Reviews by MathBrush

Beautiful Dreamer is one of the best Twine games to come out so far this year. In this fantasy game, you try to sleep at night during a windstorm.

You slowly realize that the game's world is not the same as your own. The world has a strong internal consistency, and you begin to learn more of its rules and nature.

The game is quite large. I was quite thrilled to discover (Spoiler - click to show)a classic CYOA gamebook near the beginning of the game. I thought the game was quite big already, but when I finished it and read the credits, I discovered that I had missed thousands of words' worth of text, which I went back and read.

The tone is a lot like Howl's Moving Castle (both the book and the movie), with archetypal characters, much talk of dreams, surreal magic, etc.

I also felt there were many similarities with Eidolon: (Spoiler - click to show)exploring a dark and shadowy bedroom, dream-type worlds, and a moth motif.

I strongly recommend this game.

This short choice game has lavish and beautiful drawings for each room/scenario, but the navigation system is classic CYOA style, plus a compass rose.

The story is a version of Cinderella as a secret spy. Cinderella is an action-hungry operative who clashes with the advice of the more level-headed Godmother, providing for some of the best moments in the game.

Overall, I enjoyed it. It felt like an interactive webcomic. Because classic comic strips were some of my favorite reading material as a kid, I enjoy the idea of interactive web-comic as a form of IF, and would like to see more of this in the future.

Rat Chaos's opening is purposely bad. You are in a position of authority over an area, with the option to summon rats or not.

The game is goofy and fun at first. But the 'real' content takes some searching to find. In the end, Rat Chaos has a powerful, visceral message.

It's hard to say too much more about it without spoiling it.

As of Septembet 2015, the link no longer functions, but I found someone on an IF forum willing to share a copy.

Hennessy has some very good twine games, but I didn't feel like this is one. It still has metaphorical meaning, an interesting 'cover story', good narrative voice, etc. like his other games. The story is about a dungeon, and about rpgs and dungeons in general.

However, one of the games features is that every link provides a huge wall of often repetitive text. Also, the narrative voice is jokey/juvenile, whichI personally don't enjoy very much in a game.

Overall, this is an above average twine game, but I don't recommend it. I strongly recommend the other games by the author.

King of Bees is short, with a braided storyline (where choices temporarily affect the storyline before converging again.

This game reminds me a bit of Endless, Nameless in its visual design,with a combination of types.

You play a space knight, who is sent to kill the king of bees. The game has several layers of meaning, and it is hard to know what the ultimate message is ((Spoiler - click to show)for instance, is the heavy-handed environmental subtext meant as part of the ultimate message, or is it presented ironically?).

I recommend it.

This game was entered in Ludum Dare, a 24-hour game competition.

This game is classic Porpentine. Strong writing, extreme repetition, the game as a metaphor for a relationship, occasional profanity, and a variety of bodily fluids. This game has little violence or sexual references compared to her other games.

The main mechanic is climbing. You climb a wall. Then stuff happens.

Porpentine as an author is reminiscent of the 19th century authors who wrote extremely triply material. Samuel Coleridge and Edgar Allen Poe come to mind.

In this game, you play a witch who has been confined to a single room during a potion competition. You must brew a potion to win, however, you suffer a major disadvantage, because there is something wrong with your magic.

I was hesitant about this game at first, because I found the language annoying (imagine the writing by Anna from Frozen: "I am SO going to catch her!"). Also, the first few puzzles were almost trivial.

However, I realized as time went on that the writing produced a consistent and interesting worldview (as the backstory unfolded), and that the first puzzles were just an easy tutorial. The game got progressively more difficult, until I needed 3 hints to get through puzzles.

The hints are very mild, provided entirely by your cat's actions.

There's a few red herrings in this game, and a bit of 'guess the author's brain', but by the time I finished, I realized that I genuinely enjoyed this game.

In this game, written for the author's hot-spring loving wife, you explore an expansive wilderness region with a hot spring, wild animals, a friendly old NPC, and beautiful descriptions of nature.

One of my favorite games of all time is Suzanne Britton's novel-length Worlds Apart sci-fi. She specifically cites this game and Sunset over Savannah (a game focusing on a beach and nature) as being an inspiration to her. Having played the two games, I really see how Worlds Apart took inspiration from this game. Worlds Apart is set in a forest near a beach. The forest part of the game is extremely similar to She's Got A Thing for A Spring, with vivid nature descriptions, a guidebook where you can look up plants and animals, and a specific animal (the pika/pakal) that seems almost directly borrowed, with slightly similar puzzles.

This made me appreciate both games more, as it helped me see some of the creative process. She's got a thing for spring is rare as being a realistic game without horror or magical elements. The closest game to it I've seen is A Change in the Weather, which came out a year or two before it.

There are some negatives; the game makes the unfortunate mistake of combining a large, nonlinear map with independent NPCs and tightly timed puzzles. This is a bad combination, as Jim Aikin learned with his game Last Resort, which also featured a huge map and tightly-timed puzzles. He solved the problem by re-tuning the game so that time changes are triggered by events, resulting in the excellent Lydia's Heart game.

Other games, like old Infocom games, have tightly-timed puzzles, but generally they have small maps that make replay easy, or confine the puzzles to a specific time and place.

So I just used a walkthrough to see the fun. The walkthrough was wrong in several places, so I had to improvise, and that was fun.

I've recently replayed many of Jon Ingold's games, and I am very impressed with his writing. This game is probably his best story. There are some puzzles, but you are generally held by the hand and walked through them (except at the beginning, but the game basically gives up and lets you through if you don't get it).

The real puzzle in this game is trying to figure out what is really going on. Ingold knows exactly how much to say to make something cool and how little to say to keep your imagination interested.

This is a fantasy (and possibly sci-fi) game following an assassin who is trying to escape his hanging. Not only do you the player not know what is going on at first, your character doesn't either! Your mutual journey of discovery makes the game exciting.

If you get stuck on the first puzzle, don't sweat it. This is a story, and the puzzles are just side thoughts. If you prefer puzzles but enjoy his writing, Jon Ingold's Muldoon Legacy is a huge puzzle fest, much bigger than Curses! or MIT Zork.

For a Change is an interesting short fantasy game that plays around with the English language to make you feel like you probably know what's going on, even if you aren't sure.

The author intentionally uses unusual word choices and assigns personality traits to objects (for instance, you read that "A stone has been insinuated into your hand"; if you check you inventory, you see that the stone is "humble and true").

This was one of the first IF games I ever played (it was packaged with iPad Frotz), and I thought it was much better suited for beginners than other games in the bundle. It's just a small pick-up-item use-item game, but the way you use items is just bizarre.

Good for anyone interested in surreal or dreamlike games, or who enjoy experiments with the English language.