Reviews by MathBrush

This Adventuron game was designed for the Text Adventure Literacy Project, and it seems designed to be safe and simple. Only two-word commands are used.

It has a fairly large map with around 20 locations (?) and a few puzzles, including a combination safe, keys, and examining puzzles. The idea is that you are exploring an old mansion and discovering its secrets.

There aren't a lot of surprises here, except perhaps the ending. There is a light puzzle that was kind of interesting, though.

I beta tested this game.

This is a Twine game with great multimedia. You are exploring a derelict space craft under the auspices of an evil capitalist organization. Something is following you.

There is a map on the lefthand side, different uses of text coloring and some impressive animated pixel art.

Gameplay consists of moving around the map, picking up items (you can hold one at a time except for a few special items) and learning more about the spaceship.


I find the writing funny and the art well-done. The map and the sense of movement makes this at times a fairly difficult puzzle game.

One thing I could have wished was for more items with easily apparent uses. Other than that, this is a fun, funny, replayable game.

This game is written using the Strand Games engine, a nice and smooth interface that was developed to 'restore' the Magnetic Scrolls games from a few decades ago.

I like the way it looks and moves, it feels very smooth. The voice acting option (I think it was different text-to-speech readers, at least for some of them?) are a nice change of pace after how hard it is to get sound working in Inform.

The game itself isn't quite as alluring. It's a collection of fairly tropey characters in a fairly tropey setting (a major, a dilettante child, a butler, etc. in a manor). And the puzzle seems to consist in just asking who was where and figuring out which one person was lying.

In this game, you have to get your dog to go outside and take a walk, solving a few puzzles on the way.

It's an inform game, and I believe it's the first one by this author. There are a lot of things here that are common to first games: a detailed depiction of mundane tasks in a familiar setting (here, an apartment/house), some white space errors, puzzles that are interesting but perhaps underimplemented.

I feel like the author's writing voice has a lot of personality, and I bet that the feedback from this game will help the next game be even better. Right now, though, there's just not much there.

This game seemed at first like many, many other Twine games I've played where someone reflects on their childhood and a person they had a major crush on, only to revisit their feelings as an adult.

But this game turns out to be different in several good ways. First, it's nice visually, with well-thought-out font use, colors and spacing. the writing is descriptive and interesting, with few typos. And the choice structure is actually meaningful, the game putting real stakes on its choices and remembering them (although I encountered a bug where (Spoiler - click to show)I decided not to cut the bike tires but Luke remembered me as doing so). And the relationship with your friend is kept completely real and easy to visualize while also being ambiguous and interesting.

If I had any complaint it's that I thought it ended in act 4 and then had 2 acts after. I think having either a progress bar or other indicator of time passage, or having more of an emotional rise, climax, and denouement might make that easier.

This game has timed text, which usually is a major problem in games, but this game's text was pretty much exactly in sync with my reading, so it didn't bother me.

This game takes on a social problem: America has millions of empty homes but the homeless aren't allowed to live in them.

In this game, you play a homeless couple who breaks into an ultra-mansion. There are tons of rooms, and you can explore them for a long time.

Almost all interactions are choosing which room to see next. There are some fun self-referential moments (like finding a CYOA book and talking about how much you disliked them when younger), but the vast bulk of the game is marveling at the excess and poor taste of the rich owners.

It's hard to sympathize with the PC as they seem more motivated by envy than by higher ideals.

There were a few minor typos here and there (I think there was a stray 'a', like the phrase 'the a'). Overall, though, the writing was vivid. While this game seems to be a complete idea, I wouldn't mind spending more time with these characters in this world.

This short game has you on a narrow roadway with obstacles on either side, and you have to find a way to get free.

You are carrying several metaphorical objects (a hope, a fear, etc.). There is a single NPC to talk to, and two (that I found) possible endings.

I like the idea of this game, but I didn't feel satisfied with specific elements of the implementation and the writing.

Implementation wise, it seems it just needs a little more polish, like the formatting of the ending text or the whitespace at the end of some of the paragraphs.

Writing-wise, for me personally it was a little too abstract. I have the same feeling with many games, including some of Andrew Schultz's work, which deals with similar concepts of overcoming personal challenges and regrets. For me, it's easier to grab onto more specific examples and wording than to universally applicable truths.

-Polish: The game could use a bit more polish.
-Descriptiveness: I felt that the game could use more specificity.
+Interactivity: I liked the gameplay.
-Emotional impact: For some reason, the situations in the game didn't resonate with me.
+Would I play again? I played through twice just to see a different ending.

I've had a lot of friends and students with autism, and they're all different, so it's nice to see a well-described point of view from a new author.

In this visual novel, you play as a sort of guiding friend/telepathic connection to a young adult with autism who is travelling alone to a concert in Hungary.

Interestingly, the visuals respond to the PC's feelings, turning more colorful if you navigate situations well.

There are some good explanations of Spoon Theory and features a lot of things that I've seen in other literature by and about autistic people (like using sensory inputs such as music or textured objects for soothing).

Storywise, I felt like I had some action, the varying amounts of detail in the pictures was fun. This game is incomplete, but I'd like to see it finished.

I found this game somewhat stressful, as it reminds me of writing my big novel.

In this Twine game, you sit down and have to focus and begin typing your grand novel, kind of like Violet, where you have to sit down and type out 1000 words of your dissertation. Also like Violet, the main goal is to overcome your distractions.

The similarities end there. This game is fairly short, and the main gameplay doesn't have the puzzle (although the hints in the download show (Spoiler - click to show)how to solve a hidden puzzle to get a true ending).

The struggle of writing is real, and a lot of this game is relatable. Although it focuses on how hard it is to get started, for me, it was hard every day to pick up where I had left off.

While I found the game well-done, with a nice opening animation, there were some things that could be improved. Some paragraphs were spaced apart, while some were not, for instance. And, overall, it felt like it needed just a little more 'something', a 'je ne sais quoi'; I know that's vague, but that's the only way I can put it in words.

This game has some great art, and played smoothly in the downloaded version.

This is a pure time cave, i.e. a game where every choice gives a different branch and none of them ever converge.

In fact, the first choice between 3 characters gives entirely different games with seemingly no connection to each other (I got 1 ending for the first 2 and 4 for the last one, and didn't see any connection).

They're mostly about heartfelt and kind coming-of-age stories in a fantasy world with a lot of fantasy races and animals.

+Polish: The game was polished. Occasionally the text would glitch then fix itself, but I think that was just a loading thing.
+Descriptiveness: The story, setting, and characters were distinct and vivid.
+Emotional impact: I thought the game was cute.
-Interactivity: The branching structure gets exhausting after a while, because more and more time is spent re-reading the same text.
-Would I play again? I didn't finish getting all the endings and don't feel like I need to.