Reviews by MathBrush

This is a moiki game, designed to introduce English speakers to the format. I’ve seen it used in a lot of French games before; this particular game shows off some of the text effects and of course the new audio effects very well, but undersells the other powers of the engine a little bit, which can do very complex state tracking and branching.

I think ‘deliciously frightful’ could well describe this story; it has constant sounds, the majority of which are frightful whispers. It reminds me of an audio version of the children’s hidden picture book where there’s a creepy creepy gate with a creepy creepy house with creepy creepy stairs and a creepy creepy box…the anticipation builds as the whispers become more intense. I kept wondering, ‘will there be a jumpscare now? How about now? How about now???’

So the emotion was there, and the polish. The overall story was fairly small and simple, but any longer would likely have made the audio element too big or too annoying to record.

I enjoyed this, so thanks!

This is a Spanish Grand Guignol game.

It looks really neat, with a Vorple interpreter that adds a smoky background, and it has a unique mechanic: it's a parser game, in Inform, but if you hold down shift, it highlights keywords, some in white and some in red.

The imagery was vivid: bronze doors framing the hall to a dragon, engravings speaking to you.

Then I passed to a new scene, and it seemed deeply familiar...that's when I realized that this was a translation of @VictorGijsbers De Baron!

I loaded up the beginning of that game to check. Some parts are distinctly different (like the ending of the first scene) but it's definitely the same game.

Afterwards I read the notes (this is just a preview so only has a scene or two), and it does say it is a re-writing of De Baron with different words. The 'author's note' is just Victor's ABOUT message translated, while the other note goes into the details mentioned above.

I definitely like the parser-hybrid system, especially since I can still type. The story of De Baron is one that I find uncomfortable (intentionally so!) so I'm not really looking forward to this being finished but I do like this system and think it'd see good use in many games (kind of reminiscent of Texture mixed with Inform).

This brief Twine game effectively uses every word to show just how every action of the player leads to unmistakable consequences. Without the need for flowery language, complex mechanisms, it sparks debate and discussion.

They say the mark of a good game is that it gets better over time, and I can say with all honesty that the first page was by the worst.

This is a short, heartfelt Twine game about a remote student who feels isolation while also being forced to eat slabs of meat every day due to being a wolf.

It's a nice blend of anxious mundanity and stressful metaphor that reminds me a lot of Early Twine.

The story itself is pretty simple, a daily routine of boredom and suffering mixed with longing and hope for something better one day.

The writing is where it shines; I loved the explanation of encapsulation and abstraction (which I constantly have to remind students about for IB exams, since they often forget what it means) and how it ties neatly into the other themes of the story. So I think that's by far the best part of the game, how expressively and neatly it's written.

I think this is the only Adventuron game in the competition. I always like Dee Cooke's games, but seeing how short it was made me wonder if it would be able to tell a complete or engaging story.

It ended up being funny, relatable, exasperating, and had quite a good chunk of writing in it.

It's pretty simple. You are trying to pull out of a supermarket by turning right (which for me in the US would be the equivalent of turning left). I saw a complicated map and thought I'd have to navigate complex commands, but it didn't turn out that way...

I won't say how the game ends but I was amused and honestly impressed by how many different scenarios the author could think of to cause problems with turning right. It reminds me of living in Philadelphia, where I felt like I had this kind of experience a lot. I'm glad I'm in Dallas now, where things are thankfully a lot better.

Very amusing, and I found no errors.

'She has been a solid and your friend for a long time.'

This is a solid opening for a game about your friend turning liquid in a fatal way.

This game has an utterly unique (to me) presentation, with a kind of game-boy looking feel and collapsible menus made with plus signs.

It's very short, and that shortness adds both urgency and futility to the game. What are you going to do in the precious time that you have?

This kind of game to me feels 'right', like someone's using interactive fiction in a way that it's always been meant to be used. This makes so much more sense as a text game than as a text (where the sense of unfinishedness would be absent) or as an illustrated game (I think the mind's eye is so evocative here).

This brief work was entered in the 2024 Neo-Twiny Jam.

It's a well-written and polished game about a spacecraft where survival is no longer really an option.

I found the writing dark and atmospheric, and the three possible endings all presented a real difference due to our agency.

However, I didn't feel like I had enough time for the impact of the weight of the story to take full effect in the brief time I encountered it.

In this game, made for Neo Twiny Jam and the Intentionally Bad IF jam, you play as what seems to be a woman obsessed with a man, with stream of consciousness thoughts flying around the screen as events progress to the breaking point.

The main innovation here (and I believe this was meant to be intentionally bad, given where the game was entered) is having the text and links be haphazard: some words tilted, others flickering, posting sentences out of order, links slowly fading in, etc.

The words are disjointed and hard to follow at times, which gives the effect of showing obsession.

My usual scoring system doesn't work too well here. On the one hand, the author has achieved his goals of being obtuse and intentionally bad, and has put a lot of work into it in a polished way. On the other hand, I believe others may not enjoy playing for the exact same reasons.

So, I will put a 2 here on the 'official' score, but a 4.5/5 for the author for the work put into this game.

A while ago I wrote on intfiction talking about a trend of games that followed a similar pattern:

"The text is usually a variant of ‘Oh yes, I am the bonecrusher, and I love crushing bones! The sound my victims make when they squeal is delightful’

and then choices are like:
-BREAK MORE BONES
-DELIGHT IN BONEBREAKING
-LICK THE MARROW"

People were questioning whether such games even exist, but this is another one in that category, almost exactly what's described above (down to being excited about removing body parts) even if (Spoiler - click to show)we find out some of it was an act later on.

The majority of the game is a person who livestreams vivisecting and torturing a criminal while describing how much they enjoy inflicting pain and hurting them. It has some illustrations, but they are very 'clean' and more like an anatomy book and not very realistic (thank heavens!)

This genre continues to be popular among those making games, so I assume it has an audience somewhere who loves it, and I hope they find this game. For me, I don't think I'll ever see the appeal.

The ending twist doesn't make much sense because (Spoiler - click to show)removing someone's liver is already a death sentence measured in hours, there's no reason someone capable of removing a liver and a stomach during a vivisection wouldn't know that. So why react so differently to murder when you've already murdered?

This story is the first in a series about a world where soldiers craft living weapons that take the appearance of humans.

In this story, a man and his male-looking weapon are travelling in a deep snowy region. They love each other, and are searching for something that even they don't know everything about.

The writing and worldbuilding were solid. This is part of the single choice jam, so it wasn't amazingly interactive, but my only choice felt real and led to some pretty different results.

I would definitely play more games in the series.