Reviews by MathBrush

This is an amusing/frightening story written for the French Ectocomp competition in 4 hours or less.

It's an Ink game where you go trick or treating, and I actually found it more fun on replays to see where the 'tricks' are. You have to get a costume, meet up with friends, and choose what order to visit different houses. It's fairly short and simple, but has some strong characterization.

The writing is, as far as I can tell as a non-native speaker, slightly child-like, with run-on sentences and a carefree attitude.

I played three times, because each time I reached what I'd consider a bad ending. I think a good ending exists, but I haven't been able to find it; if anyone gets there, let me know how!

This is the last of the Texture games in this IFComp 2022 competition, of which there were quite a few.

This one is fairly long and well-developed. The world is ending: the sun hangs still over the horizon and has for days, while a storm is sweeping behind you and other strange happenings are occurring.

In my playthrough, I encountered a haven in the storm which seemed to have sinister undertones. The game ended on a positive note.

Most or all of these Texture games were written in a workshop, and they generally seem to all have some supernatural manifestation of an inward emotional issue that has to be worked through, like the ending of a relationship. I think this one handles that 'prompt' (if there was one) really well. I would give 4 stars except I didn't, for some reason or another, really connect with the emotional aspect personally, just admiring it from afar.

I had heard rumors about this game before I played it.

This is one of many Texture games entered in this competition, and it's probably the best-put-together one out of the bunch.

It's a visceral body-horror game in a limited sense; you have blood leaking out of your nose while at work but you feel desperately like you can't pay attention to it or fix to it or you'll be letting everyone down.

I'm sure there are many interpretations of this, but I definitely feel like it touches on social anxiety/impostor syndrome (actually, looking back, one of the content warnings is social anxiety).

The visceral text is accompanied by excellent animations that make the spreading drip of the nose bleed a lot more real. I had some trouble, though, with a completely black screen, taking a long time to find the right way out.

This game grossed me out and I didn't enjoy playing it, but I think that speaks to its quality.

This is a Twine game that has a brief intro followed by a large open segment where you can choose between 30 or 40 houses to knock on, each with their own mini-story.

You work for a community organization group and your goal is to collect a certain amount of subscriptions before the night is over. You have to monitor both the funds, your bathroom needs, and your body warmth. Each action takes some time to complete.

Out of all the 'simulator' games this year in IFComp, this one works pretty well mechanically, with clearly understandable variables and some ability to strategize how to use your time.

Storywise, I could partially identify with it. I spent 2 years as a missionary, and quite a bit of our daily time was spent knocking on doors, handing out fliers on street corners, or doing service work like English teaching or soup kitchen volunteering. I guess the difference is that I wasn't looking for money donations, but trying to share a religious message. I would say that the results in this game are much more positive than the ones I experienced on average!

It was well known even then that door-to-door is one of the lowest-productivity ways of making contacts. Referrals were much more effective, since you could find people who were already interested instead of bothering people who don't care. Door-to-door knocking for anything can be extremely wearing.

I'd be interested to see how community organizing plays out in real life. It almost sounds like a HOA in this game (give us money and we'll make decisions for the neighborhood). It's interesting seeing different problems people care about in the game and how the protagonist evaluates their importance.

This game has a brief intro about the history of Witches in Scotland, and then lets you wander around several areas with an inventory of items, taking on different quests and trying to help people while avoiding suspicion of being a witch.

This sounds like a great setup, but all of its a bit thin. Inventory doesn't really get used much, maybe once or twice. I looked around a bunch but only found one of the quests that I could finish. (I looked at the code and see I should be able to finish the other, and other reviews seem to have managed it!) There are some spelling problems (the author says it's not their native language, which is very understandable). After a while, my game just ended the day; I think it might be on a timer? And it assigned me some points.

So, overall, some good ideas, but it felt like it could be more fleshed out, I think. It had a lot of clever concepts that just didn't feel like they got fully used, to me.

I really am not sure how to review this one, because sometimes I think it's excellent and sometimes I think it's a bit choppy.

This is an adaptation of the book The Thirty-Nine Steps. I haven't read it myself, but from Wikipedia it looks pretty cool, about a man on the run who is hunted down everywhere he goes.

This adaptation adds a good deal of additional content, and allows you to focus on being Bold, Open, or Clever. Interestingly, the choices not only increase your ability in that area, but they also affect the way you see the world about you, making you more paranoid or clueless, etc.

The game gives you a lot of freedom, but I feel like, due to that freedom, I missed a few essential plot points, such as never really learning about the people I'm pursuing. A couple of other things I feel like are confusing without context (late game spoilers:(Spoiler - click to show)I pushed a fireplace rod and a bunch of steps disappeared in a cloud of chalk. Why? What's the purpose of such a mechanism?).

So I'm wavering between 3 and 4, but I'll round up to 4.

I've avoided playing chess most of my adult life. so I never learned about famous endgame positions and puzzles.

I've learned a few recently through Schultz's work. He has several chess-based puzzle games that teach principles of few-piece chess positions, including a few mini-puzzles that teach a single position.

