Reviews by MathBrush

This game was entered in the Neo Twiny Jam, which restricts text to 500 words or less total.

This makes it hard to make a big, polished game. But this author managed to achieve that with background music, complex UI, fancy fonts and styling, etc.

There's not much time to tell a big story here, given the word limit, but there's a lot of world building that paints a bigger picture.

This is pretty good and I'd give it 4 stars, but I think that there's something missing from the story that ought to be there and I can't put my finger on it. I'd like to say it's more emotional complexness or a surprise or something, but I can't say exactly what it is. Very good, though.

This is the final game in the series, and while it doesn't pull out too many surprises compared to the first two, it's a fitting conclusion.

Like the others, you put in a couple of names and choose between two worlds. This is a bit surprising, as the main character of the last two games (Spoiler - click to show)died, but it makes more sense as you play.

I enjoyed the small trio of games. It was perhaps a bit overwrought at times, but it works with the styling.

Like the previous game in the series, this is a very brief twine game that allows you to enter names for you and a loved one, and then cycles between two options, each comparing different worlds.

I always liked 'two world' stories from a young age (I think light world/dark world in Zelda is what got me into it). This is short, but I like seeing the contrasts.

This game was written for the Neo Twiny jam, in 500 words or less. It is part of a series of 3.

The interactivity at first appears intentionally minimal, with the option to enter two names at the beginning and the option to toggle between two variations in a cycling word.

But as I went to write this review, I realized that that cycling word changes much of the rest of the story. It's clever and subtle; the piece is still slight, and must be so to fit into the confines of the jam, but I enjoyed this large-scale choice.

This game is essentially a love poem about a couple, describing their sexual experiences.

It is written in less than 500 words, and interaction occurs in two ways: clicking arrows back and forth, and mousing over text which expands the legible text.

The wording is poetic, and the UI is well-done and artistic. The game had content warnings, which I should have heeded, as it was much more explicit than most games with similar content warnings.

This game is more the hint of a story than a full story. It's written in Gruescript, a relatively recent language that is a parser/choice hybrid, created by Robin Johnson.

This game blends physical objects with conversational topics. What you're holding, you can talk about. If you can talk about something (like a name), you can take it and drop it.

The setting is some kind of alternate mythology, a fantasy world that has echoes of Greek mythology (some kind of box that wasn't meant to be opening, blends of snakes and people).

There's just not much here; I reached an ending early on that I thought was a time limit. I restarted and found out it only comes from asking a certain topic. I avoided that topic but couldn't find much more; downloading the (helpfully provided source), I see that that was the full ending.

So this game is pretty short. The concepts are good, though I had some trouble with figuring out how to do what I wanted. In a fuller game, it could be very fun, but for now, I'll be content with this hint of a game.

This game was written using ADL, which was the engine Ken and Roberta Williams used for some early Hi-Res Adventures (from what I can gather, though I may be wrong).

The game itself is a downloadable windows executable. It consists of a moderate number of rooms (around 10-15), each with either one interesting item or one interesting NPC. Nothing can be interacted with outside of these singular items (no scenery, etc.). All play consists of fetching one item in one room to get a new item in another room (like a trading-up quest). There are occasional typos, and the storyline isn't really there.

The author has admitted to having run out of time. Having more time would certainly improve the game; the author has mentioned implementing the scenery, more puzzles, etc.

For now, though, the game is lacking in polish and descriptiveness, and due to its unfinished nature lacks emotional depth. I'm giving it one star for its current state, but if the author ever updates it I'll definitely increase the rating, as the ideas in it are good, it just looks like it needs more time.

This is a relatively brief Twine game with some silly/goofy humor in it. It seems like the main goal is just to get the reader to laugh, like when you can choose between wearing a suit or a cardboard box for your big debut.

'Aesthetics over plot' seems right, as there isn't much plot to talk about. You're out of work and are going to a networking event, and you just choose how to react to a few different things.

I'm not sure how to approach this review, so I'll use my five criteria scale:

-Polish: The game has some typos, and I think decapitalizes your name when you type it in.
+Descriptiveness: There are some clear textual images that are pretty funny, like your character shouting out their plans at the party.
+Emotional impact: There are definitely some funny parts.
+Interactivity: There are some significant differences on replay, even though it's a short game, and achievements are generously handed out.
-Would I play again? It was entertaining, but too slight to replay several times. I did replay once to see how much of a difference there was.

I enjoyed this brief respite while playing Spring Thing games.

You play as a mutant pig farmer dealing with bikers. Life is kind of unfair, because if you don't feed your pigs, shovel their poop, and deal with bikers, you're gonna lose your pigs! And there's not enough time to do all of that...

Fortunately you have other options as well. And trying some of them out can give you different fun endings in a short amount of time.

I reached a point where I could pick between two different endings, and I picked a deathmatch, which was pretty amusing.

I liked the game, finding it polished and descriptive, but I didn't feel like replaying it in the end.

For me, I tend to choose interactive fiction that has features of escapism, and feel like I'm taking a break from reality when I play the game. That's one reason games like Violet threw me off at first, since, despite their quality, they reminded me of my real-life PhD pressures.

This game is quite the opposite of escapist. It poses (from my perspective) a single question: if you knew you were going to die, what would you do to be remembered?

Bez talks in honest and self-reflective detail about his experiences with pseudo-dementia, which led to concern that they would soon perish. Now, though, e's in a better place, so now we can look back and see how things were going, and how the game A Single Oroubouros Scale was developed.

Like a few of Bez's other pieces, this is structured not as a game but as a narrative essay, which different chapters broken up by hyperlinks. For me, the hyperlinks brought a definite sense of interactivity to the piece, because it was like finding clues in a mystery game, except instead of solving a crime you're trying to understand a human being.

I thought I had finished the whole project, and felt it was missing just a bit more that could help communicate the author's intent, but when I came to review the game, I found a poem (by the poet that his recent game Hidden Gems, Hidden Secrets centered on) which beautifully complemented the overall experience.