Reviews by MathBrush

In this game, made for Neo Twiny Jam and the Intentionally Bad IF jam, you play as what seems to be a woman obsessed with a man, with stream of consciousness thoughts flying around the screen as events progress to the breaking point.

The main innovation here (and I believe this was meant to be intentionally bad, given where the game was entered) is having the text and links be haphazard: some words tilted, others flickering, posting sentences out of order, links slowly fading in, etc.

The words are disjointed and hard to follow at times, which gives the effect of showing obsession.

My usual scoring system doesn't work too well here. On the one hand, the author has achieved his goals of being obtuse and intentionally bad, and has put a lot of work into it in a polished way. On the other hand, I believe others may not enjoy playing for the exact same reasons.

So, I will put a 2 here on the 'official' score, but a 4.5/5 for the author for the work put into this game.

This game is very unusual. It changes based on the calendar day.

The idea is that you are helping out at a shop in a fantasy setting and are paid in acorns. Each calendar day you can earn acorns by completing a task (usually selecting between two pictures based on a description), solve some cryptic crossword clues, and talk to the shop owner. Then there is nothing else you are allowed to do, so you can just wait until the next day.

I had struggled before with completing Ryan Veeder's Authentic Fly Fishing, a game with similar mechanics. Before, I couldn't put a finger on why.

Now I think I know. The issue is that every day I choose for myself the most important things I need to get done. During IFComp, playing a new game is one of those tasks. Finishing a game I'm in the middle of is important, too. But doing a small amount of work in an ongoing task somehow feels less important than starting or finishing, so I shelve it.

Then, days later, I come back to it, not remembering anything. When I play a game all at once or over several days, I immerse myself in it and focus on it, holding all the plot in my head as well as I can. Then I mentally summarize it to myself and let all the rest leak out of my brain, leaving only the summary, and whenever I think of the game, that's what I think of.

With this game and Fly Fishing, I never had a chance to digest the whole game. Because I played out of context each day, I didn't know what was important to remember. So I honestly have no clue how the game started or what the setting exactly is. I think we're in a magical fairy forest and the shopkeeper is a kind of animal, and there was a page given us at one point. But I couldn't say more than that.

Of course I could have looked it up for this review, but I wanted the author to get a glimpse into my deranged mind to see what one player's experience was like.

The cryptic crossword clues were fun, albeit hard (like most such to me). Upon my request, the author made a very helpful visual crossword that made it a bit easier. I also used some online crossword dictionaries, but didn't look at others' hints. The thing that got me most stuck early on was that I was convinced that the clue (Spoiler - click to show)small demon would certainly have (Spoiler - click to show)a different solution each time, and was shocked as I realized today (after two weeks of thinking about it) that that wasn't so.

Overall, the game is creative and polished, and provides interactivity that's engaging. Due to its format, I struggled to hold onto a summary of the plot in my mind.

The game also had a charity donation segment, but I'm not including that in my score, as I wouldn't want it to become a trend for games to get upvoted based on financial donations the author makes (or to get downvoted for not doing so). I don't think it's bad, I just think it should be separate from the scoring system.

This game isn’t really complete. It’s described as setting up a larger game, and that makes sense. Looking at the code, there are several blank spots and dead ends.

This is a fighting simulator where you train, spar and fight to win money and advance your career. Eventually you can retire and start over.

This game definitely suffers from maximalism. Every choice has a dozen options, and there are tons of stats and a lot of info flying around. Most things seemed conceived on a grand scale but not fully implemented. I had negative stats for several portions of the game.

There’s also several side things that are a bit odd (like an oracle that costs ‘only a little money’ costing $100,000). As it is, the game is like a store in an old Western, with a huge front designed to look like a two-story building but just a little general store behind.

It’s probably combinatorial explosion that prevented the author from finishing everything. I’d recommend starting a game with a simple model that has the entire process from beginning to end (so, one fighter, one school of fighting, one possible fight, etc) and then once that’s working perfectly move on to adding more options at each level. Then you can replay it over and over as you program to make sure the core experience works.

