Reviews by MathBrush

This game runs on a timer, although there is an option to download a non-timed gblorb. While I played it, I had to get called away three times for family business while the timer was running. I talked to my son about including that in the rating (the fact that it's hard to find time for timed, unpausable games) but he said that that shouldn't be factored in, since the game was specifically about being timed. So I won't. Edit: I've been told the game is pausable, so that fixes things! I didn't notice it earlier.

Story-wise, you are the Little Match Girl (whose powers are best discovered by playing one of the other Little Match Girl games), trying to stop a spaceship of villains from their plan of blowing a hole into heaven through the golden sphere that surrounds it. Along the way, a variety of shenanigans occur.

The game reminds me of Attack of the Killer Zombie Robot Yetis (or whatever the name is), in that it's meant to be played in one fell swoop with high stakes while cleverly disguising the way the game pushes you forward. I have a list on IFDB of games like this called "Linear Thriller Games" but haven't found many games to add to it recently. This one is an especially good example.

The timer starts out at 30 minutes but can change and adapt over time. I'm not sure what would happen if it got to 0.

The lore of the series continues to evolve. It is self-consistent. It reminds me of shows like Adventure Time and the Simpsons that start out with no continuity then end up, several seasons later, being very heavily continuity based with long storylines.

Overall, the dialogue, characters, world-building, story arc, and descriptions worked well for me.

As I played this game, after Spring Thing had ended, I thought, "This is a lot of fun. I'll probably rate it at 4 stars, but I kind of feel like it should be 5 stars under my criteria."

Then I went to see what others had rated it as, and was really surprised to see that it had an average below 3 stars.

So I wanted to share my reasoning on it.

First, a description. This is a Twine game with a kind of central hub where you, a stowaway, are hiding in the cargo hold. From there, you can go to four different locations, each of which contains either an item to grab or a place to use an item, together with (Spoiler - click to show)a strange and fantastical world unrelated to the ship you're on. There are at least 5 endings, of which I found two.

As I write this, I reflect that this is very similar to the first Twine game I every truly enjoyed: Astrid Dalmdady's You are Standing at a Crossroads, which has a similar spoke and hub structure where you find places you need items first and use them later.

Perhaps it was this similarity which made me enjoy the game. Here is my breakdown on my rubric, which is not hard and fast, but helps me organize thoughts:

+Polish: The game was bug-free, as far as I saw, looked nice, and was complete.
+Descriptiveness: I enjoyed the descriptions of the very different areas, and I liked the feel of the pirate crew.
+Interactivity: I felt like I could strategize towards my own desired ends. Interactions were clear and intuitive.
+Emotional impact: I enjoyed the sense of wonder and the whimsy of the game.
+Would I play again? I was interested enough to play to two endings.

This is a ren’py game with an anthropomorphic animal character. It features pretty strong language, so I wasn’t going to play it, but I found the script file and searched and replaced it and it was just fine.

This game has you play as a cat-like human who wakes up a little later than they’d like and has to make some cookies for an event later.

The character is self deprecating and funny, and their life is filled with both good things and challenges like an annoyingly broken phone.

As others have mentioned, it does cut off suddenly, which is why I marked it with less stars. It’s a pretty good story already; just adding a short conclusion to it would make the whole package pretty satisfying.

I genuinely don't like most RPG maker games, as I enjoy reading text more than seeing game cutscenes or walking around mostly non-interactive worlds. Fortunately, this game keeps most of the annoying parts of RPG-Maker to a minimum, with well-controlled text, relatively fast walking speed, and plenty of options.

You play as a scammer coming to an island to steal sea eggs. You can pick what to explore on the island. As you do so, you can change your character's sprite, and you find out more about what is happening on the island.

The game has multiple paths, with at least 3 endings and a few buildings I never had a chance to explore.

The story is short and a bit quick, but I prefer that in RPG maker over something drawn out agonizingly long.

This game features the same story in three languages (Italian, English, and Slovak).

The story has a strong environmental message. It seems to branch at several spots, so I may have only seen part of the story, but in my version, I received a message warning me about devastating environmental impacts of current human activity, and was able to visit Atlantis to see what happened to them in the past.

The game is primarily focused on a sense of wonder and on hammering in the importance of keeping the environment safe.

The game uses a variety of colors and background images as decorations. I found these to be a little distracting, as sometimes they were so detailed or bright that it was a little hard to read.

I think this might be the author's first effort, in which case it is impressively polished.

This game was fun to play in the Text Adventure Literacy Jam.

It's a wordplay game based on shifting rhymes, and written with Adventuron. I really appreciated the extensive explanations and help early on, the colored text and the little hints really helped me navigate the game.

The images went perfectly with the game as well, having the same whimsical vibe as the rest.

Gameplay was simple in a pleasing way, good for the context the Literacy Jam, but there are a ton of accomplishments that I didn't achieve which diligent players could search for.

I liked the game overall, but I don't see myself revisiting it; it felt like a one-time satisfying play.

While I may have given this game a lower score, I think it shows markable progression in the author's skill over time. This the fourth Text Adventure Literacy Jam game by this author, and while it has some flaws, it is a complete game with hints and help and is reasonably completable.

You play as a witch with a sick kid, and you have to make a potion to heal them. You go around to different rooms, each with 1-2 items, and you get the three ingredients necessary to make what you need.

The parser is, I think, a two-word parser, as most of my attempts at PUT ___ ON ___ and PUT ____ IN ____ didn't work but 'drop' did in most areas.

There are some fun little twists here and there. The writing is minimalistic, and I struggled with the parser several times. I definitely appreciate the hints and the HELP text.

In this German choice-based game, you play as someone who recently died and has to prepare for the afterlife.

To do so, since the IT system is down, you have to talk to a case manager about hypothetical scenarios, and you're awarded points for choosing good actions or bad.

The points are meant to determine what happens to you after you die. I got 30 points and declined going back to get more.

They didn't really seem to come up again, though. I then went to an area with a Kafka-esque gag about waiting in a vast, empty DMV-style place waiting for my number to be called. I then walked through a door and the game ended.

The game uses AI art and ends with AI music. At times the art worked (several pictures had a consistent stylistic choice of shading using parallel lines) while other times it provided details that would be really important in a normal game but not here (like the first picture, which looks kind of like a subway and has a grim reaper in it), or had distractingly wrong details (like two burning windows where flames came from the crack around the window but none inside).

The funniest part to me was choosing to wait over and over in the empty waiting room. But the interactivity in the first area wasn't very exciting, because a lot of it was like 'do you go left or right' with no indication of what that entailed.

In this twine game, you play as the Administrator at a mining complex (I think) run by a conglomerate. You are the bourgeoisie here, barricaded in your room as you contemplate your sins. Your company is out of contact. The workers are coming to kill you, as far as you know.

There are a variety of apparent paths, though I only took one. You have three or four different people or groups of people you can interact with and you can choose how to do so. No matter what, many choices require you to be an arrogant blowhard, which makes sense.

I ended up becoming a communist and ending the game with an Adam Smith quote.

It was a little one-note, but enjoyable, and had me really thinking about who to believe and how to strategize.

This is a 10K word prologue to a longer planned game, entered into the French IF competition.

It has a compelling story: your uncle whom you've rarely spoken to writes to you, asking you to come quickly. Much of this prologue is occupied with travelling there while simultaneously making choices that define your background (I made myself a poor unemployed person who brought nothing along with the journey).

You soon discover that (through a series of events I won't spoil) you owe a massive debt. You encounter a few interesting people (I thought the neighbor and the ruler of the town were well-written), and then the prologue stops dead in its tracks.

This has a lot of good in it now and could become great one day.