Reviews by MathBrush

This game was part of Shufflecomp and was based on three different songs.

In it, you go through a sequence of surreal worlds with strange and evocative imagery, like diamonds in places diamonds shouldn't be and hallucinations in an antique film viewer.

The three scenes feel mostly unrelated, except each ends with a 'hook' for the next one, linking into a loop at the end.

The game uses a variety of colors to distinguish the different scenes.

I liked the surreal feel and the variety. I felt like I wished for a little more elaboration in both the story and the code, as sometimes things felt a little rushed or underimplemented. I'm glad I played it though.

I loved the worldbuilding in this Vorple game. (side note: I'm not sure why it's Vorple; I didn't notice any graphics, sound or text effects in the version I played).

You play as a kind of shepherd for lost souls in an afterlife filled with ritual and restriction. This view of the afterworld reminds of things like Spirited Away or the Royal Guards in Bleach, with a variety of ritualized systems with specialized individuals running them in order to process the deceased.

Parts of this setting are reminiscent of the author's room in Cragne Manor (one of the earliest reachable parts of the game), which is nice because I liked that as well.

This game felt overwhelming at first, but the map doesn't branch much and most objects have one well-hinted use. I had the most trouble with the cake, but was happy when I figured it out.

A couple of things felt a bit underimplemented (like some text that fires every time you approach the statue) but I didn't have any bugs or typos that negatively impacted gameplay.

I like the atmosphere in this short Shufflecomp game a lot. There is a bunch of mysterious worldbuilding which is purposely vague, but it seems like some disaster has driven humanity (or a part of humanity) to flee to the depths of the ocean in order to survive.

You are one of these people, although you have experienced the surface. And you are in danger as the cables that connect you to your data sources begin to fail, and you have to explore.

I actually love the writing here and the neat use of variation in text placement. I also felt like the game had some significant choices early on. I was a little bummed to replay and realize it didn't matter, but for the first playthrough it felt really cool.

It kind of ends on a cliffhanger, but it also feels complete as an episode in the life of a unique being. Fun overall.

In this game, you meet a group of new friends and decide to hang out with them. Unfortunately, you end up trapped by one friend in their own treehouse which has a collection of bizarre puzzles to keep you inside.

I liked the balance of this game; it's complex enough that it gave me pause but forgiving enough that I could complete it without ever feeling really stuck. It has a lot of charming parts but also manages to be really creepy without ever insisting that you be afraid.

Gameplay revolves around exploration, information gathering, and object collection. The coding looks like it must be complex at parts, like with the random comments from your host as the play games or with the way the rope is handled.

The game isn't perfect; at times the layout can be confusing and its not clear which clues connect to which puzzles. But it satisfied all my criteria for a 5 star game: polished, descriptive, emotional impact (creepy mixed with pity), would replay, and interactive).

This game is one of the most unusual commercial Choicescript games. It's much shorter than usual (at 90K words), is intended to be replayed several times for the full experience (rather than just finding different paths), and is self-referential.

In it, you play as one of five friends in a kind of 'outcasts' group. You work a dead-end job with an awful boss, struggle with grades at school and the lack of love at home, and play a haunted video game with your friends that can lead to death.

In this game about a haunted game you can also play an interactive fiction game about a haunted game, which is pretty neat.

The game does have a mystery component in it, and replaying alone isn't enough to solve it, so once you're ready for it it's a good idea to 'get help from others' as the game suggests.

Clever concept. Only issue I had was that the beginning somehow felt hard to get through, and I had to try three different times over a few months to get into it enough to finish it. Glad I'm did.

I remember hearing stuff about this game from other people who were judging the Short Games Showcase. Even though that's over, I wanted to try it out.

It's a multimedia-enhanced, well-written visual novel that is (I think) entirely linear, but which has good pacing and has the amount of text per click and screen tuned well enough that it never felt like a chore to click through (also because the writing is compelling).

The protagonist is cool (a writer who is passionate about visual novels and indie games with plenty of experience and education who gets a shot at working on a popular franchise), and its fun to see things from their perspective.

But they're also problematic. At first, it felt like we were meant to sympathize with her 100%, but as it went on I could see the issues coming up, things very similar to ones I had in my first job(s). Amy, the hero, focuses her workplace happiness on romantic relationship with coworkers rather than the job. She zones out in meetings, feels like everyone is fake and not real LGBTQ allies, and doesn't bother to try the games of the company she's working for before getting hired. She makes radical suggestions to gameplay to the experienced team and gets mad when they won't make them, and when the team comes up with a project suited exactly for her skill set, she is upset because it's designed to be catered to the audience rather than her own ideals.

