Reviews by MathBrush

I was surprised this one wasn't reviewed on the spreadsheet yet. Jacic has a history of doing small, well-polished creepy stories, so I was looking forward to playing this one, and I think it worked out well.

This story combines three effective horror tropes: a 'deal with the devil' (although who the deal is with here is up to interpretation), carnivorous plants, and a lottery/voting system in a small town for deciding which citizen to kill.

You play as a citizen in a small desert town that depends on its sustenance for red, bloody fruit. Unfortunately, the red, bloody fruit, gifted to the town by a stranger years ago, can only grow if fed upon the blood of the guilty. Thus it falls upon your community to determine the guilty among yourselves each year and to feed them to the tree.

The problem is that your wife was taken last year, and you and your son are among the top nominees this time. You have to navigate your way through these tumultuous times and find a way to save yourself and the remnants of your family.

I liked the creepy styling on this and though the writing was appropriately dread-filled. I had some real agency, as I took the option at the end to revisit the game from its most important decision points. Both endings were slightly 'off' for me in length; I feel like it could have done with either less denouement and just having an abrupt or implied ending or a longer denouement with more emphasis on the character, but that's just nitpicking since I didn't find any real flaws to talk about. Jacic produces consistently good work and I look forward to more games from this author.

In this Choicescript game (which I played for free by watching ads), you play as Vivien, a recently-out queer woman who has fallen in love with a witch.

And, unfortunately, died.

Fortunately, your witchfriend has a solution for that. But it causes a lot of problems.

This game feels like an inentional metaphor for loss of both people and relationships, and for slow grief.

Many of the choices are binary, but there are some more involved options and even a set of riddles which I did not quite solve on my first playthrough.

There are some endings that require clicking the same screen 50 times, but I found a more normal one. I thought that the writing had personality and I was engaged with the story. At times I felt lost due to the non-linear narration.

This is a well-written and illustrated game with a post-apocalyptic setting. In it, the world has been afflicted with (very early spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)a disease that kills those who sleep. You meet your work another survivor, along with your two children.

The game then cycles through a few days. You can talk to the others , try to keep yourself awake, or try to keep others awake.

I like the idea a lot. The controls were a little strange. I had trouble noticing when time had passed so would do things like “keep myself awake” then “do nothing” and ended up dying because of it. So I feel like it could communicate its system a little better. But I definitely like the style and would play more by this author.

This is one of three brief games written a long time ago but now translated and updated by a team of authors for Parsercomp 2025.

The game design and text are simple, reflective of an era where conserving disk space was important. Most rooms have at most one interactable object, although some of these can be quite complex (like a rope).

You arrive at a deserted town, carrying nothing but a revolver and a rifle. The town is a scene of great destruction, with burnt buildings and corpses all over. Due to the sparsity of the text, this is presented in a cool, standoffish way, although the main character treats the dead with great dignity.

With each location only having an item or two and about 20 rooms and perhaps 5 major puzzles, this is easily completed and fairly satisfying for its length. I did get stuck because I failed to note an important line in the middle of a room's description.

Recently I've been realizing that reviews mean different things to different people, and that everyone has different criteria for what they value in games. So I've been reading this author's reviews of other games to see what they consider important for success in a game and what scores should mean for a game, and this review and rating is calculated relative to that standard.

This is a classic puzzlebox. You are on a ship (I believe a submarine) and have gotten stuck in the control room due to an emergency. The door is locked, the alarm is blaring, and you have to find your way out.

This progresses in escape-room like fashion. Many of the puzzles present you with challenges that hint at a solution which you have not yet found, which is nice and lets you strategize. Finding numbers and codes is essential, as is carefully exploring and reading the text closely.

I only found one error ((Spoiler - click to show)typing ENTER (the correct code) ON THE KEYPAD gives an error implying that that didn't work, but typing CODE (the correct code) does work. The game does tell you to use the second one, but it's odd the first one gives a message implying the number is incorrect.). The relative lack of errors is remarkable for a first-time author, especially given the complexity of the game. The coding is very impressive.

As for the story and writing, the situation is presented as an important and dangerous one. The background for the ship, mission and crew is less present, however, mostly told through logs that describe events in methodical language. The ending is quite abrupt as well. As a first game designed to make a polished, puzzle-dense experience, I think it succeeds, but I think that it lacks a certain narrative element that I'm confident can be provided in the next game by this talented author.

This game was fun, combining cute graphics with mechanics that made me feel kind of like a mouse scurrying around worrying about life.

It has gorgeous custom art and color choices. At first, it looks like your only options are “get off at a station” or “stay in” but as the game progresses it’s clear there more to it than that. A shadowy and frightening conductor hunts you, some stations are wrong in some ways and you may not even have a ticket.