This game is odd. It’s a fairly short Twine game that boldly announces its lack of interactivity. And yet it has a lot of type-in messages in the game, offering you more freedom in input than most games. You end up at the same place in the end, true, but that’s true of almost all parser games, which tend to have very static plots despite the non-static puzzles.

The inputs require specific formats. At one point, I was asked to give an ordinal number (like ‘5th’) but instead typed 1, a cardinal number, and the game threw an error message.

It all seemed like a blank slate input-wise but with strangely specific messages in-game that offset the benefits of the blank slate without providing its own characterization. An interesting experiment, but not one that I felt a connection with.

This game was quite different from most IF games I've played.

It's a slice of life game about a man and his girlfriend/wife who live in a cheap flat. He works nights, she works days, and today, on the eve of a new millenium, he is sick.

I was surprised when at the end of the day, (Spoiler - click to show)I found my wife dead at work. I was even more surprised when (Spoiler - click to show)there was a bright flash and I woke up at what I thought was the next day, only to see my wife still alive. That's when I realized this game was (Spoiler - click to show)a time loop. (all these spoilers are for things that happen in the first day only).

Gameplay consists primarily of interacting with others through menu-based conversation, collecting items (all of which (Spoiler - click to show)persist through the time loop) and trying to think of ways to help your wife.

There are a couple of small bugs and typos, which I've notified the author about and which should be easy to fix, although I had an issue where after I restarted the game I couldn't load any saves, which might have been an HTML TADS issue. Fortunately, the game is the kind where if you know what you're doing you can get from the beginning to end in very few moves.

I loved some of the characters in this, like Vincent, and enjoyed the multiple endings. A few times I really couldn't figure out what to do; I used hints once, I think. But overall this game was a good time and really a clever idea that was executed well.

This was a short, lovely game. Your deceased father was a prolific painter, and he left you a choice of 7 paintings in his will. You can sift through the paintings and choose the 7 you want the most.

Each painting has a different style and emotion. The game intuits what you’re going for in your collection, and a segment at the end is based on that, with a series of illustrations (but not of the seven paintings you choose).

This game is like an eclair to me: small, simple, but exquisite in taste. The CSS was nice, the background music pleasant, and the writing such that I enjoyed each sentence.

There’s not much to do outside of selecting the paintings, but this is the kind of game that I don’t think would be served well by expansion; it seems complete in itself. I had a good time (maybe because I chose the happier paintings and it reminded me of good times with both my father and son, and because I’ve gotten into art this year and loved getting new ideas). I do think it would be neat to have the drawings of the paintings in-game, but I understand why they’re not there (hard to make, especially since they’re described as high-quality, and our imagination can perhaps produce a stronger effect).

This was a cute game, written in Twine with lots of exploration and some puzzles.

You are given an invitation to a beautiful and magical house filled with enchanted objects and creatures. Almost everything has positive and wholesome undertones, although there are some disruptive or angry behaviors.

The house is full of animated things, like skulls or piles of clothes. Everything you meet has requests, from helping deal with a friend to basic needs like food. The puzzles have variety; even though the map is compact (with only 4 big locations and 2 smaller connecting rooms) the number of different tasks you can do and secrets you can find is surprising. New links pop up in one area based on actions in others, and there is some searching (like a big library bookshelf).

I think I liked the bedroom the best, because it had a combination of creepy and fun, or negative and positive emotions.

At times I wished for a little higher stakes, but the ending resonated with me emotionally. Similarly a few too many of the puzzles involved mechanical searching through a list of things, but at least the writing was interesting in each item and the other puzzles had more variety.

Overall, definitely a fun game to play. The reason I like playing IFComp games more than a lot of other IF is that you can tell the IFComp games have a lot of work put into them and were carefully nurtured and worked on until they’re a real gem. The love put into this game is reflected in its quality.

This was a pleasant game. It has a goal it sets out to achieve and does it in a descriptive, polished, and entertaining way.

