Reviews by MathBrush

This is a story-driven Twine game and is, I think, the first game I’ve seen by this author, although I’ve seem them around a lot recently.

It has nice styling and no bugs that I could find, and uses a variety of interaction forms like buttons for content warning, expanding ‘aside’ links and regular continue links.

The story is one of love and obsession, two people who meet and hit it off instantly, starting an intense relationship. Things devolve from there. It’s a story I’ve seen play out in real life, but there was an interesting twist here.

I enjoyed the time I spent reading this, which wasn’t too long, and I’d look forward to any future games by this author.

This was the next randomized Grand Guignol game I got. This one is interesting: a smooth and polished, mostly-linear adaptation of a short, sad, romantic movie called Schneckentraum or El Sueño Del Caracol (both meaning Snail Dream). It’s about a girl who is enamored with a boy and follows him to a bookstore, meaning to ask him out, but she’s too embarrassed to do anything but buy a book. Day after day she comes to see him, amassing a small pile of books.

It’s a good story, and I can see why they wanted to adapt it. There are a few branches early on to ‘opt out’ of the story, but it is otherwise a straightforward retelling of a touching story. It reminded me of the song Jueves by the group Oreja de Van Gogh.

I also wanted to add that the styling and images from the movie chosen for the game helped contribute to the atmosphere.

This was a short, well-written game about a horrifying experience being trapped in the darkness.

Most of the game is about your reaction to the things happening to you. The hardest part is the fact that everything is in complete darkness, making you have to react to everything without knowledge of what you’re truly experiencing.

It stays mysterious to the end. I did make a silly translation mistake in my head; when the game says you are surrounded by (Spoiler - click to show)miles de patas, I accidentally thought it said (Spoiler - click to show)miles de patos, and pictured the lights going on, revealing that your enemy was thousands of ducks. I laughed and thought that was fun, then later realized my mistake. The actual story was quite grim, and had a fitting ending

I looked it up, and the name has reference to a legend kind of like the Bermuda triangle where ships bearing rice (i.e. humanitarian ships with food) would disappear during the mid-1900s.

This is a Bitsy game, where you have minimalist graphics (only two colors per palette, for instance) and can move around the screen, with text happening when you run into something.

You’re a miserable kind of person who doesn’t get along with anyone, but the only person who can put up with you has invited you onto a boat. Once there, things are normal, for a party, until Ricardo messes everything up.

There are, I believe, multiple endings in the game. I reached one that had me exploring a river and doing a kind of trading quest. I thought it was creative and a lot of fun. Overall, it was short, so replaying shouldn’t be too bad, but I only played once as reading in Spanish takes some effort. Fun game.

I was searching through my wishlist looking for the lowest-rated games and this popped up, an old Ectocomp game from 2013.

This is written in pure, raw html, with the only features beyond bare text being hyperlinks and occasional bullet points.

So it is just a classic CYOA-style story with each choice leading to a different webpage entirely, of which there are nine total.

The story is a kind of surreal absurd one where you hear faint music in a hallway but it can spiral into things like being stuck listening to music for a googolplex seconds.

I checked and by the time this came out numerous twine games and other choice-based games had been released, so I wonder if the author just wanted a challenge to try to code something up entirely from scratch. I googled them and it seems like they still do writing now, so that's pretty cool that they've been trying new stuff out for a decade.

This game has been on my wishlist longer than almost anything else, and I no longer remember why I put it on there, but it was fun.

It's a mini-IF, made for a speed competition, one of the earliest I know of (held in 1998, the same year as the first of the long-running Speed-IF competiitions).

Despite being short, what's here is surprisingly detailed. You're a young girl with a crush on Randy and the two of you happen to be playing a board game together. While you hold the key to victory at any time, the other girls suggest you let Randy win so that he'll be more open to your romantic overtures. "Boys like to win," they say.

There are at least two endings to the game, which was a condition of the original competition. I thought it was a pretty grimly humorous depiction of a lot of guys I know. I knew this one guy in college who dated my sister and he would get so genuinely upset when he lost at card or board games that we would all let him win just to avoid his temper tantrums.

Overall this was pretty great. It's small, but not rushed. It can be won very quickly, but has a lot of great detail.

This game reminds me of a more HD version of Baby Tree, one of the games I most frequently show to people to tell them what interactive fiction is. It's also a minimalist game prominently featuring a bed and a child and some agonizing decisions.

In this game you play a single parent, on a bed, with your child interminably crying. All you can do is crawl around your bed, not enough energy to do more. It's a multiple-location bed, something I haven't seen much before. After finding some appropriate reading material (which is coincidentally something I've been discussing with my students a lot recently since it's assigned reading), you have some parent-to-baby discourse on your hopes and dreams and fears.

It was easy for me to vividly imagine this game because in some non-zero measure I was there. The day we took my son home from the hospital, I helped my exhausted and injured wife into bed in a dark bedroom, took a look at my son, and panicked.

For the first time, I realized that our life as we knew it was over. We couldn't just stroll out of the house to get Taco Bell or whatever. I couldn't just hop into the car to go see parents without planning. There was a helpless human being in our car and from now until the (it felt like) rest of our lives, one of us will have to be with that person at all times.

It was daunting, especially after the painful c-section. It didn't help that I both forgot the baby in the car when stopping at CVS that day (for five minutes, and panicked that I would get arrested) and that I let him roll off the bed and hit the ground after rushing outside to grab a credit card for my wife when an aggressive and convincing scammer called.

So this game really hit home. Our protagonist has to deal with all of that, but also alone. There are also concerns about whether they can relate to each other in terms of gender and orientation. I hope that all parents out there know that things can work out well, that there can be many good times mixed in with the bad (although for some people it really is hard all the time so take that with a grain of salt!)

