Reviews by MathBrush

This is a game written in Squiffy, which is based on the engine that Quest uses but is choice-based.

You play as someone who walked away from a relationship and is going cross country on late-night/early-morning busses.

It does a good feel of evoking that wistful travel feeling when you've left something behind and are passing by other people's lives, people you'll never see again but feel important in the moment.

Unfortunately, there is one passage that contains no links to any other passages (in a section on a movie), and this makes the game no longer possible to play. It's possible to fix this by opening the game up in a text editor and adding a link to the next passage. I didn't do so, but read ahead.

Overall, thoughtful and musing. I wish there were a way to tell which links were exploratory and which links moved the story forward.

This is a Twine game with few options, more of a kinetic fiction than a game per se. It's also one of the most effective uses of such a structure I've read (another effective one I could recommend is Polish the Glass).

The story is about the Bladesmith family, a twister group of individuals that read like villains from An Unfortunate Series of Events if it was aimed at a slightly older demographic. Abuse, fraud, deceit and murder follow the family and everyone in it.

It includes amusingly absurd elements (like the multitude of Mildreds) and provocatively vulgar elements (like the opening scene of a man smearing faeces on the glass).

Overall, here's my assessment:
+Polish: The game feels quite smooth overall. There were at least two typos (squeeking vs squeaking and some other typo near the end), but they were minor in the grand scheme of things.
+Descriptiveness: Very vivid and detailed writing.
+Interactivity: While mostly linear, the story does allow little sidebars and choice of navigation that lent interest to the story.
+Emotional impact: I found it both amusing and morbid.
-Would I play again? While I found it very well-done, it has a edge to it that's not my personal preference. I only enjoy darkness in media if it sets off an inner light.

This game requires you to create an account with an email and name and to accept cookies, which felt like a lot. I used a burner email and fake other things.

The idea is that you are a young man named George who is the son of a blacksmith and knows the royal family. Every year, a young maiden gets sacrificed to a dragon, but this year, you hope to help stop that.

Here's my overall rating:

+Polish: The images look a bit strange, like the princess wearing some kind of autumnal leaf pajamas. Otherwise, I didn't run into errors.
-Descriptiveness: A lot of details are just skimmed over or assumed. Plot twists happen in quick succession without a lot of forewarning or explanation.
-Interactivity: It was a bit confusing figuring out what to do, or what did what. At one point you're given a ton of gold, but then it doesn't really come up again. I grabbed a fire crystal, but it said I needed a sword; later I was given a sword, but it never came up whether I used the crystal. Exploring a royal camp ended up showing me part of a villain's base, but it just seemed out of nowhere.
-Emotional impact: I had difficulty becoming emotionally invested in the story.
+Would I play again? I'd probably like to see other endings.

To be fair to the author, a significant amount of work went into this game. I may have been prejudiced from the start, as I enjoy the quick, anonymous, pick-up-and-put-down nature of more text IF, so having a full-screen graphics-based game with mandatory account creation likely put me off from the actual content.

This game is an interesting experiment in involving real-time in text games.

Basically, there are several storylines going one in different motel rooms as well as outside. You have peepholes into 5 motel rooms. Every minute or so of real time, a counter updates the in-game time and you see new things in the different rooms. Occasionally, you can affect things by being in the right place at the right time (the vast majority of these being deaths).

It's an interesting concept, but it was hard to puzzle out in-game, and I only heard it from others and saw it in the code. Without knowing how it works, the game seems oddly repetitive as you see the same scenes over and over, since they don't change until the next 'tick'.

The writing and plot is similar to B-movies, with some strong profanity, a voyeuristic but not explicit sex scene, and violence. Plots are mostly tributes to classic horror movies, although at least one seems non-magical.

Overall, I'm not sure this timed method worked for me, but I'm glad someone did it so I could see how it works. A couple of the stories were effectively creepy for me.

This is an intricate Dendry game where you spend New Year's Eve at a party with your parents, friends and acquaintances. You've burned a lot of bridges in the past, and it's all coming back to get you know.

