Reviews by MathBrush

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.

This Neo Twiny Jam game explicitly describes alcohol as a monster that haunts you, your father and his father before him.

The jam conditions require this to fit into 500 words or less, and it does this in part by having choices that more reflect your personal feeling rather than branching the story, and that works well.

The portrayal of alcohol as a monster is a good concept but I feel like this doesn't really add anything to that idea that hasn't been done before. The monster exists, whispers darkly to you, is resisted by love. I think old ideas can work very well without needing to switch them up, but it works best if there is a strong underlying story to graft on to rather than existing alone.

This is a Neo Twiny Jam game, written in 500 words or less.

In it, you take the role of one of two primordial powers, meeting endlessly to discuss your opposing roles. It's also a love story.

In a cycle that never ends, what is the point? Do you succumb to despair, or try to change?

I was a bit lost in the first couple of paragraphs, and re-read them 3 times to try to focus, but after that it all clicked and was enjoyable to read.

This game was written as part of the Neo Twiny Jam, written in 500 words or less.

It's a poem, and it's well-crafted, both in its words and meaning, but also in its design; I enjoyed one segment where each line was just a bit longer than those before, forming a pyramid.

It's about a couple drifting apart. One person, the narrator, is always trying, always eager to please, while the other always seems to drift away, no matter how much the narrator tries.

I found this game especially meaningful as something similar to the narrator happened to me during my divorce. I had mentioned (Spoiler - click to show)that we would be having our 10 year anniversary soon and my ex realized that she had spent almost (Spoiler - click to show)a decade of life together, and it was frightening. We ended up being divorced at (Spoiler - click to show)8 and a half.

This is a pretty solid representation of the myth of Icarus. You play as the fated child, ready for your first flight, but with a mocking crow observing you.

This game is written for the Neo Twiny Jam, with <500 words, so there's not a ton of story, but the author manages to make it feel both long and meaningful by having series of pages with many links of which you can only click one. There's no going back, contributing to the feel of falling.

The contrast between the main text and the 'inevitable' text felt a bit off to me in a way that's hard to express. But I liked the overall effect of this and enjoyed the mythology references.

This game is an essay in an expendable format, written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

It's an edgy tale, with theme of black, red and white and displayed over a background of what looks like abstract art of muscle cells.

It is one static paragraph with numerous links that expand into their own page, giving it the feel of a children's book with little openable paper windows giving more details. I like this technique and would enjoy seeing i more for short works.

It's about self-harm, and a very different take than Gavin Inglis's game Hana Feels, which was an educational game designed to inspire sympathy. This game explicitly rejects sympathy; to the author, self-harm varies between amusing and matter of fact. It's not meant to be something sad.

The game has a very focused narrative and tone. The narrator wants zero credit or sympathy for both self-harming and stopping self-harming, so in accord with their wish, I will afford them none, but for other readers in similar situations, I do have sympathy for you.

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

This is just a big text dump; two choices, both leading to a solid wall-of-text paragraph.

The story is disjointed, about a dream about a skinned dilophasaurus. This is the second game by the author I read, and I far prefer the other one. This one just doesn't have enough substance to support itself.