breathed a deep sigh of relief as I opened this game. I had been playing a lot of short games as part of a competition and there is, of course, a lot of variety, some amazing, some that feel like work to get through.

I opened this and saw nice styling, compelling writing, some interactivity I really had to think and strategize with, and well-written characters. It was great to see!

Here's an example of the kind of stuff that I liked in this game:

"You start slicing the eggplant, but you hear ominous noises from the living room. Clanking noises, like something metal is being batted around on a hardwood floor. It sounds like one of the cats (probably Natasha; it's usually Natasha) might be playing with something that is not a cat toy.

Maybe you should go intervene? Whatever she's doing is probably not good for your security deposit. But losing focus when cooking isn't always a good idea either."

A lot of short games introduce characters but don't really 'introduce' them. We just get snippets, like a page from the middle of a larger story. This shows Natasha's character through both a single incident (being noisy) and a general statement ("it's usually Natasha"). It uses concrete details ('clanking noises') as well as emotions connected to it ('ominous').

The second paragraph sets up the choices that follow (going to check on her or not) and lets us know both that it's possible to strategize and that our choices matter.

And, while short, the game still manages to have a real start, build up, climax, and denouement.

While I enjoyed the game and found only one ending, I felt satisfied with that and didn't have an urge to play again. But I appreciate the thought that went into this and think that I can learn from it when it comes to writing choice-based games.

In this Ren'py game, you play as an author who is trying to write a story about a human child and a dragon whelp.

You make choices on how to write the story, but eventually you get stuck, so you go back and write something different.

This ends up mostly being a binary tree, which you can view on a map, although there are some convergences. It turns out though that you can get ideas in one branch that unlock new options in another.

There is a lot of sameness in trying to lawnmower every branch, and having both story text and commentary on the bottom meant I often forgot to read the commentary. But the main story was cute and I liked the overall concept.

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.