Reviews by MathBrush

This game has a cute concept but needs a lot more work.

Right now, it starts when you are born and stop right when you get to school.

It will detail an event in your life, possibly unlocking a new skill. Then you can use a new skill, continue, or pick from different baby language like 'gaga' or 'ouuiiiinnn' ('whaaaahhhhhh').

Choosing to use your special skills generally seemed to have no effect except possibly on one occasion. The baby language was confusing, and the game ended very quickly.

It definitely has promise and possibility, but needs far more work before it is complete.

-Polish: The game is not finished
+Descriptive: The text is fairly generic, but it's engaging enough that I would have kept reading.
-Interactivity: Hard to know what options do, many similar choices
-Emotional impact: It was hard to engage due to all of the above.
+Would I play again? If it were finished. And I would definitely increase the score then!

This game is part of the French comp. In it, you and a bunch of other students accidentally summon the Gods who give you two tasks to complete. Once you do so, you earn a special secret from the Gods.

I thought the idea was generally entertaining, but the game could have used more 'something'. More options, or more details, or more focus.

Here is my overall rating:

-Polish: There were various typos at different times.
-Interactivity: It felt pretty constrained most of the time. The best part was when it opened up to a whole island, but most options there had the same results.
+Emotional impact: I felt like it was a fun, silly game.
+Descriptiveness: I thought the author had some enthusiastic and fun descriptions.
-Would I play again? It's pretty much the same each playthrough.

B-minus makes surreal poetic games where you have to puzzle out the meaning, if there is any fixed meaning.

Some of those games work really well for me and others not as well.

This one from a few years ago has a navigable 'map'. It's made in raconteur, and gives an effect similar to Twine.

The map is a house with three wings, each with two rooms, each with an object inside.

If there's any way to combine the objects, I haven't found it. The hint of a coherent structure paired with incoherent elements confused me more than if there weren't any structure at all, kind of like the famous 'Cow Tools' Far Side cartoon.

+Polish: Worked great, looks good.
+Descriptive: Very well-written.
-Interactivity: Not sure what's going on.
+Emotional impact: Some good parts in here, I liked the grave dirt and the opening.
-Would I play again? I'm not sure what to look for here.

This game is polished and well-done, but I think I admire the coding more than the game itself.

You play as an executioner of some sort in a dark castle. This castle seems to me like a prototype of the one in Eat Me, with a similar cast of bizarre creatures and vaguely reminiscent layouts. But castles in games tend to be similar, so it's probably in my head.

You're required to find a head for your master in this game, so you have to explore the castle, finding what you can and trading it for better things.

The complexity comes from two things: the styling (boxes around progress links, none around 'aside' links, glowing words to represent runes), and the way that each character has a unique reaction to each item you carry.

+Polish: Very complex and smooth.
+Descriptive: Rich writing
-Interactivity: While there are some clues, it felt mostly like searching over and over for the right person to talk to.
+Emotional impact: It was unsettling
-Would I play again? It was good for a short game, but I think once is enough.

This game is thought-provoking, and I don't know quite how I feel about it one way or another.

At its core, it's a character generator with 10 options per choice. It's very short, with more than half the play time (for me) dedicated to the achingly slow text in the opening few screens.

It's posited as a generator for the Lost Boys from Peter Pan. However, it always ends up with a darker twist:
(Spoiler - click to show)you are actually creating white supremacists.. The game ends with a scene from your character's childhood, now with a different shade of meaning from the opening scenes.

Production-wise, this is excellent styling, music and css animations, the kind you'd expect from the author of Babyface.

Content-wise, I'm torn. On the one hand, the feeling I get from the game is that (Spoiler - click to show)it 'others' the white supremacists by making them seem like creatures very different from us, the reader, someone with with we have no connection and no relation. I worry that that hides the deeper issues, as I feel like most white supremacy is hidden inside otherwise-normal looking people, and by relegating it to the 'frightening other' in media we neglect looking within ourselves. On the other hand, the narrative is designed in a way to humanize its characters and track their journey, so maybe I'm wrong.

The other issue I think about is the way some things are lumped together. For instance, I know (Spoiler - click to show)many white supremacists, if not the majority, use religion as a pretext. But not all people espousing Christian values are supremacists or terrorists; in fact, white people are less likely to be Christian than either black or hispanic people in the US.

Both of my objections are framed from my own perspective and stem from my own interpretation of the piece, so I can't say it's anything related to the author's intent. Still, it was interesting.

+Polish: It was very polished.
+Descriptive: The text is well-written.
-Interactivity: The slower opening was a bit offputting, and the many menus made me feel like I somehow had less freedom from so many indistinguishable options.
+Emotional impact: It made me feel a lot of different things.
-Would I play again? Technically I did play again once, just to remind myself before writing the review, but I think this is more or less a one-shot game.

