Reviews by MathBrush

This was a neat experiment in a game jam designed to use non-gamemaking tools to make games.

This is a forum thread where the idea is that you read through the edit history to see what happened. It seems to me like someone having a breakdown and then it being covered up. Who covered it up, though? The government? Another personality? Parents?

It's a fun concept. Its open nature allows you to think of many possibilities but also hampers the story due to not providing enough answers to really pull you in. But a fun and unique idea.

This was a pleasant, compact Adventuron game. It had a feature I’m not used to seeing, where right-clicking on yellow words brought up possible actions. I don’t think it was all possible actions, because in both cases I tried it it only brought up ‘Examine’, but I thought it was cool!

The idea is that you’ve accidentally released the ghosts of your ancestors and you have to capture them back into the box you got them from.

There are two main ghosts to catch, each with a couple of puzzles. These puzzles were well-thought out; it looks like this Petite Mort game went for polishing a smaller-scope game rather than pushing out a bigger untested game. I think that was a smart choice! This setup would easily allow expansion if the author ever desired to do so, and I would look forward to that. Still, it’s pretty good as-is.

This game, like many in Shufflecomp, makes extensive use of public domain art.

In it, you play as two characters who died in a dangerous mission at sea and are now stuck in purgatory.

The game is fully voice acted. The two main plots that I found were the resolution of their feelings about life and death, and one of the characters coming to grips with their gender identity.

I liked the writing and voice acting, and the images contributed a lot. However, out of the three games entered by Bez in this competition, I think I preferred "A Little Guidance for A Big Heart" for its quirky ensemble. This one was meditative and thoughtful, though.

I liked this Shufflecomp game that was a short vignette about a band.

You are awakened in the middle of the night by an associate concerned about one of the other band members.

You and the other band member, Holly, talk about her fears and concerns.

I like how, even in this short space of time, the author was able to make the conversation realistic and with real choices that affected Holly's responses in a way that I could really sit and think about what I wanted to achieve.

The game also muses on whether ongoing success is achieved by sticking to your ideals, making what people want, or the luck of the draw, something I've thought about a lot before.

It's possible that I'm getting older or have a carbon monoxide leak in my house, but I frequently play games recently where I have absolutely no idea what's going on. Everything is in evocative prose but I don't know what it's evoking.

So I appreciate Bez's clear and straightforward stories with interesting characters where it's easy to follow along and see the story progress. This is a story about going to an event to meet people while a little guy in your pocket gives you dating advice through an airpod. You reveal some facts about yourself and become aware of others.

Like many of Bez's recent games, this is voice acted with a few different actors participating, and was styled nicely. Out of Bez's three games in this competition, this is the one that I most liked.

This is a game with at least three different endings and which has a pretty neat mechanic.

Everybody is dead at your party (well, it's not exactly your party, but since you're the only one alive, you might as well be). You can examine many of the dead as well as a lot of the scenery around you.

There is a hidden thread running through things which I found fascinating. At the moment of your hostess's death, (Spoiler - click to show)your pink pearl necklace is snapped and the pearls go flying. You can find these pearls as pink 'o's in the words of the different areas</spoiler.

I thought this was a neat mechanic and its symbolic meaning became more apparent in the different endings. Really neat idea here.

This game is themed around the story of a Polish revolutionary anthem from the 1800s that was repurposed by Russia.

Its a short poem with a few branches, talking about the importance of revolution and how it supersedes love.

One of the branches I played had some raw code in it that wasn't working (like UI.restart, I think), and overall this was pretty minimal. I definitely enjoyed hearing about the story behind this though!

This game was entered into Shufflecomp.

The author projects finishing it or adding more at a future date.

Basically, there is some beautiful poetry filled with nature imagery and her falling or transforming. I'd be more specific but the story itself is pretty vague, I got more 'vibes' from it than plot, and the vibes were nice. There is a branch early on and the two paths are wildly different. In one, the words become more sparse naturally.

In the other, you pare down the text by removing words. These removed words are placed into a kind of gallery where eventually they form a larger poem, but the game can end under certain criteria before you get to see the finished one some times. You also have the option to go forward and back, but there are also word links that move you forward, and I'm not sure what the difference between those two options is.

Fun concept.

This short game toys with the notion of the holographic principle, which is that it's possible that the universe is encoded on a two-dimensional surface and that the 3d effects we see are just a weird side effect of string theory.

In this future, companies have taken advantage of this by having quantum computer read and write directly to that surface as if it were magnetic tape, deleting people and moving them elsewhere.

The game follows either two groups of people or one (it's hard to tell). In one story, a man is sent in a long real-life journey through space to deliver a package for a company. In another, a couple is reunited after one is 'rewritten' (I think). The man might be the same in both iterations.

The atmosphere was nice. I had to play twice to understand a little better; one ending is very abrupt, while the other has an animation and some more explanation. Reading the wiki article on Holographic Principle helped as well.

There were a lot of typos. I understand, because I make a lot as well; in a future release, the author could use the 'proofing file' option in Twine to get something that can be run through a spellchecker.

I like the atmosphere in this short Shufflecomp game a lot. There is a bunch of mysterious worldbuilding which is purposely vague, but it seems like some disaster has driven humanity (or a part of humanity) to flee to the depths of the ocean in order to survive.

You are one of these people, although you have experienced the surface. And you are in danger as the cables that connect you to your data sources begin to fail, and you have to explore.

I actually love the writing here and the neat use of variation in text placement. I also felt like the game had some significant choices early on. I was a little bummed to replay and realize it didn't matter, but for the first playthrough it felt really cool.

It kind of ends on a cliffhanger, but it also feels complete as an episode in the life of a unique being. Fun overall.