This one involves a setup where each side has the king and 1 pawn each.

I found it enjoyable, and liked the backstory. But I spent a long time on it due to encountering a bug in scenario 2, which I forwarded to the author; essentially there is an unintended solution to that scenario, so I couldn't figure out if my unintended solution was blocking the 'real' one of if I could still solve it. I looked at the walkthrough and found one line that more or less gave away the second solution, to both puzzles in fact (the line was that (Spoiler - click to show)the king can only focus on one pawn at a time). If that bug were patched, I would definitely put 4 stars for the rating.

As a side note, I think this game struck a good balance between 'let the player keep playing in a losing position to see why it's losing' and 'cut them off right after the first mistake'. One quality of life change I would like to see is a more dramatic heralding of completing one of the scenarios. Right now, it is very similar in appearance to losing, so if one is repeatedly replaying quickly to try different strategies (especially since there's no undo), the text can blur together, so some kind of major break (like bold, or a line of asterisks, or some other signifier) can be nice. The counter in the corner does go up, and that's the main way I noticed the scenario number increase.

Overall, it's been fun to learn more about chess through these puzzles.

This is another surreal Twine game based on exploration (after just having played Lucid), but I'm happy with that since it's one of my favorite genres.

This game is built out of a bunch of literary references, starting with Neuromancer (which I've never read), and branching into Kafka, Alice in Wonderland, etc. Most of them are oblique references, ones you have to puzzle over or which potentially could describe several stories (at least for me).

The tone is fairly dark, beginning with unwanted surgery and poisoning and including a lot of theft.

The game is somewhat narrow; at first I thought there'd be tons of options or strategy but the game funnels you pretty effectively. I can say there are several options that are hard to discover and the endings can take work, so that's actually pretty good, now that I think about it. Maybe the funneling is actually a good thing, since with Lucid I had the opposite problem of too many choices.

Overall, it was pretty fun to try to puzzle out the literary references. 'Diary of Anne Frank' is a bit of a bold choice to have alongside more goofy or wild entries. But I had a good time with this. The main drawback to me was the lack of weight in the endings; to me, the endings were abrupt and didn't resolve many narrative arcs (I saw 3 endings, including a death).

This game definitely seems like a good contender for the Best Use of Multimedia XYZZY award specifically for its map 'feelie' attached to it, which is a complex map that folds and unfolds multiple times.

That map is an essential part of the game, since it marks the main treasure or objects you're looking for.

Those objects are Golden Snitches. The idea of this game is that the programmer made a real-life treasure hunt for his daughter, hiding four golden snitches in the house and creating a map that reimagined their house as various locations from the Harry Potter series.

The game itself is sparse in comparison to the lush map. Your father, Papa, follows you around, serving as a hint system, and rooms he doesn't enter are unimportant, as he feels no need to give you clues in them.

I was struck while playing with the casual, unaffected display of wealth. I've been both moderately wealthy and moderately poor in life; in my youth, my father was a video game executive and supported 7 kids in a large house with a big backyard. But his business went under, and years later after my divorce I've experienced food scarcity and can't afford a reliable vacuum or a washing machine. With that background, this house seems quite magical, with a balcony over a grand hall, a spacious backyard with water features, multiple secret passages and hidden rooms, and multiple rooms for the child, including their own bathroom. It feels like reading British books like Middlemarch (which I've been doing), seeing the life of the upper middle class or lesser aristocracy.

The game itself is charming and full of love. The two areas that I think are drawbacks are the sparseness of the room descriptions and the lack of implementation of several objects mentioned. For instance, when I first encountered the bookshelf, I couldn't X BOOKS.

As a final note, the Harry Potter themes are heavily prevalent, as a heads up for people that have strong feelings towards JK Rowling.

This is the second 'stateful narration' game I've played.

These games have an engine where you type something in a box (the game requires it to be in its internal dictionary) and then it parsers that output.

I learned how it worked when I decided to just give in and type clear words like 'happy' and 'sad'. The game seemed to understand those, as well as 'despondent'. Given a couple of similar projects I've seen recently, I suspect that what's underneath the hood is 'sentiment analysis', where there is a database of dictionary words with a score associated to them about how positive and negative they are. Or not; I could be completely wrong. But that's what it feels like.

Like the other games, this has a classic short story inserted uncut and unchanged with a framing story around it.

The framing story has some interesting elements, but I found it hard to find a narrative thread or two outside of mimicking the lottery element of the Chekhov story. It's possible the main purpose of the sauce story is just to provide several opportunities for the stateful interaction that is mostly about reacting positively or negatively to something.

Fun fact: the image used in the cover art is from a picture of a baby lottery held in early 1900's Paris and featured in Popular Mechanics. Pretty wild!

For my rubric, I find this game both polished and descriptive, but the interactivity could use a little more pushback on words with neutral sentiment; my main emotional impact was from the Chekhov story rather than the surrounding material; and there's not a lot of replayability here.

Edit: Now that I've learned more about how the analysis works, I've increased my score from what it was before.