Reviews by MathBrush

Interesting that I’d play two games within a few days of each other about inhuman creatures who gain action verbs from their surroundings in order to move around and interact with each others. Also interesting that, outside of that similarity, these games are so different (the other game is Stage Fright).

I played the English version of this game, as while I enjoy playing French games, I tend to understand much better in my native language.

This game has a cool retro vibe (it uses the Decker engine) and has an eyeball that looks wherever your cursor is.

You yourself are some kind of monstrous being with unusual powers. The game is short and the powers are the most fun part so I won’t spoil anything here. I found two endings, both of which felt appropriate for my character. Short and fun.

This is a military mermaid exploration horror game, a genre I didn’t know existed until now.

This is also a choicescript game of around 25K words (according to the author), which can be played in less than an hour.

In it, you are a captive mermaid used by the government to carry out dangerous missions. Several divers have died in a certain area, and it’s your job to figure out what can go wrong. Your greatest tool is your voice, which can injure or soothe others.

You have to explore a mysterious shipwreck and deal with a number of frightening phenomena.

I liked the storyline and the various creatures a lot here. And there was plenty to do, like choosing what to explore first, deciding how risky to be when encountering new dangers, etc.

I sometimes found my attention wandering, including one scene mentioning a splinter that I reread two or three times. Other times I was very locked in, usually with the things unique to being a mermaid (like using the voice or dealing with the collar around your neck).

I like Jacic’s games in general but I think this one is especially good; the aquatic setting is the perfect setting for the author’s strange creatures and creepy atmosphere.

I forgot that I never reviewed this, though I played it several days ago!

This game is a Bitsy game, meaning it has two-color low-resolution pixel graphics with simple two-frame animations, and text that pops up as you run into things. This particular game is a macabre and darkly humorous take on the Wizard of Oz.

You play as Dorothy whose dog is lost. The Wizard the Oz is a cruel necromancer reigning over the land and the only one that might be able to help you find your dog. The scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion take on far different forms here.

The game is a little tricker than most Bitsy games, requiring some fetch quests and some intuition on where to go to solve each problem. The ending was both positive and negative; it reminded me of the ending of Sister Location in the FNAF franchise, with its colorful and cheery tone but a 'not quite right' ending for our protagonists.

This is a story-driven Twine game and is, I think, the first game I’ve seen by this author, although I’ve seem them around a lot recently.

It has nice styling and no bugs that I could find, and uses a variety of interaction forms like buttons for content warning, expanding ‘aside’ links and regular continue links.

The story is one of love and obsession, two people who meet and hit it off instantly, starting an intense relationship. Things devolve from there. It’s a story I’ve seen play out in real life, but there was an interesting twist here.

I enjoyed the time I spent reading this, which wasn’t too long, and I’d look forward to any future games by this author.

This game by the Stelzers follows in the footsteps of A Familiar Problem last year (maybe it’s in the same universe?). You play as a homonculus with a strictly limited set of available actions (just 1!). That 1 action, though, has the effect of gaining more actions, including navigation and interfering with others.

Story-wise, is kind of a pastiche of mainly Phantom of the Opera along with Shakespeare, other plays, and fantasy elements.

Gameplay-wise, it feels like a growing power-fantasy. You start out with so many limitations that it feels like the world will just always be mostly inaccessible, but it ends up growing until you can do quite a few amazing feats.

I had a great time with this fun game. My only regret is that one part near the end is written in iambic meter, but some lines have 8 syllables and some have 10 and I couldn’t see any pattern or reason why. Even still, that part was fun, it was just something minor that stuck out to me.

I think most people will like this, and the intro flows well; I think it was the best intro for my tastes out of all Stelzer-made games.

This is a horror Twine game that plays on the fear: what if you were alone, far from society, with a man who wanted to exert complete power over you, leaving you no freedoms, nowhere to run? Also, what if that man and his family were also super messed up and wanted to mess you up, too?

This is an effective horror tale. I could feel the helplessness of the protagonist and the disturbing nature of the family’s ‘hobbies’.

I played through twice, once super quickly to estimate length and check for content warnings and another for real gameplay. I got two pretty different endings, so there is some real freedom here (ironic, given our protagonist’s plight).

There were some occasional grammar or spelling oddities, similar to the amount I tend to have in my writing. Other than that, the game seemed highly polished.

This is a Larry Horsfield game, and his games follow a pretty specific pattern. There are 32 games listed on IFDB and 20 listed in-game as part of the series this game is in (and side-series). Larry is a prolific author of large games; if an author’s work was measured by the total sum of all moves necessary to win all games, he might be near the top (this game, while large by usual standards, is comparatively small, requiring only a few hundred moves rather than the thousands of some of his other games).