I eventually got to a good ending but had fun along the way. This is a game that would be fun to show people at my school.

This game lets you select how 'intense' you want it to be on a scale of 1 to 5.

The level 1 game version is very brief and succinct, and provides almost no information.

The level 5 is visceral, removing control from the player and filling the screen with text.

There are two layers to the game. One is the story, which is someone's authentic and personal story communicated in an effective way that fits with a lot of experiences I've seen in myself (a little) and in others (a lot) over the years. You can't really measure a story like this as a success or not, but you can say whether it was transmitted in an authentic-feeling and competent way, and it was.

The other layer is the selection of the different levels. Seeing the variety of them was really telling and compelling, because it showed what the author considered most disturbing and least disturbing, and the choice of some background information only being in level 4 was particularly interesting. I'm not sure how I felt about the response to level 3; it seems like a value judgment separate from the main message of the game. If the author had just (Spoiler - click to show)provided a description for level 3 that was in between 2 and 4, I wouldn't have thought 'that's silly, there's no such thing as middle ground.' It would have just been normal. But, the choice does provide an interesting talking point for discussing the game and leads to the name of the game.

I hope everyone who has suffered from eating disorders in the past or currently are suffering gets help, patience, and kindness from those around them, and if you're reading this while going through it, I support your efforts, whether big or small, repeated or rare.

I beta tested this game.

Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight" is a delightful game from Drew Cook (author of Repeat the Ending) that is inspired by the old Zork CYOA books (which I haven't read, but I definitely got old-school CYOA book vibes from the writing here.)

This is a highly polished Parser game with several illustrations, cinematic 'cut scenes' and act changes, several layers of help menus and a lot of independent actions by actors and scenery changes. It has a lot of custom responses as well.

The idea is that you are a highly intelligent cat and you're exploring an abandoned movie theatre with your human friend that you've been locked inside of as part of an adventure. The movie theatre is mysterious and dark, and it's up to you to guide your human around.

The text is rich and expansive, while the geography is small and limited. I'd say that this game is designed (intentionally?) to be accessible to those familiar with gaming in general but unfamiliar with parser conventions and tropes. It has extensive tutorial comments early on, a constrained list of verbs that can be accessed at any time, a list at the top of available locations and important items, and hints in the text at which actions are appropriate to progress.
It's not too long; it's divided up into six acts and a finale, with each act solvable in just a few actions. The story does feel complete, though, which is another reason I think this makes a good game for those new to parser games. I've found that when starting parser games (or playing parser games in a new and unfamiliar language) that it really helps to split up the game into distinct sections, limiting the geography, and keeping a running list of important items makes it so much easier (I write this as I'm struggling with a long French parser game).

The pictures were a real highlight, very evocative and fitting of both the setting and the style of writing. They worked for me in both downloadable and online versions but I preferred the overall look of the online version.

The HELP text at the end suggests that the game was made with learning and/or teaching new Inform techniques like scenes in mind. I hope the source code becomes available, as the game does enough neat stuff that I think people would benefit from seeing examples of it.

I appreciated the little 'paw pictures' that let you know when to press a button, as there are often large amounts of text at once.

Veteran parser players will enjoy the Zork references (which manage to be both pretty faithful while also being creative) and newcomers will appreciate the help systems. Fun and not too long.

This is a game with many endings. I achieved one, but didn't get any of the 7 achievements.

This game uses extensive music, styling, and art to provide a dark and (literally) demonic atmosphere. You play as someone in a messy and cluttered apartment. Looking around, you find reminders of your life as well as huge messes.

Any attempts to get things done result in demons appearing that attack you. You can confront them in negative or positive ways (I laughed when one potential response to a demon attacking you was to doom scroll, but it makes sense since that's often a real-life response to stress).

You have a strong connection to food; there are a ton of take-out menus and each item gives you a flashback or an emotional connection.

This worked for me as a 'depression simulator', and I found it relatable and having an overall uplifting message.

This game has great multimedia presentation. It fakes a desktop with music, notes, etc. and a cute cursor dripping purple particles. It has occasional images included as well, and it seems to have been written as part of an academic requirement, as it cites committee members.

The writing is more literary/poetic than genre-based. It depicts several vignettes from the life of a girl, from 13 to 21. All of them are dynamic and full of emotion, some strongly negative (there is attempted sexual assault and violence) while others are more thoughtful or melancholic.

Much of it seems pretty realistic. I work with kids and a lot of kids get into the occult or, worse, poetry at around 13-15, and talking to former students who graduated college, many of them do find it grueling and rough entering into the working world. I found this poignant overall.