This game is a simulated bird-watching expedition in Pope Lick Park in Kentucky. It looks quite a bit like the parks near me in Dallas.

The highlight of the game for me is the high-quality photography of birds and other parts of nature. The framing of the photos, the resolution, and the colors were all really appealing to me. The description of the trails and woods occasionally felt a bit repetitive but had enough variety to keep my attention for a while.

Overall, a great game for encouraging people to get into birding. Makes me want to rememeber to take pictures when I see something cool in nature!

This game is one of those wildly-branching many-ending Twine games, kind of like For the Cats from last year (or was that Ink?)

The main gameplay is choosing some form of transit, having it fail, then switching to another.

I’m kind of torn on this. One the one hand, I think part of this game demonstrates my thesis I’ve had for a while that ‘simulating something boring/frustrating is usually itself boring or frustrating’. On the other hand, it has some pretty funny parts. Both of my two endings were genuinely funny. And it’s organized in a way that allows fun replay with repeating the same segment over and over.

I beta tested this game.

I have to say right now that I played this game twice, once in Chrome and once in Firefox, which I downloaded just for this purpose.

It is MUCH better in Firefox, where every character is voice-acted. I would really strongly suggest only playing it that way.

This is a long choice-based game with full voice acting about a character who takes up photography as a 'bucket list' item while the apocalypse happens due to a zombie virus.

Your camera purchase serendipitously leads you to find your former childhood friend nekoni online, who you reconnect with, ending up in a discord of former childhood friends.

Playtime is split up into 4 seasons, with an intro, 3 days per the first three seasons, and one day for the final season.

In each day, you'll hang out with your dog, have the opportunity to go to one of several, then hang out in discord, choosing which friend to chat with, then chatting with your friend Neko in a voice call. Your mom also might call.

If you choose the same place to visit each day, it unlocks someone to help you during a crisis later. If you chat with the same friend each day, you unlock a special ending centered around them.

Playing twice gave me really different experiences; in my first one, I hung out with a snail guy at the park; in my second, I hung out with a heterochromia guy in a coffee shop. In my first, I chatted with Artemis the most; in the second, Rainer.

I'm glad I tried multiple paths. One of them (the (Spoiler - click to show)Rainer path) unlocks author commentary on the game.

In it, the author mentions that part of the game is about something e visualized for a long time, and this is a chance to experiment with it to see what it would be like.

I think that explains a lot about the plot and setting. Some say dreams are a way of the brain coming up with 'what if' scenarios and testing them out. That's what this game (at least partially) is!

So there is a zombie virus, but much of the game is about the past and discord drama. The virus can be seen as a stand-in for both Covid and for neurodivergence or coming out. The vast majority of characters are LGBTQ+ or allies and respect pronouns. Bad things still happen (at least two really dramatic events occur) but they aren't the norm. The protagonist can positively affect the lives of others.

Thinking about it, the game can be therapeutic. Both of the worst things that happen to you personally are the kind of scenario you can think of in the shower and stress out about, so writing or playing a game like this can be a nice way to work through it.

I liked the voice acting; on this playthrough, the mother's voice and neko's contributed the most. The pictures were great; I especially liked the papercraft.

Not everything is perfect about the game; it feels really long, and it's not apparent at first just how much freedom there is. Due to the personal nature of the game, some choices don't feel authentic to who I imagined myself to be. But it helped when I realized something; I read the Great Gatsby earlier this year. I used to really dislike it, but once I realized that the narrator wasn't intended to be perfect or for us to always agree with him, I liked it much more. It's the same here; I don't think Yancy is meant to be perfect. I think part of the idea is to see what happens to someone who is doing their best but sometimes messes up.

Overall, this game gave me a lot of food for thought. It made me a lot more sympathetic to aroace people, as, while I don't identify as such in the longterm sense, I realized that I have a lot of those feelings right now in my life. And the game helped me imagine different scenariosin my life as well. So a lot of food for thought!