I was surprised at the end to see that Depression Quest was not on the list of inspirations, as it has a lot of similarity with this game. Options that are selected are denied due to your bad feelings, or greyed out in the first place. Things you'd like to say can't be said, etc.

The New Year's Eve setting provides a good backdrop for the time limit, which is until 12:00. Just like a real party, it first feels like there's too much to do and then too little. This game directly reminded me of all the reasons I don't enjoy big parties with people outside my own family, especially parties where romance is possible but unlikely.

Romance is a theme in the game, but not in a positive way; there are numerous former crushes running around. Edit: (there actually are some positive romantic elements, but I found more negative options due to my choices)

The game has excellent attention to detail, especially in Chinese-heritage culture. Characters are provided, usually with translation, and the game describes food, drinks, Mah Jong, etc., together with westernized/globalized additions like Marvel movies and pumpkin pie.

Overall, this is a strong game. I appreciated its meta-commentary at one point about how it feels like interaction with human beings is an optimization puzzle, and I've felt like that before. The only thing for me that I didn't click with was the waiting around aimlessly that happened a little more than I would have preferred. Perhaps it was due to my own actions, though.

I played this as part of the Seattle IF meetup, and then played on my own later.

There is a long tradition in IF of space games where you start alone in or near a damaged space station and have to make it out alive or at least figure out what's happened. It's a genre I enjoy.

This one goes out of its way to focus on realistic aspects, something I haven't seen much before. A lot of images directly from NASA are used, as well as a variety of free images online that have been modified, with accompanying music.

Using airlocks requires a variety of processes, including exercising! Hadn't known that was a thing with pressure changes before.

I ran into a couple of issues with lists not lining up (numbers and text was mismatched) but I think that might just be my Chrome browser, as the same thing happened with a website my son was working on, so I don't think it's the author's fault.

The only thing I felt really lacking here was emotional engagement. The processes were interesting and clinical, and there were definitely places I could have hooked in emotionally (a picture of family, the loss of Commander Rico), but for whatever reason I just didn't feel that connection. Overall, well done scientific space adventure.

This game/narrative is one that references the IF world directly, something I'm always interested to see. I've played Bez's games since 2015 and been listening a lot on Twitter, so I was interested to see how things coalesce.

The result is a complex narrative similar in structure to last year's The Dead Account, but with very different content. Both games put you in the role of a moderator closing down the account of someone who's passed on, a kind of in-memoriam/Citizen Kane/Spoon River anthology review of someone's life and whether they are of worth.

What makes this game unusual is in its complex rewriting of reality and the IF world. It's a difficult feat to call out an entire community without calling out the individual people in it; to do so, Bez has created an entire false community replete with echoes of shadows of real people but which is so entirely different as to render it impossible to point fingers. This is a real feat; I feel like I've been embedded in the community under question here and played a role in many of these events but I couldn't point a finger at any person and say 'I know who that is!

For instance, the Jot Archive Volunteer Project is strongly reminiscent of both IFDB, the intfiction forums, twitter, and the old rec.arts.int-fiction forums and IFMUD. MrDear makes me thing of Ryan Veeder, Mr Patient/Sean Shore, Graham Nelson, etc.

The content of the game is several years worth of tweets or posts, describing a journey through games that is clearly (even mentioned as such in the author's note) Bez's own journey through the IF world, even if it doesn't always meet up one to one. Sometimes, the parallels are obvious (Bez's Queer in Public vs Algie's "Queer As F*** Because F*** You"), and other times its harder (there doesn't seem a clear parallel to the real 2020's Lore Distance Relationship, Bez's most popular game).

Points made about the community include:
-Twine is often overshadowed in big competitions by parser; even though there are clear outliers it remains the reality for most entrants
-Cis white males often have more success in IF with what seems to be less effort
-Due to the prominent position of some women in IF (which I'd assume would refer to both cis women like Emily Short and trans women like Porpentine), the marginalization of most people who aren't white cis men goes unnoticed

It's hard to disagree with those points.

Beyond that, there's some excellent quotes about writing games in general which I copied down:

"Making games is about giving somebody a hidey-hole to see my heart through if that makes sense? And nobody seems to really care about that imho."

