Reviews by MathBrush

This is a brief but replayable game.

You have found the ancient Temple of Destiny. Inside is a prophecy in the form of a poem. Interestingly, the stone it is carved on is movable, and you can alter individual words and phrases.

This allows you to construct the prophecy you most desire!

Unfortunately, you cannot go back to previous choices; what's done cannot be undone (without replaying). This makes it a bit hard to strategize without writing everything down, as you can't just cycle through.

Like others, I found the Good Ending and the Bad ending but not the Worse or Better ending. I also found the 'give up early' ending.

Pretty fun concept!

This game reminds me a bit of Sweet Dreams by Papillon or of Bitsy games. Basically, you control a character on the screen and you interact with objects by hitting the space bar. Then you get some text or possibly some options.

It's a relatively short game, but well-done and polished. Your grandfather never lets you up into the attic, but you've sneaked in and now you're going to discover the truth for yourself. The relationships depicted are by turns heartwarming and heartbreaking, and there are definite funny moments (like the expressions grandpa makes when you ask very personal questions).

The game's only fault, to me, was that it was fairly brief, giving a limited sense of interaction. I don't think a game has to be long to be great, but I feel like this game didn't fill up the full size of its concept. I did enjoy it, however.

This French Comp game uses the theme of 'betrayal' well. An army is coming to your castle at your weakest moment. Someone must have betrayed you, but who?

The game is short but pleasingly symmetric. There are three suspects, each with three possible actions (consult with them, accuse them, and interrogate them). When it's time to face the enemy, you have three choices.

There are a lot of endings, mostly bad ones, of which I received two, but overall it was fun. The text doesn't vary much based on your choices so you can replay very swiftly. Investigating the treason felt interesting. Overall, the game is short but with a fun pattern.

I hadn't realized when I started this series of games based on the Magnus institute that it would just end. As far as I can tell, the creator abandoned social media (under the current name) a year or two ago.

These games were based on the Magnus Archives podcast, which has 14 archetypes of fear. The ones that were missing, and would presumably end this series, are the Web, and, appropriately, the End, or death.

This game is about the Flesh, the fear of body horror and of being eaten.

Your girlfriend is getting a scarification, with some strips of skin removed. She has it bandaged while its healing, but when the bandages are removed...

Overall, this series started out strong and had some great parts (I enjoyed the Dark, the Spiral, the Stranger, and the Eye), but kind of petered out near the end, which may be why they stopped writing it. But I think, if they ever decided to finish it, a strong ending with The Web and the End could make the whole thing kind of a masterpiece.

This is the 11th in a series of games based on the entities from the Magnus Archives Podcast. This one focuses on The Lonely, or the fear of being abandoned or all by yourself.

This short Twine game opens a bit slowly. You are sent to decommission a fire tower in a US national park. With no one around, you can at least take comfort in another nearby firetower and its inhabitant that signals you.

Things pick up a little bit later.

While I think this one doesn't really evoke much fear in me, compared to the others, I think its twists and the overall writing is strong. It has also the most action I've seen so far in the second, 'worldbuilding' part.

This is the tenth game in the Usher Foundation series, in which each game is centered on one of the primal fear archetypes of the Magnus Archives Podcast.

This one is about the Stranger, which is a fear of the uncanny valley and that people around you are fake somehow.

This story is short. You are trans, and your best friend is trans. You are in high-school. Over the summer, your friend changes somehow. He appears to be detransitioning, possibly against his will.

This game is shorter than the others in the series, but has a more extended 'overarching worldbuilding' segment at the end, which is good, because I felt like that subplot had kind of stalled.

This is the 9th game in the series of games based on the archetypal fears found in the Magnus Archives Podcast. This one focuses on the Corruption, which is one that really gets me, a fear of decay, disease, and insect infestations.

You are bidding on storage units to sell the stuff in them, when you find one that has a peculiar insect infestation. Later, you find out it wasn't the only thing that got infested...

The game has some nice (as in very gross) interactions with picking/popping black dots on your skin. Overall, this game made me feel deeply uncomfortable.

This is the eighth in a series of short Twine games based on the central themes of the Magnus archives.

This one is based on the Spiral, associated with the feeling of losing you mind, as well as being lost.

In this Twine game, you are exploring the subway tunnels under NYC after a hurricane as part of your job, when your crew comes upon a perfectly preserved wooden door deep underground that leads into a well-lit, carpeted hallway.

The game employs some clever mechanics to track the feeling of slowly losing your senses.

My five star rating is not necessarily because I would recommend it to everyone as being an exceptional game, but because it satisfies my personal rating criteria in terms of emotional impact and interactivity.

This is the 7th in a series of Twine games centered around the main themes of the Magnus Archives podcast. This one is based on the Slaughter, or fear of mass violence and death.

In this Twine game, you are hired on to help with a Civil War reenactment, helping fix uniforms, belts, etc. But one of the men has a strange book, and you almost feel like you've gone back in time...

This one didn't pull me as much as the others in this series, probably because the Slaughter has always felt like an academic fear to me, given that I've been lucky enough to avoid direct contact with war during my lifetime, only seeing it in the news. The best parts are linear and the branching parts are rather dull, so I'm glad to see this one go and move on to the next. So far this author's best games that I've seen have been ones that focus on personal connections.

This is another entry in the series of games based on archetypes from the Magnus institute. This one is based on the Desolation, which is associated with loss and fire.

Thematically, it works well; it features a burning hospital and a health point meter, and has some complex decisions in regards to human life.

Emotionally, a lot of it didn't land with me; the PC is unequivocally bad, so it sets you up to play as a bad guy, but then presents moral decisions which would be completely straightforward for a villain in distress.

And the 'overarching plot' section at the end felt a bit like an exposition dump, one that is well-needed but could have been dragged out a bit more.