Reviews by MathBrush

This is a visually very nice game, and funny, too.

It's a short twine game where you play as a crow with an attitude and intentionally bad spelling (basically 'no u' times 100). Your attitude, is, in fact, measured, and you 'win' by getting the highest attitude.

We played this in the Seattle If Meetup and I played it after, as well.

It's fairly brief, and amusing. It seems to have some kind of randomization or procedural generation, as you can get different events on different playthroughs.

There's some mild profanity. Overall, it's not too long so if the above sounds appealing, try it out.

This is an interesting experiment, reminicscent of Heaven's Vault or Short's First Draft of the Revolution, but I think it falls a bit short from both.

You plays as a translator, given glyphs in the ancient language of Asemia. Clicking on glyphs gives you other glyphs. After you go to the next page or two, a translation appears.

Asemia was a place of hard things, where people died and soldiers destroyed. The music and the extra-translatory dialogue also deals with this.

To me, the biggest difficulty I had was in the obfuscatory interactivity. What does clicking do? The same glyphs and stories came up multiple times, sometimes with different translations, and sometimes with the same. Do my actions, cycling through glyphs, change the output, or do you automatically get different results each time?

And it just doesn't make sense from a translation viewpoint. The glyphs you cycle through are very distinct from each other, so it's not like you are trying to guess what different words are in the language. It would make more sense to cycle through the translation of a fixed glyph, like Heaven's Vault does.

I'm sure there could be a deeper meaning to everything, but I didn't find it. Lovely visuals and graphics, though, and the writing is solid.

This is a compact twine game where you attempt to go about your day despite a minor annoyance.

The bulk of the game is a long loop about dealing with the annoyance.

Quite a bit of it reminds me of my friends with sensory processing disorders including certain forms of autism, where they have to go to other rooms to avoid noise or where head-cancelling headphones.

Some of it, though, seems more directly tied to OCD, like repetitive hand-washing behaviors.

Its overall message about how to deal with these things isn't something I can personally vouch for; however, the techniques described do seem related to those I've used to manage depression, so I could see them being valid in this situation.

Overall, I think the structure is interesting, but I feel like it could have been developed a bit more, hit home more.

This game's tone reads like a game parody of Neil deGrasse Tyson's 'well, actually' twitter posts (like when he pointed out that leap day isn't the earth actually leaping). The tone is very heavy-handed and smug, with the game literally telling you 'you made a wrong choice, make better choices in the future'.

I'm sure it's a parody, but a well-made simulation of an annoying thing is still an annoying thing.

Otherwise the writing is sharp and word choices and images are clever.

Message-wise, I think the concept of humanity eating bugs is just fine; I love shrimp, and shrimp is more revolting-looking than other insects. But it helps that I was fed shrimp at an early age; I got used to it, and I'm not used to bugs.

Overall interesting, but, to me, too successful at imitating an annoying person.

This is a short, one-move game from the author of the iterative Locked Door series.

You are alone with a hideous monster on a planet, alone and marooned. Most actions end the game immediately, with some kind of effect, while others give you more info.

A lot of work went into this. Decompiling this, there are a ton of verbs being implemented here.

Many of the results are similar to each other, but at least they're coherent. I got a Sisyphan vibe from the game (maybe projecting; I like Sisyphan things).

I can say I found it pretty funny when I realized what the general theme was. Worth trying out due to its short, easy-to-try length.

Whew! This game brought back a lot of memories.

It's a game that doesn't take too long to play. You are a person with an abusive significant other, Alex (I read the protagonist as coded female and the antagonist as coded male, but the game is purposely ambiguous and uses they/them pronouns for Alex).

Alex does things that are expressed as being for your best interest, but really they are for their own selfish interest. Keeping your away from your friends and family on social media , moving to be closer to their family but away from your friends and family, constantly worried that you will cheat (yep), shaming you for interests they're not into. All of which I've experienced in real life.

Actually, contemplating this game made me zone out for about an hour, thinking about things, and I wrote a big personal essay about it and realized I never finished this review. I guess I'll have to give this game points for emotional impact, that's sure. I found the choice structure not as compelling, but I can't think of any recommendations for it. It has real interactivity and limited options, but I feel it could be somehow pushed a little more. Overall, a game that has unsettled me to my core.

This is a Bitsy game with 6 different main paths. Bitsy is a visual equivalent to Twine, using simple graphics and arrow keys, although this particular game has some more elaborate images.

Instead of moving a character like most Bitsy games, you navigate a conversation menu. It's a rainy day, and you walk in to see an old friend you haven't seen through years. Different conversations seem to give completely different friends; or do they? There's another thread at the end which is interesting.

Overall, I found this game polished, descriptive, and the interactivity matched its length. I don't think I'd play it again, but it was emotionally interesting to me.

This is an entrant into the 2022 French IFComp. It is a prologue that covers the first scene or so of Mozart's opera Cosi Fan Tutte.

It's very appealing visually, with a detailed backdrop and avatars for speakers.

Overall, I found it solid, but I felt less capable of making decisions that change the story. Most options were about reacting, with a few important actions. I wasn't sure if anything was being tracked, but at the end it listed my stats and showed that I had changed things a bit. It might be good to have a way to check that more often in the finished game!

This series of games starts with a simple puzzle in the first entry (just a locked door) but adds puzzles every time.

This entry is quite complex compared to earlier entries, with a broad map, numerous tools and items, an NPC, easter eggs, etc.

However, some bugs and typos have crept in, like 'bathroom' being lower case and some synonyms not being set (like for the (Spoiler - click to show)safe, where 'set' and 'turn' don't work but 'turn' does).

So the game isn't polished, but it is more descriptive and compelling than the others.

This version of the Locked Door series (which adds more and more puzzles to the original) introduces the first real puzzle, although its fairly simple.

Rather than the original two rooms, there are now 5, with one room included in another.

There was a bug in this one, where trying to (Spoiler - click to show)open the crate without (Spoiler - click to show)the crowbar will (Spoiler - click to show)increase the score and partially act like you have the crowbar but not open. Given the smallness of the game, I think it could have been error-free.