Reviews by MathBrush

This is an excellent creepy short Twine game made for Ectocomp in less than 4 hours.

It features custom CSS styling that nicely represents multiple worlds. You play as someone swimming in a pool that serves as a sort of portal to a darker (or lighter?) world.

There are 3 endings, one of which took me a while to find. The writing is nice and tight, the pacing is good for a short game, and it's visually appealing.

I had to look up the name, as a US resident. Apparently a Lido refers to a public outdoor swimming area, which makes sense since that's what this game is all about.

This is a fairly short twine game made in 4 hours for Ectocomp 2021 (Petite Morte division).

In it, there is an interesting take on viewpoint as the main text is from the point of view of your (evil) apartment, while your choices are your own.

There is a short part introducing the setup, followed by a puzzle part with limited moves.

I found two endings, but both were pretty depressing, so I'm not sure if I 'won' or not.

-Polish: The game seemed bug free, but had little in the way of styling (which makes sense for a speed-IF!)
+Descriptiveness: The gam isn't heavy on environmental details but has a distinct voice.
+Interactivity: I enjoyed the main puzzle
-Emotional impact: I felt like I didn't have time to really absorb the chillingness, and the two endings weren't strongly differentiated
-Would I play again? I feel like I got the whole message in the first go.

This is a Twine game about a book. The book is said to drive people to madness.

The book is associated with 7 colors, and each of those colors with different (dark) facets of life. You first read about others who took on those colors, then read the book itself, and choose a future, associating yourself with a color/facet.

There's a weird fact in writing that if you use too much darkness, gore, or sexual references, it goes right past being powerful and/or disturbing and goes straight to silliness/camp, and I think that's what's happened here. For instance: (Spoiler - click to show)YoU doN’t knoW True JoY. StiCk youR FiNger in your eYe, put a KniFe throUgh youR TonGue. The writing is so extreme, ranging from insanity to guts to strong profanity to bizarre sexual references, that it loses a lot of its effectiveness. I think it could have benefited from being contrasted with something else, like more specific, concrete details or reactions from the PC that show how a human would feel about this, etc. What we don't see in fiction is often far more effective than what we do.

Of course, reading is completely subjective, and I could easily imagine a review saying 'This was amazing! The variety of voices, the visceral details, I loved it!', so I encourage people to try it for themselves.

I played both versions of this game: the 'basic' 0.5 mb strippd-down version and the full 800 mb version with multimedia. The latter is definitely better, since the contrast of blocky white letters on black background makes the basic version hard to read.

This is a fairly short game, as typical for Ectocomp games, but maximizes its content by being choice-free. This style is sometimes known as Kinetic fiction, which draws its interaction potential from our own self-pacing and choosing to further the story. It doesn't always work for me, but when the writing is good, like here, I like it. Another good example is Polish the Glass.

The story is about a woman whose mother hates fat and pressures her to make a deal with a demon that would keep her skinny forever...until it didn't.

I've seen a lot of discussion of fatphobia online, with camps who are extremely upset with each other. The most extreme on one side get extremely upset at any online posts showing a person who's not skinny, while the most extreme on the other claim that obesity doesn't cause any health problems.

This game focuses on a gentler course than either of those extremes. Instead of telling us whether fatness is good or bad, it asks us to decouple our personal sense of worth from our body size; we can still make plans on decide what to do with our weight, but not to please others or out of shame.

I think that's an important message, since a guilt-fueled obsession with weight can lead to many bad habits that are worse than simply being overweight in the first place, such as eating disorders.

This is the third game in the Crumbs series by Katie Benson, all of which deal with a struggling foodbank and the effects of Brexit. All games in the series are speed-IFs.

In this one, your foodbank is one of many across the UK which are being pressured into closing by HappyHealth, a government-backed private company taking over health care in the nation.

You can call three people to discuss the foodbank, deciding what to share with them, what to ask them about. Then you make the final decision.

Each person seemed real, and the text was interesting. I felt like I had some interesting choices. However, there was a bug where I talked to Trudka and then Mom, but the game thought I had talked to Mika instead, so it looped me in talking to Mom over and over. I solved it by talking to Trudka, then Mika, then mom.

(Edit: In the latest version, this bug has been fixed).

