Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This Spring Thing 2024 game features colorful background with sprites of different animals along with the main NPC, a long-eared elf who others mock for being fat.

The elf goes through the forest and meets different animals. Each one gives you the choice to do a good deed or a bad deed. At the end of the game, it tells you how good or bad you were.

There are several puzzles in the middle where you have to pick the right object to help someone, sometimes with a bit more complexity (like making a map).

There is background music that is pretty repetitive, there are some typos, and the text is pretty slow to be displayed.

All in all, it's clear the author put a lot of effort into making this; I think with the feedback from the other reviews and with some time their next game could be something truly special. This one had some fun moments (like seeing a normal hedgehog dressed like Sonic) but I think could have used some more pizzazz in either story or choices.

This is basically a 'deafeat Hitler government simulation', which is a pretty fun concept.

You have a deck of cards and can hold a hand of 3 at any time, each card use counting as a month of in-game time, as well as special 'advisor' hand of up to 3 people, which can be used more rarely (every 6 months, I think).

Gameplay is complex; you need to balance funding, the demographics of the people you appeal to, keeping your allies placated to maintain government strength, and opposing the rise of the Nazis.

The writing is good, and the commitment to historical accuracy (or at least the appearance of historical accuracy, as I am not educated enough to tell the difference) is really cool.

Overall, I think the game is telling both in what it says about the 1930s and what it says about today. A lot of the game felt very similar to modern political events I've lived through.

Overall, it was a bit too complex for me to want a second go around after I lost. I kept getting tripped up because I didn't know things like the difference between Leftist and Labour. If I learn more one day, I will return!

I'm giving this game a lower rating for now as it is unfinished.

This is a fangame for Baldur's Gate III with a very lovely UI. In it, a nightmare has plagued you and all your companions, and a horrible creature tries to feast on you.

One of your companions, Astarion, doesn't fare as well as the others, and your are plunged deep into his mindscape.

The game has two major goals: interacting with Astarion (who is much like a grumpy/shy cat) and building up your 3 major attributes: touch, speech, and sight.

There are several obvious goals in the game (like opening a door), and I was working towards those goals but kept dying (every day Astarion loses more health). I didn't realize until later that (Spoiler - click to show)interacting with Astarion makes him lose health more slowly. I had only just started making real progress when the game ended before I had reached any of those goals. I had thought the three 'acts' that have been laid out would all be in different areas, but I guess that at least two of them take place in the same room.

Overall, the mechanics were neat, and took a while for me to Understand. Astarion is pretty moody, but his terseness really does make sense when the goal of the game is to level up both his trust and your ability to converse.

Very fun overall.

This game was entered into the back garden of Spring Thing.

It is game written using bitsy, which uses minimalist graphics and is typically used to make interactive fiction through text boxes which can pop up with different interactions.

This game only has a single word of text in it, though. You simply progress through the same screen multiple times, that screen becoming somewhat of a maze. Eventually you discover a bit more, and have a musical ending. Throughout, music plays.

Overall, I found the piece was very successful at setting a mood and communicating an expression. I found the maze repetitive and would have enjoyed more written words.

This is the second time that students from Senica in Slovakia have written an anthology of short Twine stories for inclusion into Spring Thing.

This year there are 7 games, all of which start in a dark forest.

Most have a 'time cave' structure, where, instead of state tracking or having paths converge, all choices split the game into separate paths. Some do have a little bit of converging. Most end after 2-4 choices, often evaluating how good your ending is.

I enjoyed the small jokes, like linking an ellipsis to a 'why are you still here?' message, and the funny endings like dying of boredom and low trust while hiding behind a rock.

It could be fun next year to have a little more color; maybe letting students pick some of the CSS.

I found this game by searching for the games with the highest standard deviation.

This game is just a Warhammer quote fed into Inform 7 (with one extra line, I think). It's amusing because it compiles, thus creating the crux of the Warhammer setting but...that's it.

Pretty funny as an April Fool's joke.

This game has a heady, dreamlike feel. In it, you explore a kind of abandoned zoo or city or something, and interact with a lot of people and things, especially birds.

I didn't see until afterwards that it is explicitly framed as a purgatory, but that makes sense. It's kind of like a text version of What Dreams May Come, but stripped of all explicit moralizing.

