Reviews by MathBrush

This Neo Twiny Jam game, written in 500 words or less, is the story of a young fairy that is trans.

The balance here is interesting. There are a lot of games and stories out there about being trans, and even more that are allegories for being trans. Some of these are incredibly effective, while others can be confusing.

This one overall has a lot of authenticity but can be confusing at times as it mixes between the explicitly trans nature of the character and the fantastical allegory for it as a fairy who doesn't feel like a fairy. It felt like the same dialogue twice, once at a whisper and once as a shout, and I wonder if it could have been stronger to structure it in some different way.

Unlike other Neo Twiny Jam games I've played, this one is openly unfinished a taste of a later game to come.

Therefore, it just stops in its tracks, a less satisfying resolution than a full story.

But it holds out promise for a greater game. There is already tension here; you are a young noble, unhappy with your parents, and bound to marry a prince you do not love, while other potential romantic partners are in the air.

Looks like it could be great when finished, but the current amount is just a dip in the water.

This game was pretty cool; I replayed it about 4 or 5 times.

It's a Neo Twiny Jam game written in 500 words or less. But in this case that's distributed to two separate games: one about curing a biological virus, and one a technological.

The biological one is basically just a branching tree. But the computer one had a few fun parts, including exposing its own code in a clever way and having a text-entry puzzle that was complex enough to be fun.

Splitting up the text into two games may have been a mistake, though, as each part is almost painfully brief in terms of both descriptiveness and gameplay.

This game was entered in the Neo Twiny Jam, which restricts text to 500 words or less total.

This makes it hard to make a big, polished game. But this author managed to achieve that with background music, complex UI, fancy fonts and styling, etc.

There's not much time to tell a big story here, given the word limit, but there's a lot of world building that paints a bigger picture.

This is pretty good and I'd give it 4 stars, but I think that there's something missing from the story that ought to be there and I can't put my finger on it. I'd like to say it's more emotional complexness or a surprise or something, but I can't say exactly what it is. Very good, though.

This is the final game in the series, and while it doesn't pull out too many surprises compared to the first two, it's a fitting conclusion.

Like the others, you put in a couple of names and choose between two worlds. This is a bit surprising, as the main character of the last two games (Spoiler - click to show)died, but it makes more sense as you play.

I enjoyed the small trio of games. It was perhaps a bit overwrought at times, but it works with the styling.

Like the previous game in the series, this is a very brief twine game that allows you to enter names for you and a loved one, and then cycles between two options, each comparing different worlds.

I always liked 'two world' stories from a young age (I think light world/dark world in Zelda is what got me into it). This is short, but I like seeing the contrasts.

This game was written for the Neo Twiny jam, in 500 words or less. It is part of a series of 3.

The interactivity at first appears intentionally minimal, with the option to enter two names at the beginning and the option to toggle between two variations in a cycling word.

But as I went to write this review, I realized that that cycling word changes much of the rest of the story. It's clever and subtle; the piece is still slight, and must be so to fit into the confines of the jam, but I enjoyed this large-scale choice.

This game is essentially a love poem about a couple, describing their sexual experiences.

It is written in less than 500 words, and interaction occurs in two ways: clicking arrows back and forth, and mousing over text which expands the legible text.

The wording is poetic, and the UI is well-done and artistic. The game had content warnings, which I should have heeded, as it was much more explicit than most games with similar content warnings.

This game is more the hint of a story than a full story. It's written in Gruescript, a relatively recent language that is a parser/choice hybrid, created by Robin Johnson.

This game blends physical objects with conversational topics. What you're holding, you can talk about. If you can talk about something (like a name), you can take it and drop it.

The setting is some kind of alternate mythology, a fantasy world that has echoes of Greek mythology (some kind of box that wasn't meant to be opening, blends of snakes and people).

There's just not much here; I reached an ending early on that I thought was a time limit. I restarted and found out it only comes from asking a certain topic. I avoided that topic but couldn't find much more; downloading the (helpfully provided source), I see that that was the full ending.

So this game is pretty short. The concepts are good, though I had some trouble with figuring out how to do what I wanted. In a fuller game, it could be very fun, but for now, I'll be content with this hint of a game.

This game was written using ADL, which was the engine Ken and Roberta Williams used for some early Hi-Res Adventures (from what I can gather, though I may be wrong).

The game itself is a downloadable windows executable. It consists of a moderate number of rooms (around 10-15), each with either one interesting item or one interesting NPC. Nothing can be interacted with outside of these singular items (no scenery, etc.). All play consists of fetching one item in one room to get a new item in another room (like a trading-up quest). There are occasional typos, and the storyline isn't really there.

The author has admitted to having run out of time. Having more time would certainly improve the game; the author has mentioned implementing the scenery, more puzzles, etc.

For now, though, the game is lacking in polish and descriptiveness, and due to its unfinished nature lacks emotional depth. I'm giving it one star for its current state, but if the author ever updates it I'll definitely increase the rating, as the ideas in it are good, it just looks like it needs more time.