Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

I'm going to review all 3 acts here.

This a Baldur's Gate game. It is possible to play and generally understand it without having played the game (I'm in that scenario) but it generally builds off the associations, motivations, and understood characteristics of that game, which I've only partially absorbed through meme osmosis.

The story is that Astarion (here's where the pre-existing knowledge deficit kicks in) and you have been sucked into a nightmare world by a creature that feeds off of suffering. Astarion who, in the 'real world', has made great progress in escaping from an abusive vampire overlord, has now regressed and in his mind is back where he was at the start, hopeless and alone.

Gameplay in all three acts revolves around a combination of exploration and conversation. All significant actions cost energy, which you only have ten units of at a time. In the first two acts, energy is replenished every night, and you also level 3 skills of manifesting as a dream ghost: Speech, Sight, and Touch. In the third act, energy is replenished by finding secret 'gleams', and you can no longer level your attributes.

In all three days, Astarion has a health bar which, if it goes low enough, will cause him to die. Each day has other important meters as well, such as Astarion's mood, or the attention that can be drawn to you. Basically, this game is an Astarion Tamagachi.

For the first two days, the main goal it to keep him from dying. I discovered after some experimentation that the amount of health he loses or gains each day is based on his mood. I kept dying over and over early on from trying to max my stats first, but in fact there is plenty of time to boost stats with leftover actions. The main goal here is to please this man.

The main difference between the first and second days is that the second day adds more 'special' events with objects and intruders, while the first day just sets up the rhythm of the game as a whole.

The third day is very different, as you are pulled from encounter to encounter, where Astarion talks to people while you explore or interact.

This game is brutally hard (for me!). I died many times trying to complete Act I. There's just almost never enough actions to go around. I found it useful to save every day and reload if I don't achieve my goals. I made over 50 save files through all three acts.

The third act seemed impossibly hard and frustrating until another reviewer pointed out that you can get new actions by finding 'gleams'. I'd spoiler that but I think it's a fundamental part of gameplay and shouldn't be difficult to find in the first place. Finding that, and realizing the 'conversations' often stalled, giving you enough time to explore, helped this section work out better.

Visually and auditorially, the game is beautiful, with nice styling, transitions, fonts, colors, and sound choice.

Conceptually, while this game is symbiotic or even parasitic object, only able to exist in tandem with the resources provided by Baldur's gate, it still (to me) had a generally satisfying plot arc and some nice power progression.

Many ifcomp games are made for ifcomp. This seems like a passion project that just happened to be good enough to enter into Spring Thing and IFComp. I like it.

This game is graphics-and-sound heavy, with a lot of images of casinos and creepy houses. You play as a thief in a casino who suddenly finds himself tasked with escaping a house of horrors.

Gameplay involves exploration and collecting clues, as well as emotional reaction options in the past.

There are some inconsistencies, like some links being capitalized and others not. But the puzzles all seemed to work out all right, with everything becoming useful at some point and the game solvable by clicking every option.

Overall, I think it would have been fun to have more challenges after the first set, as the game felt like it was setting up for some really heavy-duty stuff, and that could have made the ending more powerful. But there are many good things here.

I had a moment in the middle of this game where I thought, 'This reminds me a lot of Porpentine, especially *their angelical understanding*. But I thought, 'No, come on, there are a lot of other twine authors and not every game is a Porpentine reference'.

But at the end it included a list of references to Porpentine, including lines borrowed wholesale (and credited). So that makes sense, it really does have a similar feel!

This is a love story of sorts between two women, raised in a monastery, trained in swords, devoted (or not) to gods. One woman was rebellious and was cast out; the other, a coward, stayed behind.

Gameplay focuses a lot on time: one second, two seconds, etcs. There are prophecies and visions, so that events happen and will happen and have happened, making time confusing. I think I saw an Adventure Time reference, too?

Overall, the writing hit a lot of what made Porpentine good, references to bones and gods and change and colors that are left unexplained but all can be seen as symbols of change or transition or other metaphors.

The game has consistent imagery and theming, even when restarting, which I appreciated.

Pretty neat game!

I don't really worry about spoilers very much, as I find most games and movies are just as fun if you go into them knowing what happens as they are when you come in blind.

But this is one game that I accidentally got spoiled on, which is a bummer, as that's a lot of the fun. Fortunately, only half of it was spoiled, and the rest was still a mystery.