Like the others, this is an ADRIFT game, and it shares with them the classic opening castle setup that I now have memorized (a suite of rooms where extremely important items must be found by looking under beds or, a favorite place, on the mantelpiece of a fireplace), a building layout of east-west hallways connected by vertical stairs, the dungeon in the middle of the bottom floor, a long row of dungeon cells (which I was amused to see were being refurbished into guest rooms). Then a portal to a faraway land where we wander through a forest, town and castle.

I followed my normal protocol of playing as far as I can (in this case, I got to the dungeon with the ringbolts and got stuck) and then using the walkthrough for the rest. The game (as it says in the opening screen) requires you to frequently look on doors or at parts of the room not in the initial description (like walls or roof beams). That’s not unreasonable, but there are dozens or hundreds of rooms each with a lot of furniture. I went through tons of rooms looking at each door and closing each door and looking under every bed and every table. I later discovered my error was that I should have, in one specific room, (Spoiler - click to show)looked behind a door.

Deviating from the walkthrough can cause problems. I got a pop-up ADRIFT error when I tried to DROP ALL because I had been carrying a non-droppable item since the beginning of the game (the (Spoiler - click to show)fossy whereas the walkthrough had instructed me to put it in my pocket. Similarly, I couldn’t (Spoiler - click to show)CLEAN or RUB a tombstone, I could only CLEAR the IVY on it. The games are completable without the walkthrough, as in other ways they are eminently fair (most areas don’t have much available so you can exhaustively search everything), it just requires quiet patience, a sense of enjoyment from trying different parser commands to discover the right ones (a VERBS list is helpful) and the willingness to try very many unhelpful searches while waiting to find the rare diamonds in the rough where it is valuable.

None of this is meant as criticism for the author to follow; with 20 games into the series and decades of stories in the universe, it’s clear this is a labor of love that will be made exactly as the author wants. It’s just a general description for players new to the Lazzahverse. I’ve never regretted playing these games, and generally give them fairly high ratings, because they do have a sense of adventure and of a living, evolving universe.

This was a great game! Both cute and genuinely creepy, with the two facets playing off of each other.

It’s a parser game where you play as a bug, and everyone else around you is a bug in a bug society with jobs, writing, culture, etc. While bug-based media has existed for decades, I pictured everything in the Hollow Knight art style as that’s the bug-based media I’ve seen the most of recently.

Unusually for a parser game, it has multiple paths to progress the story and a variety of achievements. However, it keeps the classic parser game play loop of exploration, grabbing items, and solving puzzles.

You’ve come back from a long trip and you’re just starving. Strangely, some of your fellow bugs are missing. Your goals are to sate your hunger and investigate the disappearances.

I had a lot of fun with this game, and it does get disturbingly creepy later on (more so because the horrors exist in real life).

This game overall reminded me a lot of Slouching Towards Bedlam, both because of the multiple paths and because of the overall plot.

This game is based on a book by the same author.

It’s written in Gruescript, and is one of the better Gruescript games I’ve played; I didn’t encounter any bugs or missing descriptions.

You play as a young man with the ability to read the minds of appliances (or at least communicate with them) and to see the hideous tentacles coming out of those machines. You are convinced that your girlfriend’s TV is out to get her, while she’s convinced that you’re being a paranoid conspiracy theorist.

You have to get advice/help from all the appliances in your apartment and in your girlfriend’s as well, devise a plan, and take down the TV!

The story is amusing, and in general felt paced well. I was surprised by how readily helpful Amanda was given the issues we had at the beginning of the game.

Puzzles are engaging while being fairly straightforward; if you just explore everywhere and carry out requested tasks you can win pretty easily.

This was a tricky game for me! It’s a Spanish-language parser game that uses a lot of wordplay and clever phrases. I also had some trouble with the parser occasionally (which is normal for me when playing a game not in my native tongue). I’ve attached a transcript if anyone wants to see me struggling to get even the bad ending (I also decompiled the game to get some help).

You play as a private detective, but, as you are a ‘detectivo privado’, you can only examine yourself! That’s an example of wordplay that I didn’t quite get as a foreigner; I assume ‘privado’ has a dual meaning between the english word ‘private’ and a meaning of ‘self’ or ‘personal’ or something.

You are alone in a locked room with nothing but a photo of yourself, a pistol, some handcuffs, and a cushion. But, as the game tells you, you can only examine yourself, and you need a crime (in the form of a cuerpo delito), a client to contract you, and a criminal!

I eventually discovered that the key to progressing was to (Spoiler - click to show)sit on the cushion and to look at the photo (possibly needing to meditate first). Once I did that, the game became complex and I was able to interact with a lot more things.

Like I said, I received a bad ending in the end. Some things are on a timer, and it looks like I was caught up in a bad end, but I liked the clever concept of the game and enjoyed playing. It was funny and mind-bending, and I was impressed by the concept and story.