Reviews by MathBrush

This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam, with 500 words or less.

It's a take on the short story A Diamond Necklace, which I only learned from Manon's review.

In it, an older student takes you in and gives you a great deal of advice (you can get 20 or more pieces of advice, it feels like). Then you meet them again later, much later, and have the chance to thank them...

The language and wording are unusual. Many of Andrew Schult'z games are based on wordplay and are intentionally written in weird ways to satisfy word patterns. This one sounds a lot like those texts but I don't see any discernible pattern, outside of some 1984 speech.

Reading the short story it's based on helped me understand it a lot more!

This was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

Abandoned/liminal/nostalgic media has been oversaturated this decade, but this game nails it pretty well and feels fresh. It uses creepy audio to establish the feeling, and it hits the right ratio of wholesome to unsettling that makes for a truly good horror piece.

Short and sweet. Interactivity is slight but used to good effect.

This game was written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam.

In a refreshing twist from the primarily (though not entirely) English games of the jam, this game is bilingual, with some Romanian first translated literally and then idiomatically (I assume that's what's going on; if not, it has the feel of that).

The first page had me captivated for a bit, puzzling over the different meanings and words and trying to understand the final message.

Then it was all soon over; another page, and then an ending. I definitely wanted more of it, but it seemed creepy, mysterious, and effective.

This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam using 500 words or less.

Someone logs onto a group chat and demands an explanation about a solar panel. It could just be a friendly group of people with nearby cabins, or a post-apocalyptic group, or just some rural people. It's hard to tell.

It's pretty funny though. There's some mild swearing, but overall I laughed out loud multiple times at this, and I haven't done that at a game for quite a while.

This game is written for the Neo Twiny Jam, requiring 500 words or less. And it uses the Choicescript engine, which is a bold choice, as choicescript is suited towards very verbose games (there are several choicescript games with over a million words of text!).

However, this uses its text wisely, with a longish loop. The words in the game evoke desperate waiting and loneliness for another. The patient lover, the waiter, who is faithful and won't abandon their love. But when the loop ends...

The tone varies a bit, seeming almost modern at first, then heavily antiquated, then more like 1800s speech. Each style is well done, but perhaps could be consolidated into one? Overall strong writing.

This game, written for the Neo Twiny Game Jam, which requires 500 words or less, rubbed me the wrong way at first, with some capitalization errors and using default Twine format.

But I honestly like loops, and I enjoyed the earnestness of this one. I loved clicking on these burning questions like 'Who did this?' and immediately getting an effects-heavy response like (Spoiler - click to show)ME, THE CREATOR. It was honestly fun. The loop had a few interesting variations, as well.

This short game, entered in the Neo Twiny Jam, serves as a brief introduction to a greater story.

It has an interesting mix; a dangerous location, a mysterious facility, weird beetles, and a connection with someone you're desperate to find.

All of these blend together well, and the setup looks nice. If it were to continue, I could imagine it being a powerful story. As it is, in < 500 words, it only manages to give the beginning of the prologue.

This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam, where entries need to have 500 words or less.

This game is about cannibalistic love. Or hate, you get to choose. You and another, someone who was close to you, or dying on an icy plain. They go first, with leaves you with one option:

to eat.

The game's tone varies from darkly morbid to the chant of 'hungry hungry hungry', and one path provide more effective psychological moments at the end than the other.

This game has you allocate 100 units of something into 6 different boxes, then makes a poem based on it.

It's a small game (written for the Neo Twiny Jam, which requires 500 words or less). But it just doesn't make much sense; after making a poem, which is you extracting sense from the universe, it 'extracts sense from you' and gives you a number.

Nothing really changes from this.

Well, I wanted to 'extract some meaning' from this, so I downloaded the zip file and looked through it.

Under the hood, it's doing some fun information theory type stuff. Really convoluted things like taking the average of all your past choices and looking at 2-log of the ratios of the differences of you etc. etc. etc. to represent the information the universe gets from your thing.

None of this comes across in the game. Complexity that players never see is the exact some as simple code that the player never sees. The experience is everything!

This game is written for the Neo Twiny Jam, made for games written in 500 words or less.

It presents the story of someone who always felt like a boy, even though his mother felt otherwise. It presents a general feeling of malaise, before transition, a feeling that you could never be yourself, and the difficulties of living with unsupportive people.

This story is well-written and has some nice effects. There aren't too many choices, and then suddenly...the game ends very abruptly. It makes sense, and I think the whole game was designed around this moment, but it was intriguing enough that I think more could have been better.