Reviews by MathBrush

I'm giving this very short Twine work a point for being well-polished (it runs smooth as a whistle) and 1 point for its smooth writing. What the author has so far works.

Unfortunately, as of Spring Thing, it is too short. You play a baby who is famous, and performs every night. Each day you can pick between one of four baby options (sleep, eat, poop, or pee). Then you hope to have a successful career. The furthest I got was four days.each day has only a few paragraphs of content.

The author references begscape by Porpentine, and these games share many similarities. I liked where the author was going with this.

My reaction may be colored by the author's apologetic blurb on Spring Thing's website. If it had been presented to me as a whole game, I may have given it another star.

This game has a nice choice of background and font. It is a mostly linear Twine game with a slow, deliberate pace. The text often appears on a slow timer, and the links that don't progress the story are generally reflective cycles. Both of these design choices force the reader to contemplate the game at a relaxed pace.

The story offered several surprises to me. I found it to be well-developed, a description of one woman's lifetime. Everything was understated and hinted at rather than pushed through.

My only issues with the game were that I felt that the placement of links and the available choices didn't make me feel involved in the story, and that the story could have been more descriptive. I only feel comfortable mentioning these flaws, though, because the rest of the game did such a good job.

This is a short superhero game written in Twine. Each screen has one to two choices about your actions as a superhero. Save many, or save one? Conserve strength or use your energy?

The game lasts about a dozen or twenty moves. The presentation is minimalist blue on black. The names of the villains made me laugh, but overall I feel the game could be fleshed out more.

This game has several interesting features. First, it is available in English or Spanish, which I found delightful. This was my first real experience in Spanish, although I only did 1 out of 5 'chapters' in Spanish.

The other most interesting feature is its dynamic text. The only thing I've seen like it is Plotkin's Matter of the Monster, but this game has more depth. You click on links to expand the text, but the expansion can occur at different locations from where you click, opening the beginning of the story, the middle, or the end. In later chalters, the mechanic opens up in unexpected and delightful ways.

Visually, I found the text color and background to be somewhat unaplealing, but it adds to the games character somewhat.

The story is about a couple that leaves a city in an unspecified setting (could be prehistoric, futuristic, magical, etc.). Together they must deal with their children and the new society they take part in.

This is a game that I was not impressed with at first. I found the writing to be a bit over the top and disjointed. My initial impression was not completely unfavorable, because the story was interesting and the game worked very well on mobile.

But as I pushed on to the end, the game took an unexpected turn which made me reevaluate my initial feelings. It made me chuckle. I played again for fun, trying to see how much branching there is (a medium amount, it turned out), and I thought I didnt like it as much the second time, but again, the ending made me chuckle.

If you try this one, make sure to finish it. Especially if you find it frustrating at first.

This game is generally about exploring in a submarine. You catalog new species you find, you can descend, ascend, or go left or right.

Perhaps the best thing about this game to me is the ability to make and execute plans. I had an idea from the beginning of what I wanted to do, and the game let me do it very well. You are constantly presented with choices to explore, to go deeper, to chase something, to return.

You have an air meter that goes down when you make choices. The beginning is more linear than the midge me and endgame.

I only played once, but it seems to be highly branching.

In this commercial game, you are trying to get around the world in 80 Days with Phineas Fogg. It is ostensibly based on the novel, although I haven't read it yet.

This game employs a beautiful map used to select various routes across the world, and has nice, mostly static visuals representing your conveyance, the city you're in, and various NPCs as well as the player and his luggage. However, this game is very much CYOA in beautiful packaging rather than just a text-heavy graphical game.

The usual pattern of the game is that you start each day in your current city with some funds and the chance to get more funds, buy some luggage, sell old luggage, or explore. You then pick a route to travel onto the next city, which may or may not require waiting a few hours or days for.

Each route can cost between a few dozen pounds to 7000 or more pounds. Faster routes generally cost more. Along each route, various events happen such as mutinies, romance, murders, etc. which you have to deal with. Your choices affect what city you are in, how fast you get there, NPC reactions, your amount of money, Phineas' health, and extremely poor choices can lead to death.

The setting is steampunk, a genre which I am on the fence about. Among steampunk games, the writing is very good. Some highlights for me were Haiti (Spoiler - click to show)with organic automata, Agra (Spoiler - click to show)A city that walks on four legs, with the Taj Mahal on top, and Salt Lake City, which provided my first glimpse at an interactive fiction treatment of Mormons, my religion. On their treatment of Mormons, I was pleased to see that they treated it fairly kindly, with any negative reactions being those typical of the day. This is typical of the whole game, in that it seems remarkably well-researched (although never perfectly) for its scope.

I found the game somewhat tedious at times, especially on multiple replays. I frequently found myself skipping filler text or repeatedly tapping on the clock. However, on playthroughs where I focused on exploration over time, I had an enjoyable experience.

Overall, I strongly recommend this game for anyone without a distaste for steampunk. I know several people who would love this game if it had a more realistic flavor. But the steampunk setting allows any historical inaccuracies to be waved away, and provides for some fun pictures, so it's a trade-off.

In this game, you play as an archaeologist through the eyes of their assistant, Aubrey. In the course of the game, you discover a journal, sending you to a first-person flashback, where you play the leader of the secret order of beet mongers.

The game is wacky and fun. The beginning somehow reminded me of Michael Robert's Ditch Day Drifter opening, which is one of my favorites.

The beet monger part has two paths: war and peace. The war part was relatively easy, and I played to both of its endings. The peace ending seemed more difficult.

Overall, recommended for fans of dry, quirky humor.

In this game, you play a young person who wants to be friends with the town's cool kid and his friends. However, to play his game, you need dice. Five dice. As you go on a search for them, things begin to get weird.

This game incorporates a number of concepts in geometry and topology, such as the Klein bottle (a surface with no inside or outside, which also was featured in Trinity); platonic solids (the five solid shapes which are as symmetric as possible); duality (where vertices and faces of a shape are swapped); Hamiltonian circuits (where you walk through every vertex of a graph without repetition); connected sums (which amounts to wormholes in physics); and a few other references such as the equations for quaternions.

A lot of this amounts to an extended in-joke, but otherwise the game is fairly well put-together. I feel that it would have benefited from some more explanations, such as an in-game textbook.

This game is one of the most well-regarded Twine games available, as demonstrated by its listing on the IFDB Top 100 as of 2016.

In this game, you play as a chancellor of a university, brother to a Duke. The setting is not historical England, though there are similarities.

The game is serious, and focuses on your relationship with your brother. You remember your past, learn about his present activities, and make choices about your future.

It's very interesting as a study in relationships, and also as a medieval-esque game.