Reviews by MathBrush

This is a story about cleaning out your mother's house after she died. As you explore the house, you discover little secrets and memories here and there, piecing together a larger puzzle.

It's a melancholy game, and has some nice voice acting. The pacing of the voice acting is interesting; only the text in quotes is read out loud, but if there is narrative text between quotes then there is a space in the audio, which I can only presume is to give people a time to catch up. So it kind of presupposes the reader's reading speed, but it worked generally well for me.

The story is sad, overall, but in some ways bittersweet. One of the scenes hints at the MC being trans, but I don't believe that's related to the overall sadness.

I don't use headphones and play IF around others, usually, so I had to schedule special times to play this, but I do feel the audio effects were positive and contributed to the story.

It includes a puzzly element at the end that provided some good interaction, and exploring worked well earlier on.

I helped beta-test this game.

This game uses a custom parser first developed in Kidney Kwest, but with a twist: it's intended to be played entirely vocally.

The parser encourages you to use full sentences (so 'open door' might throw a warning that it's better to say 'open the door'). It also is designed from the ground up and seems to involve a lot of built-in systems. So, for instance, asking about the location of a thing will usually tell you what room it's in, what region it's in, etc. Due to this systematic nature, sometimes the game will omit capitalization or punctuation, but this usually not detectable in the voice version. A final issue is saying 'put Time on [anything]' (a phrase I said a lot because in my accent Time sounds like Tom to the computer), the parser says 'a bottom is not on a time'.

The game itself is simple, and gives you a lovely tutorial that shows you how the whole system works. The tutorial is, itself, a small game. The larger game is mostly interacting with things: doors, keys, containers.

When I beta tested, I completed the game, although it seems to have been expanded since then. This time I believe I got locked in an unwinnable state since I (Spoiler - click to show)left the baby in the car and went inside, and the car took off without me. Overall, I think this technology is interesting and must have been very complex to program.

This is a mid-length Twine game where you play as a visitor to some standing stones who is sucked into the ground and deposited in a strange room.

Gameplay is mostly based on exploration, inventory and examination. There is a bizarre, alien world to explore.

Overall, the concept was interesting, but I had friction in random places. There was a ton of profanity for no real reason (the game starts with a few screens of just the F-word over and over again), each page had an animation before the next page which was cool at first but slowly wore out its welcome, and a lot of choices were hard to strategize with (like choosing left or right in a featureless corridor, or only having one option)).

I definitely felt some atmosphere from the writing, and that was to me the biggest success in this story. It gave me Brian David Gilbert vibes so I start listening to some of his songs while playing.

This is a story intended for beginners, and I believe may be the author's first published game.

It's a brief parser game with a dog protagonist. You have been hurried away from your regular home and, in the tussle lost the ball.

There is a larger overarching plot, where (very early spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)the reason you are shuttered away is because bombs are dropping in Ukraine. This makes for a dramatic storyline, and what started as a personal search for a ball becomes something more selfless, urgent and important.

The game uses a fun mechanic where 'smell' is as important as 'look'.

There are some errors, mostly things that are difficult to deal with in Inform (like extra punctuation and capitalization). Other than that, this is a surprisingly smooth game with a story that ended up feeling nice.

This is a game written in Squiffy, which is based on the engine that Quest uses but is choice-based.

You play as someone who walked away from a relationship and is going cross country on late-night/early-morning busses.

It does a good feel of evoking that wistful travel feeling when you've left something behind and are passing by other people's lives, people you'll never see again but feel important in the moment.

Unfortunately, there is one passage that contains no links to any other passages (in a section on a movie), and this makes the game no longer possible to play. It's possible to fix this by opening the game up in a text editor and adding a link to the next passage. I didn't do so, but read ahead.

Overall, thoughtful and musing. I wish there were a way to tell which links were exploratory and which links moved the story forward.

This is a Twine game with few options, more of a kinetic fiction than a game per se. It's also one of the most effective uses of such a structure I've read (another effective one I could recommend is Polish the Glass).

The story is about the Bladesmith family, a twister group of individuals that read like villains from An Unfortunate Series of Events if it was aimed at a slightly older demographic. Abuse, fraud, deceit and murder follow the family and everyone in it.

It includes amusingly absurd elements (like the multitude of Mildreds) and provocatively vulgar elements (like the opening scene of a man smearing faeces on the glass).

Overall, here's my assessment:
+Polish: The game feels quite smooth overall. There were at least two typos (squeeking vs squeaking and some other typo near the end), but they were minor in the grand scheme of things.
+Descriptiveness: Very vivid and detailed writing.
+Interactivity: While mostly linear, the story does allow little sidebars and choice of navigation that lent interest to the story.
+Emotional impact: I found it both amusing and morbid.
-Would I play again? While I found it very well-done, it has a edge to it that's not my personal preference. I only enjoy darkness in media if it sets off an inner light.

