Reviews by MathBrush

I am so, so glad I played this game, but not for the reasons the author intended (unless it's a cool reverse pscyhology thing, then it turned out perfect).

I've played some games before about topics that were good and I agree with (like caring about trans people or not being racist) but which seemed like they forced on an opinion on you or hard rigid black-and-white morality. I thought those techniques weren't effective, but I felt bad writing a criticism since I agreed with the game's principles.

This game is about something where absolutely everyone on earth can agree it is good (the game is about opposing (Spoiler - click to show)kicking puppies). But it is railroaded so hard it sucked out all the fun for me. It showed me that no matter how good the cause a game promotes, forcing the player to adopt renders it meaningless.

The game sets you up to hate your boss as much as physically possible, and it just assumes your intent at every step. It's like the game thinks it knows exactly how you would feel, like that one coworker (thankfully I don't have one at my current job) that's always try to schmooze you and assume he knows you.

I didn't have fun, which I think is essentially the game's point. The game was shooting for an emotional impact of being annoying, and it worked perfectly, I am now annoyed. It was very descriptive. But the interactivity didn't work for me, and I don't think I'll play again. It was very polished. So, according to my rating system, I'm giving 3 stars, but I genuinely disliked playing this.

I am still a fairly prudish person, and happy with that choice, but growing up I rarely left the house and just read books most of the time, and went to school and church. I had some vices and saw friends and family doing extreme things, but it all felt distant.

So for me, when I stopped at a truck stop across the Wyoming border on a trip for the first time, it seemed like a frightening place filled with evil and temptations. Pornography magazines, tons of kinds of alcohol, t-shirts with wild slogans or charts comparing breast sizes, everyone smoking or buying chewing tobacco, tough-looking truckers. It blew my mind.

This game brings back a lot of those memories. You're a truck driver (who, as you discover, has recently [early spoiler about character] (Spoiler - click to show)undergone some major changes regarding gender), and you're about to drive over Devil's Taint, one of the most dangerous roads out there (which also reminds me of driving to and from Utah). You have to get help from biker gangs, a 'lot lizard', a smoky waitress, and more to fulfill your dreams and get ready to brave the mountain range.

The author used to write in Quest but has switched over to Inform, and I definitely prefer it. There were a few errors here and there (mostly in trivial things), but it was generally pretty smooth.

I still haven't recovered from my childhood shock, and, frankly, fear of the scary mountain truck stop. But this was a medium-ish, fairly entertaining piece of entertainment.

This Twine game is about chilling waiting for a tram. There are several things to explore in a world that's kind of a mild fantasy/tech blend, like FF7 or Zork.

There are a few minigames and things to explore, like gambling or buying equipment. There's a lot of fun unexpected consequences.

Overall, I enjoyed the idea. The game could use some more polish, maybe throwing it through Grammarly could help get rid of some typos.

The game doesn't really have anything tying it all together, which I think I would have appreciated. But it is a good game for meditating and feeling peaceful.

I played through twice.

This is a charming little game, partly poetic and partly puzzle.

You are an alien on your home planet and a creature has crash landed. There are 4-5 different locations you can go, each of which allows you to sleep and look around.

Time passes, and it's important to the game. Some events only occur on certain days. There is a nice graphical change when this happens.

The puzzle involves doing the right thing at the right place, and requires a fair amount of travel.

Unfortunately, this game makes the crucial mistake of combining slow text with gameplay requiring repetition. This means that if you need to check a location really quick, you have to wait several seconds to travel there, several seconds to click on a link, and several seconds to click back. If I were the author, I'd update the game to remove the pauses, as I've never seen a review praise slow text in games and many against.

But as it is, this was fun. The puzzle is simple but satisfying, and I enjoyed the ending.

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.