Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

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).

As a small side note, this game has a nice navigation system that made me think, 'That reminds me of a game I liked a few years back.' Then I remembered that that game was 'we, the remainder' by this same author.

Anyway, this game is melancholy and gradually disturbing, reminding me a bit of The Yellow Wallpaper but also a few other stories (which I won't mention as they are spoilers).

You play as a woman wandering around a mostly-empty house, with clear indicators that you've experience many things in life (an old wedding photo, a dress that is now threadbare, etc.). The background sounds and animated color changes contribute to a mild sense of unease. One of the things that felt most off-putting to me is the matter-of-fact way the game lets you turn on all the water in the house and describes it just running and running.

Much of the game centers around alienation and also the search for your dog. More happens later on, and new NPCs mix it up a bit.

I found the writing evocative, and several sequences did a great job at 'bewildering' horror, like The Spiral entity from The Magnus archives.

Not enjoyable (intentionally so! it would be bad in a way to call this game enjoyable) but a game that I am glad I played and would recommend to others.

As a math teacher, I had to try this game first.

'Mathphobia?' I said, my nostrils flaring in mingled rage and excitement. 'Is this an ANTI-MATH game????'

Fortunately, it's not. Well, kind of...

You play as a kid who is forced to do 500 math problems on Halloween since you didn't go trick or treating to get candy for your teacher.

But you soon are transported to a magical land like phantom tollbooth where monsters such as the Specter of Subtraction try to attack you.

All challenges are defeated by use of math, starting with extremely easy problems (like 8 plus 4) and moving to harder problems like sequence finding, number factoring, fraction simplification and trick problems.

I proudly conquered each problem by hand except one where I suspected a trick, plugged it into calculator to check, then confirmed the trick (so I failed at doing it all myself!).

This game is much longer than it first appeared, with 5 main antagonists and sections between antagonists with 4 or more puzzles.

Outside of the math puzzles, the game seems completely linear. Going back and entering some answers incorrectly, it looks like it gives you another chance.

This was fun. I sent it to another math teacher to try out.

I was making a game that had some thematic elements in common with this one, from what I'd heard, so I wanted to try it out.

Pretty much everything about this game is a spoiler, so I'll describe the non-spoilery parts first.

The idea is that you are a highschool boy who's long-time friend and neighbor Sayori has invited you to join a club with her and three other girls. When you do so, you find that all four members have their own insecurities, but are each in their own way soothed by your presence and attracted to you.

Like most visual novels, text is split up into short chunks with different character poses per chunk. In this specific novel, there is a pretty large gap between choices. I saved often, as I was clicking fast to keep the game's text speed around the same as my reading speed, but didn't want to use 'auto' or fast text due to some text that disappears quickly. The main forms of interaction are choosing the order to talk to people, choosing who to spend time with (rare), and writing poems.

Poem-writing takes the form of 20 or so pages of words. On the other side of the screen are chibis of several characters. When you click a word a character likes, they jump up excitedly. Once you've written your poem, whichever character jumped the most enjoys listening to it the most.

You have about a whole week's worth of meetings and poems and chances to get to know the person you're interested in. This is all part of Act 1 out of 4. There are hints that something else is going on; Monika, the leader, refers to some out-of-game concepts like saving and loading, and all of the girls in the club hint at some darker sides to their lives.

Spoiler time:

Moderate spoilers (gives away general concept and discusses act II and the dramatic end of Act I)

(Spoiler - click to show)
By the end of Act I, your neighbor Sayori ends up hanging herself, with the character of the music and game presentation distinctly changing.

In Act II, the game resets itself and you play again, but without Sayori. This causes some logical changes in the game world, but we also see more glitches, with some text replaced with a strange bold black font with pink background. The characters you interact with are shown in more and more awful situations.


Full spoilers:
(Spoiler - click to show)It turns out Monika, the president of the club, is aware of the fourth wall and of your existence as a player, and of the files in the game. She spurs the others to suicide and deletes their 'character files' from the game (as you can check in your OS). You end up floating in a void world with her unless you delete her own character file, which ends up setting up a new world that has its own problems in the brief act 4.


Discussion of the concepts:
(Spoiler - click to show)The game has a lot in common with other popular meta-games of the 2010's like Undertale that address the player directly and show awareness of existing in a game (although such games have existed for a long time). The long Act I, though, with very few 'unusual' events, requires a way to keep the player invested and involved. Ironically, then, in trying to make a good setup for a 'twist', the first act of this game is probably one of the better 'traditional' visual novels, especially since so many other popular visual novels have some kind of major twist in them.

To create horror, this game uses several techniques popular in game creepypastas and horror films, like:
-Use of realistic graphics when 'fake' graphics have been the norm
-making the player think their computer is glitching
-establishing norms for what characters can do and then breaking them (like 4th wall breaking)
-using content inappropriate for the rating level initially established (like strong profanity, sexual references, and graphic deaths and mutilation)

Overall, it was effective in the presentation of these concepts. There is some need to suspend disbelief, though; we see Monika primarily motivated by an annoyance that the player never chooses her; however, choosing her is not an option. This is mentioned in-game, though, so it's not exactly a plothole, more like a Greek tragedy.


There is some content, especially violence and self-harm, that I generally am not comfortable with. In this case, I was well pre-warned, but had another factor that made it less shocking. I tend to immerse myself in characters in interactive fiction or text adventures, which makes shocking events more upsetting, but I did not identify with the main character at all here. He's written with a strong voice and makes a lot of comments and decisions I never would; I know that's common in a lot of games, but I feel like it was even stronger than usual in this game, as if we were never meant to identify with him. I felt at arms-length the whole game.

This game has high production values. I'd give it 5 stars, but I don't intend on replaying.

This game (I think it was made for Shufflecomp?) really touched me. You play as a person in a kind of melancholy town at evening, watching grass blow and seeing things like power lines swaying in the wind and an old radio. When downloaded, the game plays peaceful, ambient piano music that strongly affects my rating.

Gameplay is about wandering around, at first, and then learning to interact with the world in a new way.

There are some whitespace issues and the interactivity took me a bit to figure out, but the music was polished and I loved discovering the mechanics. Very emotional, very powerful, I can't remember the last time an IF game made me feel this way (but I don't expect all readers to feel this, as it just happened to fit my mood and time of day, and things always feel better when you discover them organically rather than when someone tells you they're cool).