Reviews by MathBrush

This is the only game out of Choice of Games 123 existing titles I've played that I'm giving 3 stars to. Most titles are the result of years of work and careful oversight by a large crew of editors, copyeditors, testers, etc. that result in a game that is at minimum polished, replayable, descriptive, and having some kind of emotional impact or good interactivity, which are the criteria I judge games by.

This game is the smallest game made since Choice of the Dragon, is experimental, and is buggy. The size is due to it being one of the free (with ads) mini-size games available to anyone playing on the omnibus apps. Unlike the other mini games (Zip! Speedster and HMS Foraker), this one seems like it was written to be me small, with a new kind of gameplay not seen before in Choice of Games.

As an experiment, I'm not sure the game works. It has some randomization (so, for instance, going to the stats screen and back can change what day you're on). Each day is a journal entry, presenting a choice with yes/no options. These are either 'what faction do you favor' out of 3 possible factions, or 'do you try this beneficial thing that checks which of your stats are good' or a combination of the two. In this way, it kind of reminds me of Amazing Quest, a controversial tiny game entered in the 2020 IFComp.

If any of the three factions hates you, you die. The game is supposed to let you restart that day, but a game-breaking bug instead sends you back to the beginning of the game, leaving some of your stats intact which causes a couple more errors.

The randomization and binary choices make the game pretty difficult, with the bug rendering the game permanently in 'hard mode'. I did get to an ending.

I enjoyed the character Lookout and the two different machine animals I had on different runs (a copper snake and silver wolf). I love all the rest of Marquis's games, so I enjoyed getting more lore here about Empyrean, and the captain's mysterious locked room reminded me of Bluebeard, one of my favorite characters (I've sometimes considered Duke Bluebeard's Castle my favorite opera).

So, while this has many redeeming features, I can't give this 4 stars due to the fairly severe, easily reproducible bugs and with my dissatisfaction with the interactivity. But I think Marquis can handle it, as he's an amazing writer with some of the best games out there (like the Vampire Masquerade game).

I'm also looking forward to his next Pon Para game!

This Adventuron game combines high-quality art with fairly interesting puzzles to make an entertaining game. It's about 30 minutes long (for me) and features a lot of location art and a pretty big map.

It's not huge, and I generally knew what I needed to do. I felt like several times the implementation got in the way; this isn't too unusual with Adventuron games, not because it can't be programmed in, but because many Adventuron authors emulate an era where 'smoothness' wasn't as valued. (although looking at the author's itch page, they mentioned not being able to do more than VERB NOUN, which explains why a lot of my attempts like USE NOUN ON NOUN or VERB ADJECTIVE NOUN didn't work).

The game is definitely a gore fest, mostly through text (the images, even when gory, tend not to depict the bodies themselves). Lots of dead and mangled corpses are described.

You are late to a birthday party and discover a demonic ritual gone wrong. There are multiple endings.

Overall, here is my rating:

+Descriptiveness: The writing is vivid and clear. The cleverness is a good part of the game.
-Polish: see next
-Interactivity: There were some rough edges with interactivity, knowing what I had to do but not getting it able to work which was a bit frustrating.
+Emotional impact: Definitely creepy
+Would I play again? Yeah, this was a great Adventuron game.

This french game is written in Inform and reminds me a bit of Starcross, as you spend the first part in a spacecraft while approaching a cylindrical space station.

The game alternates between linear, exposition-based segments where people tell you things and unusually difficult or illogical puzzles, where being illogical is the point.

The game seemed well-implemented, and the writing was interesting. The author went to a lot of trouble to implement a ton of different responses.

I guess if I could change anything, it would be that the conversation near the end was no conversation at all, just hearing one side of everything. I wonder if some kind of menu system might be good here, since it would fit with the theme of that section. Anyway, I'd be interested in seeing the finished game.

I used the walkthrough the entire time, as there were a lot of words I didn't know!

In this French comp game, you are a robot that wakes up to be greeted by a cute little helper-AI that has a little emoji face.

In this Moiki game (a relatively new and complex engine for choice games), you have to explore everything around you to see if you can be repaired and fixed, as you are close to dying.

