Reviews by MathBrush

I beta tested this IFComp 2017 game.

This is a Twine game framed as a situation (specifically of feeding sea-monkeys), which the actual story is fitted into.

I found the colors and presentation very nice, and the game overall very polished. I did find it frustrating how long it took to reach the final ending, but that was mostly due to time crunch around IFComp. If you have time to play, this is a relaxing and enjoyable experience.

Contains infrequent strong profanity.

This game has you going to a live escape room in a mall or building somewhere.

Inside are a series of color-coded rooms with a variety of puzzles. They include a variety using slightly-less-standard-but-still standard verbs like 'search' or 'look under', etc.

I enjoyed this game. It didn't really inspire any emotion in me, but as a small puzzle snack, it does what it is intended to do.

I feel like this is an improvement over the author's previous game, Questor's Quest, and I'd like to see more from this author.

This game plays out like a branching graphical novel. It has quite a few beautiful hand-drawn backgrounds and images.

You are a space traveler who has left the earth with her young daughter. You are separated, and must travel to five different planets, seeking your daughter.

Choices are few, but you get some major ones. For me, the biggest attraction is the interesting characters and depicted societies in each world.

I beta-tested this game, and I deeply enjoyed it.

It's a twine game with some really nice use of color and a cool title screen.

You venture from world to world, doing some grinding of resources, and buying different equipment.

Other parts of the game include more room-to-room travel and taking and using items. There are story interludes, and so on.

It was a little shorter than I hoped for, but I'm still giving it 5 stars.

This game reminds me of Pilgrimage by Victor Ojuel. Both are symbolic games with female protagonists based on the 4 humors: sanguine, phlegmatic, bilious, and melancholic.

Beyond that, though, they diverge significantly. Temperamentum has a 'real world' and 4 different worlds themed on the idea of hot/cold, wet/dry associated to the 4 humors.

The game is heavy, about loss. I enjoyed it, but parts of it are almost impossible without the walkthrough, and the walkthrough itself is unreliable in parts (for instance, west and east are switched at one point, and in another, it uses the word 'woman' when only 'her' works).

This game has you explore a reservation-based casino to try and uncover the truth behind a murder.

It implements a blackjack game, and uses graphics and a hand-made parser hybrid engine.

The primary portion of the game is investigating a few suspects by interviewing them, examining their items, and talking to those who have seen them.

However, I never felt strongly emotionally invested in the game. I did feel interested while playing, though.

This is a fairly long and polished Twine game with multiple branches, more or less in the Gauntlet style under Ashwell's classification system.

The game is centered around meekness. You are a milquetoast character on a train dealing with family issues and personal anxiety.

If you choose to, you can be sent on a small adventure, where you learn more about the possibilities in yourself.

The writing was engaging, but I felt like my choices didn't really matter (outside of Do you want to continue or Not), and I feel like they didn't drive the text forward. The concept was creative, though.

This game is about a girl named Mikayla, whose phone you find. The game consists of digging though all the apps in the phone to see what her life was like.

I enjoyed the photos (of random things like dogs and writing) and the poetry. There were text notes and voice memos that were, I think, too long for me. They seemed to be there mainly to provide a feeling of reality and background; however, in a storytelling environment, being 'true to life' often makes things too unwieldly. I feel that the purpose of stories is to condense and crystallize reality, and those two parts of the game could have used significant condensing and crystallization.

Overall, it left a good impression on me, especially the ending (which I found by poring through the code).

This is probably the slickest of all the games entered this year.

This is a short mystery tale set in a women's college in (I think) the northeast. You are replacing a professor who has mysteriously disappeared.

The main narrative is about time-hoppers (which feels more like a temporal Gulliver's Travels than H.G. Wells), but there is a sub-narrative about the place of adjunct/temporary/visiting faculty and the various roles of women in academia.

The game beautifully divides between 'asides'-links and 'moving forward'-links by having the first show up as notes in the margin and the latter extending the text.

It's well-illustrated and well-written. One of the best web games available.

I enjoyed the puzzles of Goodbye Cruel Squirrel with a walkthrough. I enjoyed the writing in general, but not the mean-spiritedness.

You play as a squirrel raiding another tribe. You have to progress through a series of locations, each with its own puzzle.

I got stuck early on and used a walkthrough the whole time.