Reviews by MathBrush

This is a Neo-Twiny Jam game written in 500 words or less. Its text is rich and symbolic, though difficult to understand. I felt that it was saying that I was some kind of monstrous creature, part lizard and part bird or maybe even insect, whose body was bleeding and rippling and changing in a liquid way.

The writing had a lot of good similes and metaphors and strong verbs. The game doesn't last too long, and it all ends up kind of in the air. Fun for its length.

First, some long background not relevant to the gameplay itself much:

(Spoiler - click to show)At one time, I had played every Choice of Games game up until 2021, but after that I couldn't quite afford to play all of them. So I've only picked up a few over the years.

Having loved Vampire: the Masquerade -- Night Road, I was excited to try this game, even at its relatively high price point, since I knew how high quality this author was.

It said the game was mature and I had to verify age, which I hadn't had to do for most other Choice of Games games. I foolishly ignored that, and when I started playing I realized it was filled with constant strong profanity, which I don't really enjoy in games. I tried refunding it, but I had played too long, so I just hid it from my library.

Eventually, I wondered if I could access the code somehow and put a filter on.I messed around with it but couldn't figure it out. Then I realized I could transfer steam purchases to my choice of games account and play online, so I did that and got the filter in. It was really funny to see stuff like 'ruthless motherfreaker' but it got the job done.

The game itself is based on the ruleset for Werewolf: The Apocalypse. In that setting, you have a list of around 9 core attributes (like strength and intelligence) and a lot of skills like computers, aim, etc. You get opportunities to raise these skills at the end of each chapter. During chapters, you frequently get challenges where you test one attribute + one skill. For instance, strength+combat is frequently tested.

In addition, you have five or so damage markers and a maximum of five rage points. You also have five possible werewolf forms (ranging from fully human to hybrids to fully wolf). Shifting forms heals wounds and gives advantages in fights similar to passing challenges, but it costs 1 rage for each step of shifting you do. Running out of rage makes you lose the ability to transform. You can increase rage by getting hurt or at the end of each chapter. If your rage goes over 5, you go into a frenzy and kill all around you.

Like Night Road, the game has a few central chapters that occur in a fixed order interspersed with 'mission' chapters that can be done in any order. Throughout the game, you can meet allies and romantic partners (I romanced Nin, a wolf turned human who plays rock music) and gain gifts from spirits that let you do supernatural feats. You can also join a tribe which incurs advantages and prohibitions.

It can be difficult to keep track of all of this. I was completely overwhelmed with reading all the spirits texts'. It helped me a lot to realize that I can just try every one of them and most of them are out of reach (you need specific requirements for them). There's also DLC that unlocks new gifts, good for people who want to replay in a different style.

I was averse to the first chapter; I found it relentlessly negative to the point of parody, like an 'unfavored child' Gacha Life story, a genre of youtube video where a child is hated by their family until they're rescued by someone dreamy. In this game, you're poor, unhappy, on the run, the world is dying, everyone around you hates you and cusses you out and even attacks you and blames you for everything. It's a completely miserable life.

Fortunately, you quickly escape and move onto a land recovering from a devastating attack years ago that killed almost all werewolves and drove spirits into hiding. Your goal is to restore the nature around you while dealing with white supremacists, evil corporations, and a horrifying werewolf whose spirit ally can create convincing false worlds and who yearns for an end to all existence.

The characters are pretty diverse, from a posh British shadow lord werewolf to a bloodthirsty hacker werewolf to a non-binary reporter who gets into harms way a little too often.

Overall, the game is very weighty and complex. I was on vacation when I played, and would play a chapter at a time before doing a chore or task. It took me 4 days to beat it, putting it at around 15-20 hours (could be much faster if read without interruption and with clear focus). I played with storyteller mode on, which told me which choices tested which attributes.

I felt like Night Road had slightly better and more coherent content, while Book of Hungry Names had more total good content. I like these big, complex RPGs and find it difficult to finish IRL campaigns, so this is my shot to see what it would be like playing these settings.

I can recommend this to others for sure, with my caveat about profanity. There is also pervasive and constant violence but it doesn't dwell on it or seek to make it excruciating. You're werewolves; you kill things. It's what you do.