Everything you see, though, is rendered in poetic language, as someone has hacked you. A supermarket becomes a body, where you explore the heart, the colon, etc. and a repair shop has become a church.

I probably missed a lot of figurative language due to not being a native speaker, but the concept and execution worked really well. It can be gross at times, but is more often funny or charming. Great game.

This game is a money-based procedurally generated French twine game.

You take the role of a leader in the mafia who is in debt. You go on missions (each giving a certain payout, lasting a certain amount of time, and having a certain downtime, while requiring a certain number of gangsters), get money, and either die after 24 hours (which usually happens), or, if you made enough, win. Your debt and your savings persist from round to round.

It's a pretty short loop, and you'll see the same text a lot. There is some variety, and things change as the game goes along, but I think the main story just wasn't very compelling for me.

It was polished, though, and had a distinctive 'voice'. I spent a while looking at the code after, and it seems very complex.

This entry in the 2021 French Comp is a Twine game where you are in a kind of random loop for most of the game.

So you sail, then you can check your inventory or scrub the deck, then you sail, and you can get drunk or raise the sails, etc.

After a very long time (seeing every scrap of text 4-5 times), a big event with another boat happens, which can have several endings.

The randomness looks complex and the concept is interesting, but in execution I felt it was too tedious. I would have reduced the main loop to half its size or less so the action could happen earlier.

This game from the CYS website is a difficult, branching game about Coronavirus. I found it surprisingly informative and I learned some things I didn't know before.

You play as a professor recruited by the government in the early months of Covid to help them understand the spread of the disease and to make recommendations about it. If you do well, you have the chance of moving up and influencing public policy.

Part of 'doing well' includes doing well on difficult math questions about things like exponential growth and infection transmission.

This kind of math test hasn't always done well in IF before, with games like #vanlife and A Final Grind inserting frustrating calculations in the middle of otherwise normal stories. But in this game, the choices are fair, and undo is available at any time. It uses math to teach instead of punish.

That being said, it's pretty hard, and the questions involve policy as well. In my best run, when I thought I was very successful, I only ended up with 14/50 points!

+Polish: The game is generally well-polished.
+Interactivity: I'm not usually interested in 'only one right path' games, but it's fair and gives you a chance to try again.
-Emotional impact: The topic and mechanical approach left me feeling distant from the story, making the whole thing a thought exercise (though a welcome on).
+Descriptiveness: Especially good at putting difficult concepts into understandable language. I swear a lot of people should try playing this to understand coronavirus better.
-Would I play again? It was interesting, but it more made me interested in looking up what it said to understand it better rather than replaying.

This is a game in the french comp which is very technically proficient and uses figurative and descriptive language (which left me running to Google Translate more often than not).

You are a bestselling author who ends up on an island looking for inspiration for his next book. You have a phone with little minigames on it that remind me of Lolo on the SNES (mostly involving pushing sliding blocks around).

The island is fairly small, and soon bizarre plot twists happen.

I believe there is some branching in this game. In my branch, I found a minigame where you use a radio to solve a maze and another minigame where you visually push blocks around (like the cellphone puzzle) to open a door, but Jack Welch said he found a Towers of Hanoi minigame, which I did not encounter.

Overall, the story was interesting and it was complex, but I'm not sure how well the disparate elements tied together. Overall, though, it was polished, descriptive, compelling, and had good interactivity.

This is the last 2020 Adventuron Christmas Jam game I played, and it was pretty good.

There is a large map and several independent puzzles to solve, as well as many red herrings that add to the interactivity instead of taking away.

You are an elf who has to find a present Santa lost before catching up to all the other elves on vacation.

Everything was competently coded. I had a little trouble occasionally guessing verbs but not a great deal. The art and writing are good, but I feel like everything was 'good' but could go even further somehow to be 'great', like it's missing some final ingredient. But I'm impressed over all!

This is a smaller game with about 4 rooms but a lot of tiny puzzles.

The girl you're baby sitting has gone missing and you have to find her. On the way, you find that Christmas needs your help! But just for a second.

The puzzles are fairly small and mostly well-clued. The game makes it clear that searching things in various ways is the path to success.

The achievements are perhaps the best feature, basically puzzles that would otherwise be unfair are not part of the main story, instead giving you achievements to reward your curiosity.