Reviews by MathBrush

This is by the same group that has done the Seneca Thing for the last two Spring Things.

This is a collection of students that write mini-twine games under the direction of their teacher.

This year, the theme is a horror hotel. Like many young beginners, the games are primarily branching with little state tracking or merging of branches (although there are some fancier games that do this, like the soda bottle game!). There are some typos here and there, which makes sense as each one was written in a 2 hr time limit.

Where the games excel is in the imagination. One game has really funny messages when the player dies; another manages to be genuinely creepy (with the dolls); one with a maze is pretty complex; and so on. They all have creative things that happen, which made it enjoyable to play through them all. I hope the students continue to write engaging and entertaining games.

I liked the way the ending of this game was handled.

You play as someone in the basement of an old house who must do everything they can to escape. This is a twine game written with an inventory-based system, and so puzzles revolve around taking and using objects.

I found it challenging a bit, probably due to my non-native speakerness of Spanish, but also partially due to the fact that you have to be pretty creative for some of the puzzles.

The atmosphere is described at a distance, objectively, dispassionately, but the objects seen show that a lot of destruction and wild events have occured.

The story that gradually evolves worked well for me, especially contrasted with the more austere opening. I loved the very last actions you have to perform, which felt very fitting.

I enjoyed this game; it reminds me of the games that first got me into Twine (like You Are Standing At A Crossroads).

This is a well-made Bitsy game about a creepy hotel.

Bitsy is a minimalist text and pixel art animation game engine. Here, the author has modelled a hotel with quite a number of items scattered around, and multiple rooms.

The ambient messages you find around are effectively chilling. At one point, I was checking something out the second time and the game changed drastically. I made a choice, and got a very interesting ending.

I don't know if there are multiple endings. If the one I found is the only one, that's neat; if not, I appreciate the branching. Overall, a very strong bitsy game.

This game is set in the world of Castle Balderstone, but is a standalone entry as opposed to the large anthologies usually found with Castle Balderstone.

It's a western, a genre of IF I enjoy as it traditionally wasn't very common (although more have popped up recently!) (although now that I think of it it's set on a military base, so it doesn't have to be a western, but it has western themes kind of, like a solo hero with a gun, musical elements, a jail with a single cell, etc.)

The idea is that literal hell on earth has appeared at a military base, and monsters roam around. You have a pistol and can acquire more weapons.

Most of the gameplay for me was finding demons and then shooting them a lot. There's a little bit more (like puzzles) but I found that the main appeal of this game was the overall aesthetic, with the mechanics mostly serving as a way to flavor your experience of the aesthetic. In that way, it resembles Winter Storm Draco and The Ascent of the Gothic Tower out of Ryan Veeder's other works.

I enjoyed the writing and its demons, and the excruciating moral quandary that our hero encounters in the final verse.

For a few years I've maintained an IFDB list for surreal games set on trains, which has turned out to be a surprisingly common genre:

https://ifdb.org/viewlist?id=y1jy1stmutkbdk5y

I was glad to add this game to that list.

This is an Italian game. Unfortunately, my Italian is not good enough to understand everything (especially given the spooky vocabulary employed) so I enjoyed this game through the medium of Google translate, which I'm sure botched much of the feeling.

Yet I enjoyed several parts of this game. It's a Twine game about a ride on a frightening train. The train itself is organized linearly, where you can either go forward or backward, and each train car has its own surreal or horrifying elements.

While you play, background actions occur, at least one of which referenced another IF horror game.

I found some parts pretty creepy, like some of the sleeper cars.

Overall, there didn't feel like there was much direction, just ambient atmosphere, so a focus on characterization of the train more than plot. That characterization was pleasant, and there was some choices that made a difference here and there. Overall, I think I would have liked more chances to influence the world around me (although part of horror is being unable to do so!)

This game was made in just half an hour. It’s a bitsy game (or similar), with arrow key movement and animations, and text triggered when you reach certain squares.

It’s a brief telling of a legend of a creature that comes for kids that don’t sleep well. It features some spooky urban-legend type horror. The students at my school just finished a unit on legends, monsters, and superstitions in spanish-speaking countries, so I sent this to our Spanish teacher.

