Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This game has you play as a kind of spellcaster desperate to reconnect with lost memories and lost people. I think. It's kind of hard to know what's going on; it reminded me at first a bit of Dreamhold, where you're an amnesiac in a magic place. But here, the character seems to know what's going on, even if we don't.

The game includes gore, the type that would be horrifying in real life but in text has looped around to be something cold, distant, and removed from emotion.

It's a short game. The main choices I saw were that you can pick from several different potions to toss in a bowl, each of which provokes a different memory. The ending itself did not seem to vary for me, other than one very brief early alternate ending.

This game has a bit of a different setup between the reader and the protagonist.

The narrative voice of the game is a sentient word. It addresses 'you', but 'you' doesn't mean the reader, it means a person in college that the word traded bodies with for a month.

The word is intrigued and obsessed with the human world, especially with things like color and visual stimuli.

The concept is clever, and there is a lot of enthusiasm that comes across as appropriate for a visitor from another world.

The longer it went on, the more I saw it as the story of someone who truly despises what they are; someone who does not like themself whatsoever. Because the word likes text least of all; it doesn't enjoy visual things more, it actively despises text.

There were two things that were a little weird about my interaction with the game. The first is that I felt like it was apologizing for itself a lot, which is weird because do you as a reader agree with it that it's non-ideal or feel sympathy for it? The second is that there was a wide range of interactivity which never fell into a rhythm for me; it went from wild combinatorial explosion to mostly linear.

Overall, I think it's a solid concept and that the game is just the right length for what it's exploring. I didn't click with all of it, but I did like parts and others might like all.

I played this game as part of the short games jam.

It's designed to show what life is like when you're part of conservative Christianity. You are given many options, but your options aren't always things you can actually do.

This reminds me a lot of families I knew growing up. I remember one family that banned The Little Mermaid because her outfit was inappropriate. Another family I know banned soda pop and trick-or-treating.

That level of restriction was generally ineffective; the people I knew that were most straight-laced as kids grew up to be the most wild when older.

So the game is very relatable in that sense. It's also pretty brief, which can often be effective in this type of message, but for me, I just didn't feel a big impact. It's completely subjective, someone else might feel very differently.

This game has some good potential in it, but is unfinished. It's the beginnings of a choicescript game mingling characters from Megaman X and Creme de la Creme, the choicescript game.

I hadn't played Megaman X but played the earlier megaman games, so that part wasn't too hard to follow. But it's been years since I played Creme de la Creme so I don't recognize the names off-hand; seeing what their characters look like or act like would have worked better for me.

I liked all the things built up around the game. If finished, I would probably give it around 4 ratings, but not all projects need to be finished. Great work needs a small series of 'aha' moments, which you can kind of force if you need to but are better left around. If nothing 'clicks' for the author with this concept, it would make sense to leave it alone. But it's definitely neat!

This is a short game entered into the Bare Bones jam.

It has no real interactivity and a stripped down interface, but that's kind of not true as it uses text alignment which gives both some variety in link clicking and is visually appealing.

But overall there's really nothing here except the writing. As a lifetime woman stan there's really nothing in mlm stories for me, but the characters were well-written. There is a big focus on concrete details like clothing, appearance, etc. The dialog feels natural, with a back and forth more like what you'd expect in real life or in a back-and-forth part of a play.

This is a kind of medium-length Twine game with some nice styling.

It starts out with a 'my parents don't understand me' kind of vibe and has the kid running out to have an argument with their current partner, which gave me lots of flashbacks to my most recent creative writing class I taught in high school, as that's the kind of story the better writers would write (the bad ones involved Ninja from fortnite and lots of helicopters). Still, I didn't have high hopes.

But then it pivoted into a thoughtful and interesting story involving (Spoiler - click to show)time travel that made for an excellent game. You have the chance to try a lot of different ways to stay with your partner. Your character has real flaws and strengths and felt like one of the most real people in a game I've read recently.

I thought the ending didn't make sense in-universe, but makes perfect sense as a metaphor, so I'm leaning more towards the second point of view in my personal interpretation.

There's some fairly frequent strong profanity.

I don't say this often, but I really just didn't like this game. It shows talent in making, and is almost certainly the game that the author had envisioned when they set out to make it, but that design is not something I enjoy.

It is primarily visual and graphical in nature, with text added as flavoring. The beginning is set up in a way that the controls are unresponsive, playing a harsh dissonant sound with blinking lights while nothing you do does anything, followed by a blank screen for such a long time I thought the game had crashed. Then there are some graphical mazes with some light text.

The writing is scattered and surreal, which can be an amazing effect, but I couldn't find any thread to connect it all. It reminded me of nothing more than hearing Captain Beefheart Trout Mask Replica for the first (and only) time.

In no way does this take away from the author's skill; they seem perfectly competent. But their intentions and my reception were at cross purposes in this instance.

This game is framed as homework for translation in a Russian lit class (or similar).

You are given the poem ( a famous one: Он любил три вещи на свете by Анна Ахматова unless I copied it down wrong), and asked to translate it.

The issue is that, like most poems and most translation, it makes use of idioms that don't naturally have a unique counterpart in the other language (in this case, English).

Choosing the meaning to stick with can drastically change the meaning of the poem.

I though this was well made, and powerful.

This game was entered in Shufflecomp.

It has beautiful styling, with an easily readable font and nice color choices.

The game plays naturally, and tells you upfront what stats are being tracked, which made it easy to plan out overall paths through the game while still maintaining agency. I liked that.

The story writing is very strong, talking about a young person and the strange boy they fall in love with at a young age. Only during summers can they meet, and as the player ages, they soon must part.

The two paths contrast each other well, and overall the story is scoped just right, with a nice narrative plot arc that rises, has a climax, then falls to a denouement. I had chills for one ending. Very well done.

This game was entered in ShuffleComp and inspired by Charlemagne by the Blossoms.

It's a fun game with both strong character building and strong world building. There is a magic system sketched out, even coming with a separate 'spellbook', and multiple modes to play in.

The game itself is small, easily consumable and not enough to show off a greater system or world, but it works as a whole, paced especially well through the use of chunks of the song lyrics. This allows you to get a feel for how far you are in the game, something that is missing from so many IF games.

The worldbuilding is a mix of spacecraft and sorcery, with heartbroken people running a heist together to stop some tears of gold. Pretty fun!