I encountered a lot of mysterious and compelling scenes, some making the use of delayed text in a surprisingly effective way, such as in the luggage carousel full of masks. Birds are a recurring theme.

This doesn't feel like a pleasant world to be in. Statues are ugly, people are cruel or crass, decay is everywhere. But it feels like a place to move on from, a place that shapes and refines you for good or for bad.

Very compelling game. Due to its overall grimness, not one I think I'd revisit, but one that I could recommend to others.

This is an interesting puzzlebox of a game with some cute 'characters'.

You play as a wizard that has lost all ability to use verbs. However, some of your words have possessed nearby objects, creating automatons!

You can use nouns instead of verbs. Unfortunately, this causes all loose verbs to converge on the given noun! This can cause a lot of problems.

This was a fun game, but also hard. It was hard to know how to start; it was hard figuring out if I had locked myself out of victory or not (spoiler: (Spoiler - click to show)it seems like there are multiple ways of doing this), and it was hard to win, so be aware of that coming in ahead of time! Although it was reasonably short. I think it's just fine being difficult (I think it made me like the game more) but I do think it could be useful to indicate the fact that you may need to restart/undo to win (unless I missed an ending that lets you do that!)

A very clever concept and a fun game.

This game is the first three chapters of a potentially longer game. Still, it is very hefty as is, and took a couple of hours to play for me.

The worldbuilding is strong here, which makes sense as it is set in the same world as a previous game (although it stood alone, for me). There are several kingdoms in conflict with each other, and you are employed by one of them due to your royal blood.

However, fate brings you into contact with the Kitherin (sp?), a mystical group that connect magically with mythical animals.

Most of the game so far revolves around meeting the other Kitherin and engaging in training with them.

It was interesting playing this game after recently touring a Daoist temple, with multiple shrines to different Gods, as well as the Summer Palace near Beijing, with its symbolic mystical animals. I felt like the setting in this game would be very much in place there, especially with the Phoenix and Dragon connections.

This is a Heart's Choice game, so the emphasis is on romance. I don't want explicit sex scenes in a game, but the characters were lovable, so I was glad to be able to fine tune my choices (cuddling, nothing sexual). I spent the most time with Rae, and found a lot of content with her, and I declined content with others, and saw less, which sounds like it should be normal but a lot of games get that wrong (constantly pressuring you to interact with people you don't like).

There is a lot of detail here and it can be kind of hard to keep track of which ridiculously attractive temple-goer is which; it helps that they contrast in experience/age and in jobs (like rune-maker), so mentioning those things helps me keep track.

I don't feel like the opening really meshes well with the rest. I had a bird companion and was excited to be close to it, so when I found out I could bound with animals, I thought, 'I can bond with my bird!' but actually you bound and become close with another animal you just met. Similarly, the intro part feels much more low-fantasy while the rest feels high-fantasy. I like the latter part more, and in fact started the game a couple of times and put it down before pushing through the intro to what I think of as 'the good parts'.

I think this will be a fun game when finished. For now, a slightly lower score due to its incomplete state.

I played two versions of this game; an Introcomp version a few years back, and this Spring Thing one.

They feel like two different games; the part of the Introcomp version I remembered most was branching paths and a butterfly, while this one is focused on divination symbols. Replaying the introcomp one, though, I found they share a setting.

In this game, you are a day early for a visit with a magic professor, and so you have time to think and contemplate your father's death (?). Gameplay consists of examining descriptions, finding symbols that translate into phrases, and DIVINE-ing a full sentence from these symbols.

The descriptions are lush and complex, giving a richness to the setting but also rendering it difficult to find important clues.

There are some bugs; the biggest one I found was The game saying 'There is a carving here' and X CARVING not working (you need to (Spoiler - click to show)X INITIAL).

I was unable to complete this without significant help from discord. Since discord isn't not publicly available or permanently stored, I want to record what helped:
-The number of symbols you need is (Spoiler - click to show)three
-The specific symbols you need to have found are (Spoiler - click to show)waves, piercing, concealment
-You find that first symbol by examining (Spoiler - click to show)the ocean specifically, not just water
-The final sentence you must type is (Spoiler - click to show)arrows planted in flesh are shrouded by an unaware mind