Reviews by MathBrush

This Twine game has you enter a beautiful cabin that you can customize to your hearts content. Drinks, decorations, everything is what you like.

There's even a holoscreen, which is nice. And the game can end this way.

Or...

There is an alternative world you can enter that strongly contrasts with this one. It reminded me of Porpentine a bit (mostly the juxtaposition of a pleasant holochamber with (Spoiler - click to show)body horror, so there's a ton of people in similar genres, but I'm not widely read in that area, so I go to Porpentine first).

It also reminded me of a grimdark video my son and I used to talk about called the Rainbow Factory from the MLP fandom.

Anyway, there was good atmosphere overall, the game was very descriptive, and it had some nice interactivity, but I think the overall length wasn't enough to draw me in, and the ending scene for me lacked something I can't really put my finger on. Still, it's overall a well-done game and one I hope is preserved for others to play in the future.

This game takes several TS Eliot poems and combines them with some original poetry (which fits in quite well and is lovely).

It uses a stressful mechanic: a giant countdown clock in the background ticks down one minute's worth of time. Once it's over, something special happens (and is a pretty neat trick).

I like the overall vibe T.S. Elliot's work, having encountered it once in high school and again in Graham Nelson's Curses!. There's a lot of parts of his work I dislike, but this game has great chunks in it that work well. The frantic race to see things leads to quick reading and moments of 'huh, what was that??' that were fun. I guess it was the opposite of timed text; instead of the author telling me how long it will take me to read a passage, I get to go at any rate I want through the game with just the overall experience being timed.

I played through three or four restarts until I saw everything I thought I could see. I don't know if there's a canonical ending, but my game ended with a lengthy race against the clock with a piece of actual timed text that made me feel like I was some person at the end of their life just watching the last bits of daily existence before floating away.

Overall, the game is polished, descriptive, has a nice interactive twist, drew me in, and I played it several times.

This is a Seedcomp game, made with Super Videotome, a branching visual novel/IF engine.

It has a great deal of glitchy graphics that honestly look great and add a lot to the game atmosphere.

You play as someone stuck in a club for hours and hours on end. So long, you can't even remember why you're there.

From there, it branches quite a bit; a feature I really liked is that you can choose to skip a choice rather than choose anything, and that felt really authentic.

Mine ended up in an explicit sexual encounter with a biblically accurate angel. I don't associate explicit sexual content in games with positive feelings, and so it decreased my enjoyment of the game, however it was clearly signalled at the start of the game that it contains such content, together with strong profanity. The profanity use reminded me most strongly of the 14 yr old boys at my high school, so that's how I imagined the protagonist.

The best part of this game is the atmosphere and the surreal world.

I thought the atmosphere worked well.

I liked this game, and felt it was a solid improvement over the author's previous game.

Here, you play as a member of the coast guard who is trying to track down a tramp steamer leaving a trail of destruction around the Florida coast.

The game is well-suited for children, with needed commands bracketed to be clear, light puzzles, and a generally positive and happy attitude.

Movement is unusual; a single N command might move you one room forward in a ship or send you dozens of miles through Florida. It reminds me of Victor Ojuel's game Pilgramage in that way.

The conversation system is well-presented, with an extra window popping up, although most conversations for me involved just going down the line one at a time.

I appreciate the game running smoothly and well. There were a couple of minor issues like 'an unsecured items', but overall it worked well. I feel like there could have been a bit more polish like replacing 'you can see Bart here' with something more specific.

So to me, it was descriptive, interactive, and fun, but not completely polished and I don't feel like I would revisit it. If the last game was a 5 or 6 out of 10, this one is a 6 or 7 out of ten.

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.