For several years now, Ryan Veeder has entered a game with a variation on th name Tales from Castle Balderstone. Previously, these games were parser games that contained many 'mini games' with a framing story that you were being guided around a castle that was holding a contest or reading of short horror stories, with each story being one game. The narrator of the framing story speaks to you directly as a guest, and is usually Ryan Veeder himself.

This game spoofs that general idea, but instead of parser games, it uses Ink, Twine, and Choicescript (possibly more). In an interesting twist, this year's real Castle Balderstone game also blends platforms by using both Twine and parser.

This game uses the same framing device, except now there are more Ryan Veeders; in fact, everyone is a Ryan Veeder.

The overall switching between systems is impressive, but the game has numerous errors, such as doubled periods in the Twine system and a game-crashing mis-defined variable 'raven' in the Choicescript section. My game ended abruptly after the Choicescript section with a screen that I could only see when not in full screen but couldn't click on, so I assume that was the ending.

Overall, the game has funny elements (such as the stats screen of the Choicescript section). I feel, though, that it misses the mark a bit. Castle Balderstone is already a humor/parody series, so making a parody of it is like making a copy of a copy, kind of how Scary Movie made fun of Scream which made fun of earlier horror stories. Part of what makes Castle Balderstone games work so well is that, within the framing, the stories can be seen as completely earnest and actually work quite well as sincerely creepy or heartfelt stories; the games also serve as a combination dumping ground/testing ground for interesting game concepts, many of which are completely new or at least relatively uncommon in the parser scene. This game has a touch of that (with blending Ink, Twine, and Choicescript), but in the end I was left a bit disappointed.

-Polish: I found several bugs, including game-crashing
-Descriptiveness: The game is pretty vague
+Interactivity: I liked the switching systems and some of the mechanics
-Emotional impact: Like I said above, it didn't really grab me.
+Would I play again? Yes, especially if the bugs were fixed!

This is a Petite Mort game, meaning it was created in 4 hours or less.

The author has chosen two lovely Emily Dickinson poems focused on death and the afterlife. The author has turned them into a parser game as minimally as possible, so that looking or some other simple action is all that is needed to get the next action.

Most adaptations fail when they go 'off the rails', since people's writing is rarely as good as the original they're adapting, so choosing to be faithful to the original was a great choice.

Of course a game written in 4 hours tends not to be super polished, but I like the imagination here and the concept is done well.

This is a fairly short horror story set in space.

You wake up in a food storage area of a ship with all the food running out. You have to exit and explore your ship. The general feel is uncertainty, terror, and wistfulness.

It's a small game, only 4 locations. The writing has a nice creepiness.

Overall, it felt a little spare, a little far in the direction of minimalism, especially the final room.

I took a lot of ballroom dance classes in college, and I remember one of the biggest problems a pair could have is noodle arms. If the arms are rigid, the two dancers can communicate effectively, but if they're lose, dancers tend to step on and run into each other.

This game has some good ideas but has so little feedback. I had no idea what was going on until I peaked at the code.

Gameplay-wise, you wake up and have 3-4 areas you can take care of by watering, removing trash, etc. (Spoilers for ending and mechanic)(Spoiler - click to show)This lasts for 7 days, and, each day, the river grows bigger, removing gameplay areas unless you shore it up enough the day before.

For me, it was difficult to see any effect of my actions, besides the immediate ones of watering and such. (Spoiler - click to show)The effect of the river was indicated by the absence of old text, not the presence of new, and as I was shoring up a lot from the beginning, I saw few changes. This, for me, made the game more or less a tedium simulator. Even once I knew what was going on, I had no real reason to care for either out come, because I was nobody in a nobody land. I can see the thought experiment, but it just didn't pan out for me.

This brief Twine game has you exploring a forest after you accidentally (Spoiler - click to show)lose your gender. Lookin around, you try to understand and search for gender identity through metaphor.

There are only 4 or 5 choices in the game, but there is meaningful choice. The game invites you to understand what is meant by gender roles and identity.

In the end, the choice isn't all yours; regardless of your choices, the game will not (Spoiler - click to show)allow you to choose your old identity.

I found the game to be polished and descriptive, despite its brevity, and was in some ways emotionally moving, although I don't think I'll revisit it.