In this Choicescript game (which I played for free by watching ads), you play as Vivien, a recently-out queer woman who has fallen in love with a witch.

And, unfortunately, died.

Fortunately, your witchfriend has a solution for that. But it causes a lot of problems.

This game feels like an inentional metaphor for loss of both people and relationships, and for slow grief.

Many of the choices are binary, but there are some more involved options and even a set of riddles which I did not quite solve on my first playthrough.

There are some endings that require clicking the same screen 50 times, but I found a more normal one. I thought that the writing had personality and I was engaged with the story. At times I felt lost due to the non-linear narration.

At 4900 words, this is the shortest game you can purchase from Choice of Games, and is listed under its Hosted Games label.

It’s a gauntlet-style game with two chapters and no save. At any point, most options will kill you and make you restart the game. I replayed around six to seven times.

You wake up next to a dead body in your bed and need to figure out what happened. I was able to reach an ending where I was alive and powerful but never really discovered the truth.

The writing is terse and characters, plot and themes are underdeveloped. However, it’s not horrible, and can be played for free after an ad. It’s managed to get a 3.9/5 rating on the app (around 20th from the bottom) and hundreds of ratings.

This is the third-least rated game on the Hosted Games app. While some games have tens of thousands of ratings, this one has had 9 ratings in 5 years.

It’s a puzzle game. There are six or seven chapters, and each chapter has a “correct” path and multiple dying paths. Making it through one chapter means that you don’t have to replay it if you die.

The game is surreal, with a forest full of shadows and ghosts and demons.

The writing had some good descriptions but seemed more intent on atmosphere than communicating helpful descriptions. We are constantly becoming disoriented and confused, the trees are always full of shadows, there are strange sounds and growls; all good elements, but it can become kind of repetitive. There are also a lot of typos. I myself have a lot of typos in my own writing, but I try to use spellcheck and get friends to read the game to look for mistakes, and I think that would be helpful here.

It eventually ties into some (Spoiler - click to show)Mayan mythology, which was an interesting twist.

The puzzles include mazes, repeating actions, finding keys, etc. It is difficult to predict the effects of your actions. The main verb in most choices is “Percept”, which I looked up and is a noun (different than precept), but in the game it seems to be used like “perceive”.

Overall, it has a lot of rough edges, but I didn’t regret my playtime and I feel like the author must have learned a lot by writing it.

This is a well-written and illustrated game with a post-apocalyptic setting. In it, the world has been afflicted with (very early spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)a disease that kills those who sleep. You meet your work another survivor, along with your two children.

The game then cycles through a few days. You can talk to the others , try to keep yourself awake, or try to keep others awake.

I like the idea a lot. The controls were a little strange. I had trouble noticing when time had passed so would do things like “keep myself awake” then “do nothing” and ended up dying because of it. So I feel like it could communicate its system a little better. But I definitely like the style and would play more by this author.

This is a short game that has a special gimmick. Revealing the gimmick removes most of the enjoyment of the game. I recommend playing it; just now I played it twice in 10 minutes so it's not too much time.

Story-wise, you are a contract killer who has performed an assassination, and your goal is to get home. You meet three different people or groups of people on the way, with some choices on how to deal with them.

(Spoiler - click to show)This game is played in reverse. Each action is kind of localized in time, and then you go to an earlier time in the day. The way this is represented is that each spot has two ghostly figures, and by recreating the ghostly figures, you cause them to disappear. In reality, what you did was make them happen, but since time is going backwards, it looks like you make them unhappen.

I always thought there was a unique path in this game, but you can pick between multiple futures at each location.

The gimmick here really is impressive. I'd love to see someone else try it. Long gone are the days where people could reasonably assume to have a unique idea for every parser game, so it would be fun to see this concept polished up a bit.

This is one of three brief games written a long time ago but now translated and updated by a team of authors for Parsercomp 2025.

The game design and text are simple, reflective of an era where conserving disk space was important. Most rooms have at most one interactable object, although some of these can be quite complex (like a rope).

