Reviews by MathBrush

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.

I really enjoyed Charm Cochrans previous game, and I was surprised at how different this was compared to that. That one was a religious-themed Twine game with good graphics and lush descriptions. This is a stripped-down parser maze.

It's well-implemented and runs smoothly. You are met at the beginning by a man who introduces himself to you and explains the maze. You then go through it.

While it seems hideously complex at first, the vast majority of the maze rooms have only one entrance and one exit. If mapping, it's only really necessary to write down the rooms with three exits, which are rare.

There are several layers of meaning in the game, from the base Inform implementation level (with little meaning in itself), to the maze itself, to the objects in the maze (like the lizard you can follow or string you can leave behind you), to the messages from Everyman and the LED tickers, to clear political statements that are plain and not symbolic (especially (Spoiler - click to show)the gravestones describing people who died from being denied an abortion for a non-viable pregnancy or who died without anyone using their real chosen name).

Overall, I enjoy surreal games and well-implemented games. I thought that a lot of the messages were delivered well, and if it is designed as a way to feel the frustration of being a marginalized person in a white male cishet-dominated world, I think it demonstrates it very well (also the frustration of caring about the climate or similar issues and getting a lot of promises that don't get acted on). But the main gameplay loop was not one that I enjoyed; a frustration simulator is still frustrating; a frustration parody is still frustrating; a metaphor for imprisonment through frustration is still frustrating.

But given that the game seems designed to incur those feelings, I can only conclude that the author has succeeded. Given that they've so far made an excellent Twine game and an very well-coded parser game, I can only expect that his next game will be brilliant.

This is a lavish Twine game that has you visit a town as an apprentice baker, set on making a cake for the town's Savings Day.

The real appeal of this game is the characters. You meet a variety of well-illustrated characters, each in a unique style that reminded me of Tim Burton or Ruby Gloom or the Haunted Mansion or even HxH's Palm. Each one has their own dark secrets to hide.

The game simultaneously has a lot of variety and very little. Every time, you must visit the same people to get the same things. But you do have a chance in how you treat them and what you discover. You even can choose from many endings, but all of the good endings have a lot of overlap.

There were some minor inconsistencies here and there (like the credits page softlocking the game by not offering a way out of it) that damped enjoyment, but this is one of my favorite games so far in terms of content, characters and art.

My dad use to run a video game company, and one idea he always had was to make an incredibly bloody and vicious fighting game with entrails and gore, etc. but with all characters made of chocolate, so that it would technically pass Nintendo rules.

He never got around to making it, but this game reminds me of that concept. It's a hardboiled detective story with candy version of murder, gore, hardcore pornography (alluded to only), a strip club, etc. All of it is bowdlerized through the candy medium.

The author of this game has made quite a few interesting and/or bizarre experimental Twine pieces (and one using an RPG making software, I think), so I associate him with creativity and innovation in a choice medium.

In this move to the parser medium, he's brought the creativity and the amusement. One thing I think is lacking though is dealing with 'bad' parser responses. Due to the parser medium allowing theoretically infinite possibilities, a large part of parser craft is nudging players gently (or not) towards commands that actually do something. So more custom parser responses, implementation of basically every noun in every description (or turning them into synonyms of other nouns), etc. This can often take up a huge part of programming time, but it also represents a huge part of player time, since often half or more of a player's commands will result in an error, as they try out whatever they think of in the moment.

That, coupled with some capitalization problems in room names, makes me feel like what this needs more than anything is some more time in the oven. I've found that the best way to get this part of the game nailed down is to have a bunch of testers send transcripts and then implement a response for everything they try (or redirect it to a pre-existing response).

Overall, a clever concept.

This is a well-written texture game about a young woman who is desperate because her sister is missing.

Starting with a true crime-like opening, the game soon pivots in another direction.

This is written using Texture, which is an engine where actions are dragged onto nouns. As far as was apparent to me, this story is mostly linear, with choices either expanding some dialogue or moving the story along. It is possible there is some branching but I didn't find evidence of it.

I enjoyed the story and the characters. I felt it ended a bit abruptly (I had a successful ending), and would have liked to see more variety in interaction.

I initially misinterpreted this game quite a bit. I found 2-3 bad endings early on and thought that was the whole game, and was pretty disappointed.

But it turns out it's actually a 'gauntlet' structure game, with multiple binary choices, one leading to death/failure, one leading to success.

If you find the right path, the game leads you through several different ghosts, each of which are very distinct from each other. The 'failure' text actually gives a lot of background you can't get from just succeeding; fortunately, the other coded in mini check points for these parts of the game.

I enjoyed this the most out of the texture games I tried during this competition. It had some interesting themes about grief and those who may or may not deserve it, as well as the fun cast of characters. It is polished and descriptive and has interesting interactivity, but I didn't feel a strong emotional connection for some reason or another. Worth checking out.

This was my former review:
This is a tiny game written in the Texture language, which involves dragging verbs onto nouns.

When I say tiny, I mean it's only 3 or 4 screens, with 1-3 possible actions per screen and a couple paragraphs per page.

Tiny isn't necessarily bad; I love the Twiny jam games, which had < 100 words each, and even made some of my own games inspired by them. But this game and story don't have any features that benefit from brevity, like branching or innovative twists.

What is here is entirely competent: nice artwork, interesting writing, some fun action design. It could be a fine story/game if expanded.