I've often thought that IF and writing in general is a way of sharing a piece of your soul with someone. So I agree with that. But then he presents a new thought which hadn't occurred to me:

"But it is also only the version of me that was preserved at that time. AND does not mean you 100% know me or what I’m thinking. Unless I say it is all me in there, don’t assume that ffs."

I've never really thought about how media takes a snapshot of our current selves and saves it for the future, whether we want it to or not. I think that explains a lot of older authors wanting to remove things they wrote in the past that were objectionable or cringe.

And this is the last thing I copied down:
"I feel like my need for external approval is an ouroboros that will never EVER be fulfilled. Either I seek it and don't get it (often) or I seek it and do get the level I wanted (rare) but it ain't enough. My goal is so far away, and it keeps moving, so maybe I gotta lower my damn expectations—towards myself and in the IF world."

The end of the game concludes with Bez's current reality and deepest fears brought together to their possible end: the death of an author after a forgetting mind disease, followed by a second death when the community forgets him.

As a side note, I found it emotionally jarring when the game started with you helping an older IF figure to prune and delete people's old stuff, because that's what I'm actually doing in real life right now, working on a project where I close out people's old stuff that's no longer relevant. Fortunately, it's just bug reports, so no one's hard work or creative labor is being lost.

Assigning a rating to a game like this is behaving exactly like the narrative actors it contains, who judge and rank and sort and gatekeep. However, I am going to do so anyway:
+Polish: The game is thoroughly polished
+Descriptiveness: The writing is vivid and detailed.
+Emotional impact: clearly the game resonated with me
+Would I play again? I think so.
?Interacivity: On one hand, there's not much to do besides run through the list of things and then make a decision. On the other hand, the game itself talks about how stories don't have to be approached as systems first and stories later. On the other hand, I don't think I should give a high rating in a category just because the game calls it out. On the final hand, though, I wanted to rethink my decision at the end and spent a while reloading the page because there was no immediate reload, so it seems clear the interactivity worked for me at some level.

This was a game of big contrasts for me. There were parts of it that were phenomenal and parts I struggled with.

This is a story about a young girl alone at home whose father is outside, texting her to let him in. The problem is, though, that her father was in the study just a little while ago.

I loved the writing in this. Vivid and surreal images mixed together for a very creepy feel. It reminded me of some goosebumps stories when I was younger, like the one where the dad was a plant scientist.

I love horror and find this writing style to be very enjoyable, so I'd definitely like to see more games from this author.

This fantasy twine game is modeled on Shakespeare's language and style of writing, and deals with bandits in search of a temple with a hidden treasure.

The story has some fascinating elements of time travel and Pictish culture, of which I learned many new things (one I didn't fully learn was the other name for Picts, and so I haven't used it here as I've forgot it).

There are some interesting mechanics, such as a variable amount of gold that you can bribe someone with, with varying results. The styling looks quite nice.

I didn't feel completely drawn into the game, for whatever reason. Partially it might be because some of the language was off, like using 'thy' as a subject or the '-st' suffix for the third person tense. I enjoy Shakespeare quite a bit too, and I feel it could have been a little closer.

Overall, though, the game feels quite polished and I expect that I would enjoy further works by this author.

Out of the many wordplay games Andrew Schultz has made, the anagram ones are perhaps my favorites (along with Threediopolis). I feel like coming up with anagrams is hard enough to be fun but easy enough not to be overwhelming or send me to hints or online solvers right away.

This is a compact game, set on a circle (or torus) with 7 different locations. Each one is solvable through an anagram.

After that, there is a motion puzzle that is a little tricky to solve. What is going on, exactly? Well, it seems like they want you to (strong spoilers without an explicit solution) (Spoiler - click to show)visit every square of the torus, never moving more than half its length at once, and varying your steps somewhat.

It took me quite a while to figure out what was wanted here, as I kept finding solutions deemed 'too easy'.

Overall, I'd say this is a fairly challenging game, and definitely one not to miss for fans of the first two, longer games.