Reviews by MathBrush

This game, like many in Shufflecomp, makes extensive use of public domain art.

In it, you play as two characters who died in a dangerous mission at sea and are now stuck in purgatory.

The game is fully voice acted. The two main plots that I found were the resolution of their feelings about life and death, and one of the characters coming to grips with their gender identity.

I liked the writing and voice acting, and the images contributed a lot. However, out of the three games entered by Bez in this competition, I think I preferred "A Little Guidance for A Big Heart" for its quirky ensemble. This one was meditative and thoughtful, though.

This game is run on a retro mac emulator running Hypercard. I played a downloadable version, but I believe I read on the itch page after that you can play online.

It is graphics and music heavy. Like I usually do, I loaded up the game on my computer to have ready to play later while I finished chores, but I was surprised to come back to find it had been playing an opening sequence on its own, so I restarted to see what I had missed (quite a lot, it seems).

In it, you play an injured mech pilot who now (in embarrassment, I think) resupplies the other mech pilots. They come in, talk to you about small talk and also needs they have, and you need to deduce from that how many parts to order for them.

Throughout the story, you encounter a woman who always has and inspires tense emotions; this seems to provide the main thrust of feeling and plot in the game. However, the game is unfinished, so we'll find out more later on, and I'll likely revise my review then.

I liked this Shufflecomp game that was a short vignette about a band.

You are awakened in the middle of the night by an associate concerned about one of the other band members.

You and the other band member, Holly, talk about her fears and concerns.

I like how, even in this short space of time, the author was able to make the conversation realistic and with real choices that affected Holly's responses in a way that I could really sit and think about what I wanted to achieve.

The game also muses on whether ongoing success is achieved by sticking to your ideals, making what people want, or the luck of the draw, something I've thought about a lot before.

It's possible that I'm getting older or have a carbon monoxide leak in my house, but I frequently play games recently where I have absolutely no idea what's going on. Everything is in evocative prose but I don't know what it's evoking.

So I appreciate Bez's clear and straightforward stories with interesting characters where it's easy to follow along and see the story progress. This is a story about going to an event to meet people while a little guy in your pocket gives you dating advice through an airpod. You reveal some facts about yourself and become aware of others.

Like many of Bez's recent games, this is voice acted with a few different actors participating, and was styled nicely. Out of Bez's three games in this competition, this is the one that I most liked.

This is a game with at least three different endings and which has a pretty neat mechanic.

Everybody is dead at your party (well, it's not exactly your party, but since you're the only one alive, you might as well be). You can examine many of the dead as well as a lot of the scenery around you.

There is a hidden thread running through things which I found fascinating. At the moment of your hostess's death, (Spoiler - click to show)your pink pearl necklace is snapped and the pearls go flying. You can find these pearls as pink 'o's in the words of the different areas</spoiler.

I thought this was a neat mechanic and its symbolic meaning became more apparent in the different endings. Really neat idea here.

This game is themed around the story of a Polish revolutionary anthem from the 1800s that was repurposed by Russia.

Its a short poem with a few branches, talking about the importance of revolution and how it supersedes love.

One of the branches I played had some raw code in it that wasn't working (like UI.restart, I think), and overall this was pretty minimal. I definitely enjoyed hearing about the story behind this though!

This game was entered into Shufflecomp.

The author projects finishing it or adding more at a future date.

Basically, there is some beautiful poetry filled with nature imagery and her falling or transforming. I'd be more specific but the story itself is pretty vague, I got more 'vibes' from it than plot, and the vibes were nice. There is a branch early on and the two paths are wildly different. In one, the words become more sparse naturally.

In the other, you pare down the text by removing words. These removed words are placed into a kind of gallery where eventually they form a larger poem, but the game can end under certain criteria before you get to see the finished one some times. You also have the option to go forward and back, but there are also word links that move you forward, and I'm not sure what the difference between those two options is.

Fun concept.

This is story-focused twine game that uses dithered graphics (I recently learned this word) and is set in a diner at the end of all worlds.

You survived an apocalypse that destroyed everyone in your world. You were able to leave, and your travels eventually brought you here. Now other versions of you from other abandoned worlds have built a community.

The story focuses on your perceptions of and interactions with the other copies of yourself. Some you embrace, some you despise, some you have hopes for. Of course it can be read as a metaphor for our perception of self and our self-worth. And it works well as both allegory and story, as most good sci-fi does.

The story progresses in one direction, but you can pick what order to encounter some things and in some cases you can choose which branch you'll interact with. I didn't feel a need to replay (as it felt complete) so I didn't see all branches.

Overall, good for someone wanting a polished, self-reflective sci-fi fix.

This short game toys with the notion of the holographic principle, which is that it's possible that the universe is encoded on a two-dimensional surface and that the 3d effects we see are just a weird side effect of string theory.

In this future, companies have taken advantage of this by having quantum computer read and write directly to that surface as if it were magnetic tape, deleting people and moving them elsewhere.

The game follows either two groups of people or one (it's hard to tell). In one story, a man is sent in a long real-life journey through space to deliver a package for a company. In another, a couple is reunited after one is 'rewritten' (I think). The man might be the same in both iterations.

The atmosphere was nice. I had to play twice to understand a little better; one ending is very abrupt, while the other has an animation and some more explanation. Reading the wiki article on Holographic Principle helped as well.

There were a lot of typos. I understand, because I make a lot as well; in a future release, the author could use the 'proofing file' option in Twine to get something that can be run through a spellchecker.

I almost completely misunderstood this game.

It's navigated via a clock-like interface where you click on squares to advance the story.

It's about two people who tell each other stories each night. One makes up stories with CYOA-style "A or B" choices (like, 'was the villain the WITCH or the PARASITE?'). The other tells the story of a girl who turns into a sparrow when troubled.

There's a question mark button in the middle that I didn't notice. So after the first pair of stories and 'The End' I figured that was the whole game. I reset a couple of times to try out different stories. I couldn't figure out why the sparrow one seemed so incomplete.

That's when I realized that there are actually like 12 (or maybe 8?) sparrow stories all spread out, and you make your own stories in between. That made the game way more satisfying than I had originally supposed.

The individual small stories are interesting. They feel kind of allegorical in many ways, and the choices you make, while they matter, weren't always obvious in the effect they'd have. Especially when you choose who the villain is, the narrative often made them out to be sympathetic or not really more villainous than the other path, so I feel like there's some overall message I'm missing.

The sparrow story was also symbolic, but as it took place over a longer time I had time to see more repeated themes and feelings, and I liked what it was expressing. It includes a lot of scenes that I've seen frequently in LGBTQ story games (like a desire for transformation, parents who disown you, friends that captivate you and help you change), and it executed them very well.

Neat visually and well-done with the overall storyline.