I know exactly how she feels, especially with having to write what others want than what you want. One thing that helped me so much with that was someone's advice about writing (looking up, it was an author named ferkung):
"It's just very "I know what works, I am a professional, if you do not want what I think is 100% right, then I can offer 80% right and meet your goals."" And as for hating that the team poo-poos her ideas, I remember a lot of early teams I was part of where I jumped in and criticized what they were doing, only to find out later that they had tried my ideas before and found failure (as I did) and just didn't want to rehash it.

So I expect the fictional Amy will be a lot happier if she survives in the industry and finds a team she loves (or grows to love the team she has). It's like a coming-of-age story for a working professional, and a great representation of one at that.

This game is written under extreme constraints. Specifically, it uses no quotation marks, including ones that would be used to give the game a title (so Inform defaults to 'Welcome').

So everything has to be deduced from the info you're given in object names and actions of those around you. Runtime errors are also a source of info.

This is quite tricky of a game. There are several layers of puzzle here. I solved a small chunk of the game on my own (around 20-30%) then went to David Welbourn's walkthrough, where I realized I hadn't understood any of the run-time errors.

Overall, this was a fun concept that was well-executed.

This game started off with some timed, animated text which I had no control over. It was on a beautiful starfield and the text was nice, but I was worried that I'd miss something and have to restart since I couldn't go back. So I was expecting that the game would be frustrating or hard to play.

It ended up being really lovely. Only the opening and the ending had missable text like that. The rest of the game was so thoughtful.

In it, you a post-mortal human, your consciousness uploaded into a planet-sized database that preserves your 'self'. The love of your life is also uploaded nearby, and together the two of you count down to the end of the universe.

Most of the game is about reminiscing over your past with your love. At times the choices changed in a way I couldn't understand; it seemed like maybe I could only choose 2 out of 3 memories, which is a nice touch, but I may have just misunderstood how it worked.

Overall, I thought this was sweet, and had fun trying out some of the songs it was based on after.

I was struck when starting this game by how lovely the visuals were. The colors were rich and vibrant and the style was kind of impressionistic, allowing some flexibility in how to interpret things.

Most of the game is a series of conversations with 'Elias'. I don't want to give spoilers, but I don't think that would even be possible, since the game is not definite about what's going on.

'Elias' looks like a kind of plant monster. The real Elias was your boyfriend, but this thing can talk like him and seems to have some of his memories and feelings.

You are someone living out of their car, where everything is, and no other person is visible anywhere in the deserted areas you drive through. It's just you and 'Elias', whom you've trained or asked to re-enact your past memories with.

The art, music and lyrics are haunting. I thought at first it would be a shorter, poetic piece, and thought it was coming to a close, so I was surprised when it went on for quite a while. The ending was transcendent in the literal sense, as it passed from clearly understandable phenomena to something more. I didn't fully understand.

The game is mostly linear, with some choices along the way that may have had story impact but felt more like (good) flavor. I felt like the goal here was to write a game that gave a certain strong impression or feeling of combined nostalgia and alienation, and I think it achieved its goal.

One thing that could have been nice would have been a way in-game to know how much of the game I had completed or a way to save (maybe there was one; I didn't know any UI) to ensure that I could plan to experience the whole thing at once. But it was a charming experience and I found it really beautiful visually, one of the nicest-drawn games I've played in a long time.

In this game, you are tasked with finding treasure and investigating evil in an old abbey. As you explore, you find things like casks of pigs blood, evidence of violence, and a library that is a real maze. Eventually, I realized that this all seems familiar, because it's based on The Name of the Rose! When I found the 'finis africae' it was clear confirmation. There's a lot more added, and it doesn't follow the plot of the book, so it's not an adaptation, but it's pretty clearly inspired by it.

I played this the way I do many older adventures: I wandered around seeing how much I could achieve for a half hour or so, then used the walkthrough. For about half of the game I thought, "wow, this isn't that bad. Just mapping every room and taking everything you see should solve the majority of the puzzles". Then I got to a puzzle or two that I think I never would have solved on my own, but Rovarsson's review states that he solved it by dying and someone else said something similar, so that seems fair.

The overall atmosphere is spooky and fun, just like the source material it was based on, but intercut with silly jokes in a way reminiscent of other games in that post-Infocom and pre-Inform era (like Unnkulia).

Don't expect anything to be described. You could find (hypothetically) a miniature alien with a tattoo of the Queen of England in the middle of kissing a moldy tuna sandwich and the game would say:
'>X ALIEN

You see nothing interesting.'

Most actions will say it's not understood. So for most of the game you'll be fine. There are a few actions near the end that are more complex, though.

Overall, a fun adventure and neat to see a game from an era that's not as common as others.

I had to play using the online link.