This game reminds me of a more HD version of Baby Tree, one of the games I most frequently show to people to tell them what interactive fiction is. It's also a minimalist game prominently featuring a bed and a child and some agonizing decisions.

In this game you play a single parent, on a bed, with your child interminably crying. All you can do is crawl around your bed, not enough energy to do more. It's a multiple-location bed, something I haven't seen much before. After finding some appropriate reading material (which is coincidentally something I've been discussing with my students a lot recently since it's assigned reading), you have some parent-to-baby discourse on your hopes and dreams and fears.

It was easy for me to vividly imagine this game because in some non-zero measure I was there. The day we took my son home from the hospital, I helped my exhausted and injured wife into bed in a dark bedroom, took a look at my son, and panicked.

For the first time, I realized that our life as we knew it was over. We couldn't just stroll out of the house to get Taco Bell or whatever. I couldn't just hop into the car to go see parents without planning. There was a helpless human being in our car and from now until the (it felt like) rest of our lives, one of us will have to be with that person at all times.

It was daunting, especially after the painful c-section. It didn't help that I both forgot the baby in the car when stopping at CVS that day (for five minutes, and panicked that I would get arrested) and that I let him roll off the bed and hit the ground after rushing outside to grab a credit card for my wife when an aggressive and convincing scammer called.

So this game really hit home. Our protagonist has to deal with all of that, but also alone. There are also concerns about whether they can relate to each other in terms of gender and orientation. I hope that all parents out there know that things can work out well, that there can be many good times mixed in with the bad (although for some people it really is hard all the time so take that with a grain of salt!)

Presentation-wise, the game has a lot of rough-edges. Here is a sample:

Top of the bed
You have dragged yourself up, digging your nails into the bedcovers, to the top of the bed. Here you can reach what is on your bedside table.

You can see your phone and a glass of water here.

The baby looks tired. You are tired too.

>x table
You can't see any such thing.

>drink water
There's nothing suitable to drink here.

The baby takes a quick and wheezing breath, only to continue crying.

>take water
Taken.

The baby's high pitched crying turns even more high pitched.

>drink it
There's nothing suitable to drink here.

You feel your own vocal cords contracting and stinging, asif you are the one who has been crying all this time.

>x it
You take a sip of water from your glass.

Your baby's cries become even louder.

So the implementation could definitely use some work, but the message resonates.

I thought this was a touching game. I have listened with anxiety to news reports of famine and destruction of homes in Palestine over the summer, and fervently hope and pray for peace.

In this game, you are an olive tree that needs to be nourished in order to produce. You add more water and leaves to balance your growth, and then use it up to produce. Expending some energy to survive, and more to create the next 'generation'.

Simultaneously, outside of your control, a story plays out of a Palestinian farmer helping you grow and passing you on to his daughter. Like him, you experience hard times and lack of the resources you need to live. Each 'season' is actually a large amount of years.

Like the olive tree in the name, being a symbol of peace, I hope for peace for both Palestinians and Israelis.

I remember the Fascism: Off Topic intfiction thread from earlier this year and I had heard about this game cooking up for a long time so I somehow imagined that it would be a twine game with a fake model of intficiton where you participate in a thread but you have to argue with increasingly irrational people. I had such a strong imagination of what I thought this game was that I thought it was real.

Instead, I was shocked to open it and find a well-implemented (well, that part wasn't surprising) parser game set in a grungy subway with graffiti on the wall and an arguing couple. Where was the thread? What was the reference?

Playing around and examining things, seeing some well-written descriptions, I tried talking to people, and that's when I discovered the mechanic:

You can talk, but if you do, the game ends. You only have one thing to say, a one-note parrot's catchphrase. It might be relevant to the current conversation; it might not. It doesn't matter.

It reminds me of the Introcomp game Gallery Gal, where you have the superpower to turn into an art gallery, but only once, and permanently. You go through a normal game and choose to end it whenever you want to, crushing all those around you as you assume your true art gallery form.

Similarly, you can at any time interrupt the conversation of those around you with your irrelevant comment.

Because of my pre-conceived notions, it's taking me a bit to suss out the message. I had imagined (in my fake mental version) that the game was originally pro-discussion of fascism, and that we would be playing the role of someone who was pointing out the rise of nationalism in the world and that others would poo-poo our notions and shut us down. This game seems to be the opposite, where it paints out the discussion of fascism as an obnoxious interruption to others' conversation.

Whatever the true meaning of the game, it's well-put-together. My apologies to the author for fabricating a fake game from whole cloth and spending half of my review discussing it, and thanks for entering!

Well, it was fun to load up this game and see the font adjust itself slightly. "Bisquixe does that too," I thought. And it turns out this game uses Bisquixe! And a lot of the features, too, like hyperlinks and CSS adjustments. So it was fun to see someone use my extension, it made my day.

The coding of the hyperlinks lets you examine different objects and try out various interactions with them (some of it reminds me of some sample code Drew Cook posted a while back with a list of sense you could use; that example crashed in one interpreter but that interpreter bug has been fixed since then). There are also some more tricky hyperlinks where the linked text is very different from the action that you end up doing.

So overall I'm very happy with the technical side of this game. On the other hand, the story is pretty thin; most of the game is either a sudden bird poop-induced ending or walking past several almost-identical rooms. There are some kind family moments near the end but there's not a big build up. So I'd see (from my obviously biased perspective) this game as a successful tech demo that could be the foundation of an even stronger future story, but it would likely take a while to develop such a story.