The animation is very good, although it took me a while to realise that the upper-left picture is like a ‘zoomed in’ version of things (maybe our POV?) and I don’t know what the lower rectangle. Creepier than I thought it would be.

This is a moiki game, designed to introduce English speakers to the format. I’ve seen it used in a lot of French games before; this particular game shows off some of the text effects and of course the new audio effects very well, but undersells the other powers of the engine a little bit, which can do very complex state tracking and branching.

I think ‘deliciously frightful’ could well describe this story; it has constant sounds, the majority of which are frightful whispers. It reminds me of an audio version of the children’s hidden picture book where there’s a creepy creepy gate with a creepy creepy house with creepy creepy stairs and a creepy creepy box…the anticipation builds as the whispers become more intense. I kept wondering, ‘will there be a jumpscare now? How about now? How about now???’

So the emotion was there, and the polish. The overall story was fairly small and simple, but any longer would likely have made the audio element too big or too annoying to record.

I enjoyed this, so thanks!

This is a genuinely funny game; it’s the kind of game I wish I would have written.

The title means ‘Lucky Spinelli Must Die’. Unfortunately, Lucky Spinelli, a mafia hitman, is very, very lucky.

One of the main attractions of the game is the humorous gangster dialogue, which includes references to a recent ifcomp game as well as a series of improbable coincidences, kind of like Pink Panther movies in terms of humor.

The game also has an overall conceit which is very funny that messes with some of the parser conventions for meta commands. By the end I was grinning at how absurd it got.

According to the blurb, this is another game that was meant for Petite Morte but got expanded. Because of this, the game suffers in terms of implementation of objects. The ‘main path’ is pretty smooth, but there are multiple areas I had to decompile the game for because I had to make a leap of intuition in German and couldn’t do it (especially guessing the noun I needed to interact with in the cabin of the truck and the verb to use with the worker).

Very amusing. Unfortunately I am strongly biased towards games of other languages because translation and guessing words and google translate adds another layer of interaction, so I can’t tell if this would still be very fun for native German speakers or not.

This is a lovely little game with themes that I like. It is a bit rough in execution sometimes, but that could easily be fixed in a future update.

It's a surreal game where you are being hunted inexorably by a monster through a surreal world. Gameplay consists of passing various obstacles which slow down the monster, and which for most of the gameplay consists of doors.

Most of the rooms, in particular, have 3 doors, each with their own way of opening, and with different symbolic elements. It quickly becomes clear that the whole game is symbolic or meaning-filled. I played through twice, opening an entirely different set of doors the second time and having a final choice.

I haven't been able to determine yet if there are 'good options' or 'bad options' for the doors, as the two doors I got in each room were similar to each other, so either they're all the same or the 'hardest door' in each room is special.

The execution had some issues, mostly things that come from a complicated game, like having extra lines or extra full stops. I think that having more synonyms for actions could be useful.

The overall story of the game is one told with a heavy hand at the end, but the vivid language used throughout balances that, I think. Great job by the authors, and I think that adding more testers and polishing the game for an after-competition release would make this a great long-standing game. In the meantime, though, the missing synonyms and typos could cause trouble for players.

This is a Spanish Grand Guignol game.

It looks really neat, with a Vorple interpreter that adds a smoky background, and it has a unique mechanic: it's a parser game, in Inform, but if you hold down shift, it highlights keywords, some in white and some in red.

The imagery was vivid: bronze doors framing the hall to a dragon, engravings speaking to you.

Then I passed to a new scene, and it seemed deeply familiar...that's when I realized that this was a translation of @VictorGijsbers De Baron!

I loaded up the beginning of that game to check. Some parts are distinctly different (like the ending of the first scene) but it's definitely the same game.

Afterwards I read the notes (this is just a preview so only has a scene or two), and it does say it is a re-writing of De Baron with different words. The 'author's note' is just Victor's ABOUT message translated, while the other note goes into the details mentioned above.

I definitely like the parser-hybrid system, especially since I can still type. The story of De Baron is one that I find uncomfortable (intentionally so!) so I'm not really looking forward to this being finished but I do like this system and think it'd see good use in many games (kind of reminiscent of Texture mixed with Inform).