Reviews by MathBrush

This game is written in Twine, and features you, a programmer, working on a secret government project when things go wrong.

It uses colored text for emphasis. The structure for much of the game is a small section where you pick 3 options in any order, then moving on, sometimes with a branch when moving on. The branches are big, with no coming back together in the end (essentially a 'time cave').

The overall storyline isn't bad, involving a kind of robot apocalypse.

There are several errors. One of the largest is that in the Twine code, many of the sections check the 'history:' feature of twine to see if you've visited a passage, but types the names of the passages wrong, so you never get to proceed unless you load it into twinery and proceed by yourself.

This, connected with the semi-frequent typos, leads me to believe that the other never played through the finished game or had testers try it. Having someone play through your game from end to finish really helps when submitting to a competition!

I agree with the other reviewer that this game's protagonist has problematic views. They're part of an overall bigger issue, which is that he is more or less a jerk. I've noticed when looking at choice-based games that while many people like being a 'bad guy', very few people like being a jerk.

-Polish: The game has gamebreaking bugs.
-Descriptiveness: The game's text was most interesting when describing the robots, but was otherwise fairly vague.
-Interactivity: The bugs threw a wrench in things.
-Emotional impact: I felt disconnected from the protagonist.
-Would I play again? Not until it's polished a bit.

I would definitel bump up the rating if the major bugs were resolved!

This game has truly great multimedia. I had some troubles with it (mentioned later), but I've never seen a Twine game at this level when it comes to video usage.

This spy game has constantly changing background animations that preserve a high degree of readability. There's a great score, and the videos/animations are just so crisp and readable.

The puzzles are honestly very clever, but again a technical mishap got me.

These were the things that I had trouble with:
-When I first opened the game, I had no sound.
-I restarted the game, but that popped up several javascript/Twine errors
-Then I restarted again, and the audio worked, but then....
-The AR thing seems to require a very specific set of technology that I could only solve with weird finagling. I had to (description of partial solution of this puzzle) (Spoiler - click to show)scan a QR code, so, since I was playing on the computer, I used my phone. But that took me to a twine game with a constantly moving link to click. That just straight-up doesn't work in Twine on mobile safari. So I copied the url into my email and sent it to my computer. Once you solve that Twine, you get sent to an AR. But the AR requires motion tracking, so I again had to email the url to myself so my phone could do the AR. This could all be solved by removing the text movement portion of the twine minigame you get sent to when you scan the QR code and replacing it with a different cool thing.

The storyline broke the 4th wall a lot but was honestly genuinely funny. There are some great lines here, and the audiovisuals and writing put together are very impressive. The tech troubles I had are the only thing keeping me from 5 stars.

Features strong profanity, some gruesome violence.

I rarely review a game without playing it to completion. To explain my omission in this case, I'd like to describe my play experience.

This was the second python game I played in this competition, so I had a better idea of how to get it running than I did on that one.

There are two ways to compile it: command prompt or web version.

I first tried command prompt and found it very slow, so then I tried the web version.

The web version has a several seconds pause between each line of text. This is somewhat frustrating, but not too bad. But the web version also blanks the screen frequently, and on a timer, so important text gets overriden by incidental 'flavor' text, making the text sometimes too slow and sometimes too fast.

The slow text, while a drawback, would have been manageable if not for the fact that:
-the same text pause happens when you make an error
-the game doesn't recognize most standard parser commands

For instance, you can't LOOK AT, W means WAIT instead of WEST and N means NEXT instead of NORTH. TALK TO is also not recognized. There is a HELP command, which lists helpful things to do, but in the web version sometimes typing HELP just gave me the environmental text, and HINT never worked.

So, much of my gameplay consisted of trying commands, getting errors, trying other commands, getting errors, all at a fairly slow pace.

The main game concept seems like it could work, but I can't proceed right now.

This game does a lot of good things, and really drew me in.

You play as a nouveau-riche socialite who is also a catburglar/art thief.

Gameplay revolves around two mechanics: conversation and puzzles.

The conversation consists of choosing one of three attitudes: Friendly, Direct, and Leading On (?) (I can't quite remember what they stood for). Most conversations last 2-4 choices and you have to use the feedback you get from the NPC to determine if you are making the right choices or not, so there is some allowance for mistakes.

The puzzles consist of both strategizing (often the choice is between being fast and risky or quiet and slow) and text-entry. I liked the last puzzle quite a bit.

I found the Gwen character a little annoying, but enjoyed the MC a lot. If you're a fan of Alias the Magpie, I think you'll enjoy this too.

Note: The many save files available were great. I decided not to try and get a perfect game, but I did use one save once to recall what someone had said many turns earlier.

This is a Spring Thing game written in Ink. In it, you play a young man in a mining town where a disaster has struck. There are several chapters, each of which has 3-4 binary choices to choose from, with several paragraphs of text per choice.