This game requires you to create an account with an email and name and to accept cookies, which felt like a lot. I used a burner email and fake other things.

The idea is that you are a young man named George who is the son of a blacksmith and knows the royal family. Every year, a young maiden gets sacrificed to a dragon, but this year, you hope to help stop that.

Here's my overall rating:

+Polish: The images look a bit strange, like the princess wearing some kind of autumnal leaf pajamas. Otherwise, I didn't run into errors.
-Descriptiveness: A lot of details are just skimmed over or assumed. Plot twists happen in quick succession without a lot of forewarning or explanation.
-Interactivity: It was a bit confusing figuring out what to do, or what did what. At one point you're given a ton of gold, but then it doesn't really come up again. I grabbed a fire crystal, but it said I needed a sword; later I was given a sword, but it never came up whether I used the crystal. Exploring a royal camp ended up showing me part of a villain's base, but it just seemed out of nowhere.
-Emotional impact: I had difficulty becoming emotionally invested in the story.
+Would I play again? I'd probably like to see other endings.

To be fair to the author, a significant amount of work went into this game. I may have been prejudiced from the start, as I enjoy the quick, anonymous, pick-up-and-put-down nature of more text IF, so having a full-screen graphics-based game with mandatory account creation likely put me off from the actual content.

This game is an interesting experiment in involving real-time in text games.

Basically, there are several storylines going one in different motel rooms as well as outside. You have peepholes into 5 motel rooms. Every minute or so of real time, a counter updates the in-game time and you see new things in the different rooms. Occasionally, you can affect things by being in the right place at the right time (the vast majority of these being deaths).

It's an interesting concept, but it was hard to puzzle out in-game, and I only heard it from others and saw it in the code. Without knowing how it works, the game seems oddly repetitive as you see the same scenes over and over, since they don't change until the next 'tick'.

The writing and plot is similar to B-movies, with some strong profanity, a voyeuristic but not explicit sex scene, and violence. Plots are mostly tributes to classic horror movies, although at least one seems non-magical.

Overall, I'm not sure this timed method worked for me, but I'm glad someone did it so I could see how it works. A couple of the stories were effectively creepy for me.

This is an intricate Dendry game where you spend New Year's Eve at a party with your parents, friends and acquaintances. You've burned a lot of bridges in the past, and it's all coming back to get you know.

I was surprised at the end to see that Depression Quest was not on the list of inspirations, as it has a lot of similarity with this game. Options that are selected are denied due to your bad feelings, or greyed out in the first place. Things you'd like to say can't be said, etc.

The New Year's Eve setting provides a good backdrop for the time limit, which is until 12:00. Just like a real party, it first feels like there's too much to do and then too little. This game directly reminded me of all the reasons I don't enjoy big parties with people outside my own family, especially parties where romance is possible but unlikely.

Romance is a theme in the game, but not in a positive way; there are numerous former crushes running around. Edit: (there actually are some positive romantic elements, but I found more negative options due to my choices)

The game has excellent attention to detail, especially in Chinese-heritage culture. Characters are provided, usually with translation, and the game describes food, drinks, Mah Jong, etc., together with westernized/globalized additions like Marvel movies and pumpkin pie.

Overall, this is a strong game. I appreciated its meta-commentary at one point about how it feels like interaction with human beings is an optimization puzzle, and I've felt like that before. The only thing for me that I didn't click with was the waiting around aimlessly that happened a little more than I would have preferred. Perhaps it was due to my own actions, though.

I played this as part of the Seattle IF meetup, and then played on my own later.

There is a long tradition in IF of space games where you start alone in or near a damaged space station and have to make it out alive or at least figure out what's happened. It's a genre I enjoy.

This one goes out of its way to focus on realistic aspects, something I haven't seen much before. A lot of images directly from NASA are used, as well as a variety of free images online that have been modified, with accompanying music.

Using airlocks requires a variety of processes, including exercising! Hadn't known that was a thing with pressure changes before.

I ran into a couple of issues with lists not lining up (numbers and text was mismatched) but I think that might just be my Chrome browser, as the same thing happened with a website my son was working on, so I don't think it's the author's fault.

The only thing I felt really lacking here was emotional engagement. The processes were interesting and clinical, and there were definitely places I could have hooked in emotionally (a picture of family, the loss of Commander Rico), but for whatever reason I just didn't feel that connection. Overall, well done scientific space adventure.