Reviews by MathBrush

I was browsing through games published this year without reviews, seeing if I missed any good games.

I saw an Andrew Schultz game with no reviews, which is surprising because of his well-known style and positive general audience reception of his games.

It seems this was an April Fools game in the style of the old IF Arcade pack, which had some very funny games and some very traumatic/horrifying games.

This is an optimization puzzle game where you have to change the colors of a board that is an isometric triangle of cubes, but presented in text form. Your goal is to change the color of every square on the board.

It's a fun challenge, and I appreciate that the game doesn't punish brute-forcing things. I found some fairly simple solutions, but they took a ton of turns, so getting faster would be hard.

Overall, it was polished, pretty descriptive, I had fun and liked the interactivity. This is a small and simple game, but I'm giving 4 stars because it achieves what it sets out to do in a smooth and forgiving way.

This is a branching stats-based Twine game that is fairly brief, split up into 4 or 5 segments that each last an in-game week.

You are a young woman from an upper-middle class family who has recently discovered she is a werewolf. You must learn how to deal with that while simultaneously maintaining your lifestyle.

The presentation is well-done, with good font and color choices and cleverly-named stats (like ILL vs VIM and GAL vs FUR). I didn't like the typewriter/slow effect, but hitting any key skips it so it wasn't a factor.

Overall, the things I most wanted more of was more satisfying endings and maybe a little longer game. I had one ending that was just a stat getting to 0, but another one seems like I got to the end but didn't really wrap up anything (Spoiler - click to show)I ate my date at the ball. I liked the writing.

This is a speed-IF written in 4 hours or less. It's written using Dendry.

Basically, you're at a party and need to assemble a party of fighters to take on a coming entity. You have both telepathy and future-telling abilities. You can use your telepathy to talk to others and know what type of arguments will convince them most.

There's still some puzzle elements, despite the mind-reading, as you have to figure out how best to implement what you learn. I always liked Divination specialists in D&D and this game seems to show exactly why being skilled in information gathering would be an excellent power.

This story is brief, but has easter eggs from the author's other works, including A Paradox Between Worlds (referenced in on friends' costume and favorite book series), and The Archivist and the Revolution, referenced in encoding data in DNA.

This is a surprisingly polished game for 4 hours (I've said that a lot this comp, I wonder if this shows that I don't use my time as wisely as others do).

You have a job interview coming up, but you also have a massive zit! It's described in excruciating detail. You're in a bathroom with a little but a few things in the drawers and your cell-phone.

To me, the real appeal of the game is in the insight into your loved ones. Each one you call has a different reaction, some of them showing off a poor moral character, others a sweet or charming one.

The other big component is dealing with the zit itself. I had some trouble near the end with the game saying I hadn't done something when I had already done it, but it fixed itself pretty soon. Overall, a strong entry.

This is a pretty surreal Adventuron game with images and a little music about confronting a giant Zombie eye in the London Underground. It involves a lot of sensory details, including sound and touch, in ways I found pretty poetic.

Dee Cooke is perhaps the adventuron author I know best, having made several excellent games before and winning or placing high in a lot of comps. I was surprised when this game was so small, then impressed when I realized it was in the 'made in 4 hours' division instead of the 'longer than 4 hours' division it seemed like it was in. This is pretty great for a speed-IF, with conversation, a reactive NPC, and graphics and sound.

Overall, it's a nice little treat with good atmosphere and some perspective shifts.

This is a charmingly complex game for one written in less than 4 hours for a speed-IF.

You are essentially a protagonist in a gothic novel, writing to your sister about your husband whose previous 6 wives have mysteriously disappeared. You can choose several different versions of each letter you write to communicate different tones, leading to different endings.

This rewriting mechanic is reminiscent of Emily Short's First Draft of the Revolution, another letter-writing game that involved cycling through different options; in fact, that game inspired the cycling mechanic in Twine!

The mechanic here hovers between too simple and too obscure but lands, I think, in a happy medium. The writing is a pleasure as always from this author, with many references to well-known tales (and some less well-known; I was glad to see Ann Radcliffe mentioned, as Mysteries of Udolpho is one of the few gothic novels I've read). Very neat overall, especially for such a short time-period for game writing.

This gave me a chuckle, especially as a high school teacher. The game consists of two parts: a 1000-line text manual and a 35-question multiple choice test.

The game encourages you to do exactly what most students do when studying: start the assignment first and only look up answers as you go along.

The text is dry, an imitation of standard technical writing, but sprinkled with a variety of frightening or hilarious spooky situations, like scissor lifts made of solid flesh or horrifying accidents brought on by improper rituals.

Overall, there's a lot of effort here and the extra flavor is good. But a simulation or parody of a boring thing is often, itself, boring, and while there's a huge effort here to alleviate that, it doesn't fully succeed. As an idea, though, the whole setup is very clever.

This game, written in Ink in 4 hours or less, has you, apparently a psychologist, interviewing a cold, emotionless killer.

You have to ask about his life, his actions, and his dreams. He is emotionally unstable, so you have to be careful what you say. Your comments can make him shut up or open up.

The game uses a variety of charged language and imagery, including strong profanity, descriptions of violence, incest, misogyny, and violent death, and strong hatred.

It's all very grimdark. This man is irredeemably bad, and seems to hate himself or everyone around him.

It has some interesting narrative twists and the craftmanship in the choice structure really spoke to me. But the content did make me feel deeply uncomfortable, which is a subjective thing that of course differs from reader to reader.

I had a lot of fun with this game. Modeled on Untitled Goose Game, your goal is to cause trouble. Specifically, you have 6 hours before the new owner of your house arrives, and you have to make the house as scary as possible before then.

It's a cost/benefit analysis thing that requires trial and error: some actions take a ton of time but provide little benefit, others are short but trivial, some are heavy hitters. It requires some replay, but fortunately the choices are really funny and the text is enjoyable to read.

This was made in 4 hours, so it doesn't have huge depth, but it felt complete as a game. According to my rubric:

+Polish: I didn't see any errors, and the human-voice sound effects were really funny.
+Descriptive: The game had fun descriptions of everything.
+Interactivity: I felt like I could strategize and that the game was both responsive and not too easy.
+Emotional impact: it was funny to me.
+Would I play again? I played through three times.

This is a Twine game where you have three dreams in order, over and over again, about dying.

Each dream is fairly brief, with 2-3 or 4 choices per dream. There are a lot of options, though, so it's hard to know what to do to be safe.

Fortunately, if you explore each dream enough, you find hints about the other dreams. Phrases that don't make sense at the time but later you look at options and go, 'Oh, I get it now!'.

Even after playing a couple of times, I didn't always understand why some things happened (like why the kitchen just kind of disappears or what triggers the ending for the final dream).

The writing is on-point and covers some frightening situations. I didn't feel sucked in emotionally, maybe because I was focused on the puzzle-aspects and felt safe as it was all a dream. But it was very descriptive.

Excellent work for a 4-hour game, and a neat way to do choice-based puzzles.