Reviews by MathBrush

This is a one-room parser game with a lot of little and big gags in it. You are an insurance salesman waiting for a noble Baroness to arrive to sell insurance too.

In the meantime, though, several mishaps occur, each more ridiculous than the last.

Like others, I found the ending abrupt and thought there might be more. Decompiling the source code, I could find no solution to (Spoiler - click to show)the burning curtains, while at least one other reviewer found that reaching the part of the game with more points gave an alternate ending.

Our male character has a sexual fixation with the baroness, and it crops up enough that I personally found it annoying, as I don't associate such material with positive feelings.

Overall, the comedic timing was well-done, and outside of the ending I found the puzzles not too hard and also engaging.

This is an Adventuron game set in the plains of Manitoba. It involves research about local plants and wildlife and about Ukrainians who emigrated to Canada.

It also contains a jumpscare, so fair warning! Scared me quite a bit. Just the one scare, though.

Overall, it's a well-done horror story that is elevated by the obvious research and care into the background details. It has 10 different achievements, of which I found 8.

Overall:
*Polish: I didn't run into any parser problems, the art is well-done and the prose is smooth.
*Descriptiveness: A lot of vivid imagery and attention to detail.
*Interactivity: I liked the open-endedness of the achievements but also always had something to do.
*Emotional impact: Pretty scary, although 80% of it was the jumpscare.
*Would I play again? Yeah, I think I could.

This is a thoughtful game, a mostly-linear ghost story about a roommate that haunts the place and about relationships and our dealings with the others.

I liked the writing in this, it's really about turning an inner eye on ourselves and seeing the bad habits and unhealthy relationships that we have let become so natural that we can't even see them anymore.

It also has an interesting take on ghosts, similar to but slightly different from most representations I've seen in media.

This a a very well-written but overall unstrusctured short, linear twine story about a funeral home late at night, and a cat.

It cites influences like House of Leaves, and has a bilingual protagonist, with the game including vivid details of a Hispanic family's life and culture. The protagonist is relatable and there's some great scene-by-scene writing.

This setup gave me huge expectations, but the story ends with a very quick infodump and sudden ending with nothing but a 'start over' link. It felt like it was missing a third of it; the ending could have worked with more middle exposition, or it could have worked with a longer denouement, but I was left feeling unsatisfied. But I would love to read more by this author, as I love the style.

This is a weird game.

It's a unity-based visual novel with some video title cards, jazz music (or maybe ragtime?) and static cut-outs of animals.

You play as what I can only describe as a deeply disturbed squirrel, one out of touch both with the thoughts and emotions of others but also with physical reality itself.

While the game isn't super long (about 5 or 6 vignettes), each explores a dark facet of the human existence. It feels like the 'depressing half' of Anna Karenina (the one centered on Anna, as opposed to Kitty and Levin).

But in the end, even a narcissistic and untethered-to-reality squirrel deserves to live and has some human worth, and is perhaps deserving of love (although this goes against the squirrels own desires, so maybe not).

All in all, I didn't expect the pieces of this game to fall together for me the way they did, but I think I'll end up contemplating this for a while.

This is a game from the recent 'Running out of Ink' itch anthology.

In this Twine story, you play as a tired author who just moved out of her parents' house and is trying to write a story over 3 days. Your choices during each of the three days affects the resulting story, which you can read at the end.

A lot of it is very relatable; trying to manage your creative output by procrastinating through playing games (something I've been doing myself except with writing reviews), writing for the 'wrong outlet' (where you are verbose) instead of the 'right one' (where you get stuck). I especially related to listening to podcasts while playing grindy games (I can highly recommend mixing the Magnus Archives podcast with Sunless Sea/Sunless Skies).

The character is depicted clearly and the variable story at the end is neat (the code for it is basically a time cave, with three possible first pages, 9 second, 27 third, etc. approximately).

My only caveats are that the game could be tidier. Paragraphs run together; I'd rather see each new paragraph indented or a full line left between them, like the finished story at the end. And there were a couple of noticeable typos (like 'to' for 'two') that could be caught by using Twine's text dump feature and running the result through Grammarly.

Though just a demo, this a pleasant experience overall.

It uses a custom interface that is made with Moiki, a system I've never seen before but which seems like a smooth, stats-based hyperlink system with good graphics integration. My first impression is 'choicescript mechanics and Twine styling options', but I'm not sure how accurate that is.

Game-wise, I'm going to call it 'Bohemian' as it's focused heavily on wine, food, culture and literature. It has some darker undertones as well.

The stats at first felt like perhaps they weren't used very much, but as the game progressed I saw them more. It was a bit odd seeing some choices where you have to be good at a stat to use them, but your reward is just more of that stat (I swear I read an Emily Short post where she calls this 'rich get richer'). But the demo didn't last long enough to show the long game, so it's possible this won't be a problem in the long run.

My only other (small) complaint is that the text when gaining something special just flashes on the screen for a second, so I (a non-native speaker) couldn't finish reading it.

Otherwise, a good story, reminding me of an Edgar Allan Poe story adapted by someone who owns a vineyard.

This is entry in French IFComp 2022 written in Twine.

You sign up to be an adventurer, giving your name, age, description, etc., and get to choose between swords and magic.

The game has an odd structure. It splits in wildly different directions a lot, like a Time Cave, but many of them are dead ends, like a Gauntlet, but the ones that don't often allow you to visit one of the other main branches.

The writing is classic fantasy, with wizards and wyverns. While pleasant, I didn't feel a strong emotional connection to the game. And some of the structure I feel could be improved; there is only one save slot, and no undo, and if you reach a good ending while you have a full save slot, there's no way to start over without clearing your cache. And on my chrome browser, there was a graphical glitch with scrollbars appearing out of nowhere.

But it was enjoyable enough if you just want a bit of fun on an afternoon.

This is a game I'd happily replay in a better state and which is fairly descriptive. However, I had numerous problems with it that I'm not sure are solvable.

This is the author's first IF, and takes place on an island you sail to in a canoe. On the island you can disembark and discover a huge, bustling city with a complex web of possible trades and an economy.

It's a very cool idea. The problem is the bugs. The author had to try and work around several implementation issues and their solutions don't always make sense. For instance, instead of typing HELP or AIDE for help, there is a manual floating by you you read. Similarly, the walkthrough is just an item in a different room you can read, and so is an 'indice'.

The canoe isn't a vehicle you enter; instead you have to TAKE the canoe to use it. There is an object that guides you through the forest but it is purposely left vague and it disappears from your hand at some point.

More distressingly, the seashells used as currency seem to disappear as soon as you enter the village, which means I can't give them to anyone. Rats also appear which you can kill for money, but they are seemingly random and also pretty uncommon after the first one.

Over all, it has cool ideas and I would like to see a more polished version, but I had to give up.

This game is most likely the first Dialog game written in French (for the 2022 French IFComp). As someone who's currently writing an English Dialog game, I was intrigued by this.

The author admittedly had to rush this game, but it feels pretty smooth overall. I only found one error message not translated ('You can't go in that direction', I think). I did feel like a lot of synonyms and alternate solutions were missing (especially for [mild early spoiler](Spoiler - click to show)trying to get the shining object stuck in the rubble; I tried PRENDRE, PRENDRE AVEC BRANCHE, POUSSER AVEC BRANCH, etc.). Thankfully, there's a walkthrough.

Story wise, your mother always told you sweet stories about a mirrored princess in an enchanted land. But when she dies, the journals she leaves you have notes and maps that indicate it all may be true.

I found the story quite cute and liked the ending. If the game were polished a bit more I think it would be quite good, despite its brevity.