Reviews by MathBrush

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.

This is the fifth in a series of 12 twine games about types of fear from the Magnus Archives podcast.

This story is about the Eye, or fear of being watched.

Like the others in the series, it is short, with a couple spelling errors. But it does some fun tricks that make you, the reader, feel that your personal space is being invaded or that you're being surveilled, in addition to the regular story, giving a more direct version of the fear than the other stories so far.

Besides these tricks, the main story is about a man selling off his dead father's possessions, including a very large collection of glass/plastic eyes. But he starts to get a feeling that he's being watched.

This game is the fourth in a series of Twine games centered around the Magnus Archive podcast. This one centers on the Vast, or the fear of very large things like the sea, sky, or space.

Except...this one's not really about fear. Quite the opposite, really. This story is about two girls that meet and start to bond romantically over falling, whether tripping on a sidewalk, bungee jumping, or skydiving.

The game implements 'vastness' into its styling, with very long pages to scroll through; it's actually very effective, I liked this quite a bit. It adds a bit of interactivity to an otherwise linear story.

I was a little disappointed that this doesn't really follow the modus operandi of the Magnus Archives. No one is really afraid, here; this is honestly a feel-good love story with a bit of drama at the end. Which could be great, if that's what you're looking for.

This is the third game in a multi-part series based on the Magnus Archives. This one focuses on the Buried, or the feeling of claustrophobia.

The main characters are a gay couple on a vacation to a cabin in the mountains. One of them finds a disturbing book in the cabin, a copy of a Jack London novel that's not quite as it should have been.

As the story progresses, things get increasingly more frightening. I actually found the writing very strong, feeling visceral discomfort from the horror.

Unfortunately, I found some formatting issues, which others apparently also experienced. At different points, the white links disappeared, until I went to full screen, and even then I had to change the font size multiple times to reach the next links. This took away from the experience somewhat.

This is the second in a series of short Twine games centered around the themes of the Magnus Archives podcast.

This one is based on one of my least favorite archetypes from the series, 'The Hunt', and it's presented in a fairly straightforward manner without a lot of twists or turns. For most of the game (spoilers for midgame) (Spoiler - click to show)you are running away from bizarre beast, dodging different directions in a maze-like labyrinth.. It was just so on the nose that I wished there was more subtlety, more build-up.

Overall, the writing is strong; in both games I've played there are occasional typos (I've been guilty of that quite often myself), but the ideas and atmosphere are solid. I'm looking forward to the rest of the series.

While hunting through few-rating games from this year, I was pleased to see a whole series of Twine games based on the Magnus Archives, my favorite podcast (I've listened to the whole thing at least three times). The organization of the games in this series is based on some of the deeper lore of the series, centered around archetypes of fear.

This one is about darkness, a fear the original podcast writers said they had trouble writing effectively themselves. This one does a great job; at first, it's a pretty mild/boring Twine game about going the bathroom, but quickly gets darker...literally. Warning for those who have trouble reading, (moderate spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)the text gets harder to read and eventually you have to hunt the screen for text that pops up.

The game is pretty short and could probably have been extended, but overall I'm looking forward to playing and reviewing the other games in the series.

I've been browsing IFDB by searching 'added:2022' by the fewest ratings to see games that didn't get noticed this year.

This was an interesting IFDB entry: added by an author who only was on the site for a couple of days, editing this post a couple of times, with no other activity.

The game itself is actually an interesting concept. You are a prisoner in a torture chamber-based prison deep underground.

Three voices, (a red one, a blue one, and a green one) urge you to acts of escape and violence.

It doesn't last too long, but looks neat visually. There were several typos (it's possible the name of the player was some special effect that doesn't display, since the subject was missing of several lines). Overall, it could stand to be fleshed out a lot more. But the core concept works.