Reviews by MathBrush

This game paints you as a character who wants to ask out someone in a market who you've seen before, but you have to settle on the right approach.

Unfortunately, our protagonist does not know that they are in a game entered into the Anti-Romance Jam. How unfortunate!

This is also part of the Single Choice Jam, so we only get one shot. But quite a few of them end pretty bad.


One that made me chuckle was (Spoiler - click to show)"Look, I'm just going to lay it out: I've noticed you here before, and I would really like to kiss you. So... what do you say?" and the reaction that followed.

Overall, the game definitely hit home, and having little choices right at the front made the interactivity work well.

This short Twine game is set in a fictional universe where you are a kind of seer having difficulty with your visions.

I feel like this part of a larger work, with some pre-established characters. It was a bit difficult to keep track of at times, especially since it used terms the 'the monster' and 'tyrant' where I thought it might mean a real monster, given that this is a fantasy setting.

The game itself is very polished, and includes some audio and some appropriately-timed text on one passage. It's part of the single choice jam, so there is, of course, only one choice.

Overall, the coding is impressive and I didn't see any typos or bugs, and I thought the choice had some emotional impact to it.

This is a mystery game written in Quest for the Single Choice jam.

I often run into bugs or 'guess the noun' problems with Quest games, but there were none here. Instead, there is only a single link per room (or, occasionally, a single link in the inventory menu on the side), up until the very end, where you can choose a suspect.

The story is that you are a stepmom that likes to cook, but your cookies have gone missing. You find traces all over, but you have to piece together what actually happened using out-of-game logic, rather than in-game.

Overall, it's a nice way to put interactivity into a 'single choice' game.

There were a few noticeable typos, especially near the end.

The game uses at least one character from a sexually explicit series, according to the author, but there was nothing explicit in this game.

This game is a pure mathematical riddle. You are shown six dice, and are asked 'how many petals are there are around the rose?'

After typing in a number, it tells you if you're right or wrong, and tells you how many petals are around the rose.

Pattern and function guessing can always be kind of suspect. Given enough rolls, you can construct a perfect mapping between dice and 'petals' without understanding the reasoning of the author.

But I eventually got it, after a lot of attempts and theorizing. A fun idea, but for my personal taste riddle-type puzzles aren't quite as fun as 'learning a system' or 'exploration' puzzles (although there was some exploration of the dice rolls).

I could have sworn I had played a game just like this before, with similar color scheme and theme (high school reunion to see someone you were once close to), but I couldn't find it anywhere online. Then I remember, I actually read through this once before for the author!

Anyway, this game is about going back to a high school reunion hoping to see a girl you had a huge crush on before.

This is part of the single choice jam, so there's no deep interactivity, just a single moment that can alter your future irrevocably.

The writing is poignant, and feels 'real'. I went to my 20th high school reunion when I happened to be in town and while I didn't have a former crush there it was great to see and connect with friends I had once known.

Very strong story. The background does make it a little hard to see the grey links sometimes, but that's the only real drawback I can see.

This game was part of the single choice jam.

It's generally polished; I found no bugs or typos.

The writing is descriptive. It was a primarily linear narrative, due to the nature of the jam, but it works well as such, with a strong story about a half-Asian kid and their mother's attempts to bridge a generational gap.

It had good emotional impact; I know it's based on real life, but even depictions of real life can become one-dimensional. Both characters seemed complex and thoughtful here.

While the interactivity is severely limited, the game made good use of 'blocked out' options to highlight futility.

This game was the only game entered in Spring Thing 2020's Late Harvest, designed to accomodate designers who were unable to complete their games in time for Spring Thing due to Covid.

It's a parser game with a long sequence of almost-identical rooms, each with different puzzles in them. The puzzles can repeat, and I believe in the long run that all of the rooms are procedurally generated in some way with common elements in them.

There is a bit of a twist, which I saw in the Club Floyd transcript and which was hinted. Explicitly, (Spoiler - click to show)You can TOUCH WALLS to go through them and end up in a story segment that you have little control over.

Overall, the plot was interesting, as were the puzzles, but both were a bit threadbare. Not bad at all for a first game, though.

This game has you play the friend of the eponymous Beth, whose date has arrived. It’s your job to size this guy up. The game has music and graphics, starting with a black and white picture of the date that is slowly colored in, which was a really neat mechanic.

I was emotionally invested in the conversation. The date guy seemed kind of lame at first but I grew to respect him more. The ending I got when I chose to let him up surprised me quite a bit, but I ended up accepting it in the end.

There is some profanity in the game. Overall I was impressed by the presentation and the writing.

This game has a classic setup: you awake, disoriented, from a cryopod, alone on a starship. It’s been used dozens or hundreds of times before, but I always enjoy it.

You meet your ship and have the chance to walk around and exam things. The game isn’t too long, but I liked the writing and the two characters.

There are at least two endings. I liked one of the ones I got. I think one thing the game does well is its focus on sensations, including touch and sight. The descriptions are vivid.

All that said, the game is brief and doesn’t have a lot of time to develop emotional momentum, although it does well with what it has.

This game is a long choice-based game where you build a character who is a hobbit and live through a year or so of local hobbit life.

It seems built on the same general model as Choicescript games, where your choices influence your stats and relationships with delayed effects in later chapters.

However, the effects of your choices are pretty opaque. Unlike Choicescript games, there is no stats page that I could find, and many of the options you can pick from are very similar. On top of that, several chapters are built up as a 'win/loss' scenario where you either make the right choices and get a good result or just fail. When I played every commercial Choicescript game a few years ago, those were all common things that made games more frustrating.

On the other hand, the characters and setting here are fun. A lot is taken directly from Lord of the Rings, but the individual characters are all new. There is also a lot of branching, especially with romances. I did two playthroughs, one pursuing Patty the 'witch' and one pursuing Lily the mayor's daughter. The last 3 of the 7 chapters in these playthroughs were very different from each other.

Everything is pretty low-stakes. Someone steals a sword and runs away with it, but not you. The most stress you have to deal with is social judgment and a pie contest.

So, I'd recommend this to fans of 'coffee shop AU' or Stardew Valley. I liked it enough to play it twice, and the price I paid (I think $3.99?) was definitely appropriate for the size (a lot of such games are $10 to $20 now).