In this game, the names of everything have disappeared. All you see around you is 'something' and an 'other thing'.

The whole game is about experimenting and trying to figure out what those things are. Once you have an idea, the game is pretty short.

Overall, fun and well-done.

This brief Twine game effectively uses every word to show just how every action of the player leads to unmistakable consequences. Without the need for flowery language, complex mechanisms, it sparks debate and discussion.

They say the mark of a good game is that it gets better over time, and I can say with all honesty that the first page was by the worst.

I think this is the only Adventuron game in the competition. I always like Dee Cooke's games, but seeing how short it was made me wonder if it would be able to tell a complete or engaging story.

It ended up being funny, relatable, exasperating, and had quite a good chunk of writing in it.

It's pretty simple. You are trying to pull out of a supermarket by turning right (which for me in the US would be the equivalent of turning left). I saw a complicated map and thought I'd have to navigate complex commands, but it didn't turn out that way...

I won't say how the game ends but I was amused and honestly impressed by how many different scenarios the author could think of to cause problems with turning right. It reminds me of living in Philadelphia, where I felt like I had this kind of experience a lot. I'm glad I'm in Dallas now, where things are thankfully a lot better.

Very amusing, and I found no errors.

This Twine game depicts the fall of a great empire. We play as the emperor, a being with complete control over the the people. Excess and corruption are rife.

But then, a famine strikes the land, and the old way of life begins to disappear.

The writing is descriptive and evocative, and the story is good in itself and can be applied to almost anything in life where a group has grown powerful and complacent.

It reminded me of something I saw in China earlier this year. At the Summer Palace, there were some older buildings that had been destroyed, and I heard the story about how it had been burned down by Europeans. Our tour guide said that her mother used to bring her there in her youth, tell her the story of the burning, and say, 'That's why you have to study for school, that's why you have to work hard, because if China isn't strong it will be burned down again."

Obviously this game is different as there is no invading force, just nature itself, but the two tied together in my mind.

This is a short, heartfelt Twine game about a remote student who feels isolation while also being forced to eat slabs of meat every day due to being a wolf.

It's a nice blend of anxious mundanity and stressful metaphor that reminds me a lot of Early Twine.

The story itself is pretty simple, a daily routine of boredom and suffering mixed with longing and hope for something better one day.

The writing is where it shines; I loved the explanation of encapsulation and abstraction (which I constantly have to remind students about for IB exams, since they often forget what it means) and how it ties neatly into the other themes of the story. So I think that's by far the best part of the game, how expressively and neatly it's written.

This is a neat idea I hadn't seen before this competition: an interactive comic strip.

It's four panels, each of which remains fixed with the same general background while a character moves between them.

The story itself is that you're an off-duty or retired cop who's trying to uncover a gun shipment. You need to find a way to break into a truck and uncover the truth.

The concept is pretty neat. The game is pretty hard! To fully get it right, you need to replay the same short sequence over and over, getting a little better at it each time. It's hard to guess what effects actions will be ahead of time, so experimentation is a must.

I tried some of the other linked comics, and the idea definitely seems fun. I'd play more games like this in the future (hopefully a bit easier for my own sake!)

I was glad to see the name ‘Carter Gwertzman’ because their (one’s? zher? the pronouns do seem to matter after playing this game, but I don’t see them listed anywhere) games are generally imaginative, creative, and not too hard to complete.

This is perhaps my favorite of this author’s games so far. It uses the idea of fairies or similar creatures stealing names and identities, a very old concept that was popularized in recent years by stories like SCP-4000. I made a game about it this year called Faery: Swapped.

Carter Gwertzman’s game is a color-focused Twine game that makes clever use of CSS styling. You (and the name ‘You’ is important) are someone who has lost their identity in a strange forest. To get help, you have to explore and help others in an attempt to recover your true identity.

There are various mushrooms in the game that can affect your size and color, which directly changes the text in the game. Pronouns can be modified, too.

The game openly operates as well as a metaphor for personal change and growth, where sometimes our self-identity becomes something different than we thought it would be. It reminds me of myself, where I planned for years on becoming a professor at a specific school, and when I didn’t achieve that goal I fell into deep depression (and started reviewing IF as a coping mechanism) and spent the next few years rewriting who I wanted to be in life.

Very glad to have the experience playing this!