I'm going to rank this on my five-point scale:

+Polish: I could have sworn I saw some typos but not sure. Game looks nice, generally polished.
+Descriptiveness: I quite liked the descriptiveness in this game, the characters were interesting and the mine scenes were excellent.
-Interactivity: This is a hard one. It's better than many games I've seen, but in general it's very hard to figure out what kind of effect different choices might have. It branches wildly, but seems generally forgiving. In a perfect world, I would have hoped for choices that have some kind of pattern, so I could make a plan, but unexpected surprises, so I'd have to adjust that plan.
+Emotional impact: I really got into my character and my feelings for the town.
-Would I play again: Even though it branches a lot, I didn't feel a strong desire to replay. Glad I played once, though.

Like many of the Back Garden Spring Thing games, this is a demo for a much longer game in the future.

As in Bez's other games, the writing here is well-done, and the characters are well-defined with distinct personalities (for me, at least). The audiovisuals were excellent, although I didn't see any easy way to mute the music (for, for instance, taking a phone call while playing).

The idea is that you work at a store in the background of Cyberpunk 2077 (a game I have never played, so I may be missing some nuance here). You have a boss that literally monitors your thoughts and docks your pay when you step out of line.

I feel like the game suffers in how its message translates into interaction. The game has a good message which is completely reasonable (the use of surveillance tools by employers and other features of a police state are bad). But sometimes it feels like the game looks like it offers a choice but not really; your character is asked about your feelings but you are also told your feelings. I feel like it might be better to have one or the other: have no choices about how you feel but a lot about your actions (the way Howling Dogs or their angelical understanding does), or allow choices about how you feel and let the player stick with it, even if the consequences are dreadful (like Lore Distance Relationship). As one older author wrote, you can't act unless you're enticed by two contrasting things, the sweet and the bitter.

I don't think I would have played this game if I hadn't been committed to reviewing all the Spring Thing games. Downloading Python 3 was tedious and frustrating, having to type exact commands was rough, and restaurant sim's not my favorite genre.

Still, I was engaged by this game and played through till the end. You run a diner on the moon (or Mars, although I didn't try that diner), ordering food, finding what customers want, making recipes, serving it up, then taking care of the diner or hanging out with a friend.

I enjoyed the little narrative snippets when hanging out with my friend the good Doctor. She gave me lots of cool trinkets and talked about space.

Auto-complete was a lifesaver, although I have to ask, why go to the trouble of using autocomplete but then have so many customers whose names start with O? It'd be way better to have every customer name have a distinct letter, or at least spread them out roughly uniformly (unless, by a cosmic joke, they were uniform and I just got 'O' tourists over and over again).

This game was okay, but I felt like I was fighting the system all the way. The question is, what's next? If the authors were trying to learn python better or demonstrate their use of python, then that's great, this is a cool program. If their goal is to create awesome IF, I would ditch python and go with a specialized language like Twine or Ink.

This game describes itself well on the Spring Thing page, where it says:

"I’ve entered it in the Back Garden section because it is
not very large, it has had insufficient testing and consequently has some rough spots. It should anyway be playable through and hopefully provides some enjoyment along the way. A walkthrough is available in a separate file. Have fun!"

I found the puzzles pleasant and the overall atmosphere light and breezy, but there were several typos or bugs.

Overall, you're trying out for a spy type job and have to infiltrate a house. Puzzles are presented one at a time, generally, with each solved puzzle giving a clue to the next one.

The hints could definitely have used some fine-tuning, but the author seems well aware of that. I had fun, but could have had more.

While this game is unfinished, I found it a pleasant surprise. In format it reminds me of Lifeline, a once-popular game where you were texting with an astronaut and guiding them around a planet.

In this game, you have a nosy mother who is very interested in the death by fire of her neighbor. You give her advice as she learns more about the death and investigates.

I found the characters well-depicted and funny. The writing needs polishing, but it might be fine as-is since it represents the way the characters talk in real life.

The text timing and animation could use a little tweaking. Something about it seems a little off, making it hard to read.

Overall, I'm looking forward to the finished version! If possible, I'd love the final version to have controls for text speed, audio, and saving.

This seems like it will one day be a complex game about 4 different games competing in a simulated hacking competition.

For now, though, it is incomplete; all paths I checked stop when dice are rolled for the first time. There are sentences missing, fragments of code, and notes like 'TODO: add GRU and NK later'. The text that is available has typos.

What is available looks to be interesting and deals with a subject I'd love to learn more about: American election security and vulnerabilities that other countries can exploit.

The game is descriptive, but its incomplete state meant that, for me, it was limited in its interactivity, emotional enjoyment and polish, and I wouldn't play it again at this time.

If it were complete and polished, I would certainly give it a 4 or 5.