You arrive at a deserted town, carrying nothing but a revolver and a rifle. The town is a scene of great destruction, with burnt buildings and corpses all over. Due to the sparsity of the text, this is presented in a cool, standoffish way, although the main character treats the dead with great dignity.

With each location only having an item or two and about 20 rooms and perhaps 5 major puzzles, this is easily completed and fairly satisfying for its length. I did get stuck because I failed to note an important line in the middle of a room's description.

This game was part of Ryan Veeder's early explorations with unusual uses of Inform, which later branched out into things like twine/parser hybrids, collections of parser games that communicate with each other, dramatic graphical displays, etc.

The main interesting feature here is that the game saves automatically online and reloads your progress, and that the game differs depending on the day you play it. Two characters come and go based on the day of the week, and several actions require multiple days to complete.

Because of this, I frequently started the game before stopping due to forgetting to play again and intimidation. But I finally finished it!

The main idea of the game is that you're at a large pond, which represents most of the map. The pond itself is around 16 (Inform) rooms of water, and circling around it is a long series of rooms forming a circle. You get a fishing rod and a jacket, and the game lets you customize yourself quite a bit, down to a fear of bugs.

You are not given any defined goal. You are not even really able to fish. But as you explore, you begin to find both badges and a large variety of birds. In going out of your way to find badges or birds, you'll also discover a lot about the lives of the people who lived at and/or visited the pond.

The scope of the game is quite large. Even without the timed aspect, it took me around 10-11 hours to play and comment on the game in a forum thread, and so if only half of that was playing, it'd still be around 5 hours, and if only a third was playing, it'd still be 3-4 hours. This is substantial content.

The storytelling is mostly environmental storytelling. Many events are only alluded to. Careful notekeeping can be very helpful.

Overall, I genuinely enjoyed finishing this game off. It took me 6 years to get around to it (and I've had it open in a browser tab for one of those years), but it was worth it.

This game was originally made as a tabletop RPG and then converted into Twine years later.

It features a pretty great storyline about seven women who conceived children from a devil (or so rumours go), one of which is you. You have demonic power like using spectres and giving your blood to spirits for more power. Your goal is to find out the truth behind your birth and to determine your future.

The game is very complex, with multiple areas, each with their own encounters, and each encounter being a large puzzle.

There is art (handdrawn and then enhanced by AI, a process that makes it more coherent than pure AI), which helps the game quite a bit.

The big draw here, outside of the art and story, is the combat. And this is also why I'm giving a lower score than the other reviewers (but would be happy to revise upward if the author feels it's unfair).

You see, the way combat works is that you and your opponent(s) alternate turns. You have 2 actions (at first) and your opponent has a varying number of actions.

One action can be used to summon a spirit or spectre to help you. Doing so costs blood. Each spirit starts with one ability that costs a few 'control points' and one that costs all control points. It's helpful to save the 'all control' points one for last.

You can also spend you action using an item or attacking with a relic (a weapon).

The issue is that using your abilities gives yourself damage, and your enemy gives damage. That means you lose health very quickly. You have two rations in your inventory that can heal you, and occasionally you can rest, but essentially there is no way to just go out there and grind combat to level up. In 3 different attempted playthroughs on three different difficulties (completed only on easy) I wasn't able to level up myself (apparently there are classes?), barely levelled up one relic by paying for it, and never reached the level 2 abilities of the spirits. Every early enemy is very hard, each beatable alone but not 2 or 3 in a row.

Reading other reviews, it seems like everyone is in the same situation. Rovarsson beat it on hard with 5 fights by save scumming but mentions never having health. The other reviews on here also mention that as well.

Even on the easiest mode, there isn't really a way to heal, just skip fights.

Now, I'm sure there is some reasonable way to play through and hit up a lot of encounters and level up items. The author mentions some combos of attacks; there are spectres with abilities like 'boost next attack' and 'do triple damage' which could theoretically one-shot people. But all of that takes damage to summon the spirits.

I think this would work better as a TTRPG, as intended, because there the DM or player can 'fudge' things if it gets too intense. But for right now, as a computer game, I just don't see any way to play through and level up yourself or abilities. If the author provided a sample walkthrough for the first two chapters, like suggestions on who to fight first or how to get stronger, that would be interesting and helpful.