This is a game seemingly designed to be inscrutable. The prose is dense and hard to comprehend, and the structure in the opening sequence is a series of almost randomly highlighted words that lead to musings on those words or the reason you selected them.

Overall, I’m not quite sure if the author succeeded in their goal. Was it contemplation about our place in the universe and its effects? Was it poetry? Was it a meditation on life? I’m not really sure.

And what effect did the Thief have on others? Make them believe only the Thief mattered/existed? I’m not sure what that means.

+Polish: I didn't see any errors.
-Descriptiveness: I found the text vague and imprecise.
-Interactivity: In the first section, it's hard to know what to pick; in the latter portion, there's only one thing to pick.
-Emotional impact: This game didn't land for me.
+Would I play again? I might take it for another spin in the future to get more impressions.

This is an RPG Maker game. Its goal seems to be to take genre conventions and turn them on their head.

I guess the real question is, does it succeed? I’m not too concerned about the format, as very little happens in the game outside of the text boxes and the player’s choices. At least in my playthroughs, it always ended after one specific action.

I feel like this is old ground. I swear Zelda games have made the same kind of point going back to the first Game Boy game, and so have many other RPGs (I swear the Soul Blazer trilogy does this at least once). The concluding segment reminded me (in a good way of Chrono Trigger).

It just seems a bit silly. And there are tons of pop culture references, including to Adventure Time and Lord of the Rings. So I just consider it a bit of fun. If anyone finds a ‘correct path’ that doesn’t lead to the main bad ending, let me know!

+Polish: I didn't find any errors.
+Descriptiveness: There were several funny lines.
-Interactivity: I didn't enjoy slowly clicking through interactions with tons of items, but I also didn't want to miss anything.
-Emotional impact: I kept waiting for the payoff.
+Would I play again? I am interested in finding a better ending.

This is a short game with two choices, each one being ‘support protestors’ vs ‘don’t support protestors’ (with a middle-of-the-road option in some playthroughs).

You play as someone on Mars who is in a relationship with someone who is either marginalized or very socially active.

I believe that all people are equal before God and I believe that racism is abhorrent. I believer that I am a beneficiary of a system that benefits white people over other races, and that change is necessary and requires personal effort from privileged peoples to stop practices that harm other races and foster those that strengthen them.

But i don’t believe the choice structure in this game is an effective way to communicate any of those messages.

As a final note, the game was polished and well-written.

+Polish: The game is thoroughly polished.
+Descriptiveness: It was well-written.
-Interactivity: See my thoughts above.
+Emotional impact: It certainly got a reaction out of me.
-Would I play again? I don't plan on it.

I had a bizarre moment when starting up this game because it seemed 100% familiar. I thought that I must have beta-tested it and forgot, or somehow seen it earlier.

Then I realized that I had seen it earlier, but in a blog (I assume it's okay to link, as the author links to their blog in the end-credits):

https://annwords.wordpress.com/2020/06/23/what-happened-on-the-12th-of-july-2018/

I remember at the time finding it a traumatic story.

This game is very well-done. It's not aspiring to be an epic game or a involved interactive experience. Instead, its a game that tells a specific short story and it does so very, very well.

You play as a teen who was recently hired at a store in the mall. Work is a little bit frightening (you're young and neurodivergent, as is hinted at), and things start to go off the rails pretty soon.

The interaction is generally a 'continue' link, a choice between two similar options, or links which 'aren't allowed'. Usually, this makes for poor interaction, but in this game, it's entirely the point: feeling constrained, or helpless, or swept up by events.

Multimedia use is subtle and effective. Slight changes in the background color, inconspicuous music. I was thrown off for a second by the fact that all links are approximately the default color for already-visited links (which increased my sense of Deja-Vu) but that was just a small thing.

Overall, great game, 100% effective (for me) in what it was trying to do. Crappy experience, though.

+Polished: Very nice effects, everything worked.
+Descriptiveness: I felt like I was there.
+Interactivity: It contributed to the game's message
+Emotional impact: Definitely!
+Would I play again? Yes, and recommend it to others.

I enjoyed playing this game after hearing about it from many others.

A shortish Twine story, its main strengths are in its well-wrought writing and its numerous special effects, which include responsive graphics, elaborate text animations (especially the title screen!) and sound. I especially like how it integrated the sound test.

As a story, I was frightened enough by this game that I considered stopping playing (it was close to midnight). As it was, though, I’m glad I’m finished.

A few people talked about the ending not being as strong as the rest. I’m not so sure; horror generally has two endings (hopeful and victorious but at what cost? vs defeat snatched from the jaws of victory), and while this game kind of mixes the two, I don’t see that as a bad thing. It’s a game I could definitely recommend to horror fans.

+Polish: Great effects
+Descriptiveness: Very vivid writing
+Interactivity: I loved how responsive the game was to your actions
+Emotional impact: Felt some fear!
+Would I play again? I plan on it.