Reviews by MathBrush

I helped test this game. This is a brief one-room parser game with a well-written atmosphere. You are in a carriage with your father who has come to a grim decision regarding your future.

The game lets you talk and look around as well as several other actions. The issue with parser games with puzzles in ectocomp is that it can be hard to correctly clue things in a way that people can naturally follow the puzzles; fortunately, while the main game isn't too hard, the author managed to fit in Story Mode, which you can activate by typing STORY and which basically types in a walkthrough for you. I found it to be useful even after completing the story itself since it helped me key in on important things.

I definitely like the setting and the nuances here, the focus on the details of the wood and cloth and expressions.

This is a twine game with visual novel-style controls. The game focuses more on story than branching, with one very important choice at the end.

The story is written in a way that is grounded in reality (with a lot of description of physical sensations) but also very disconnected from reality as it's difficult to sift out what is actually happening, what the narrator thinks is happening, and what the underlying meaning is. As the story goes on, details make more and more sense.

Visually, the game uses fixed-width fonts and (I'm only now realizing this) varies between left-justification and right-justification, with just a hint of center.

The story is about a woman who's pulled in different directions, between a new and exciting life and a life of respectable office work (these characterizations may not be those intended by the author). In this story, this difference physically manifests in two sides of the body fighting for control.

I thought the imagery in the game was unique, a blend of old folklore and modern technology.

Parts of it were confusing, but I think that's the intention. Noticing the text justification thing made a reread a lot easier!

I played the first GUTS game, which I remember liking, but I didn’t play the second.

I’m not sure what this third one is really all about. It does remind me of my favorite opera, the Hungarian opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, which is a surreal two-person one-act opera about 7 colored doors in Bluebeard’s castle. As each one is opened, some emblem of power is shown (strength, cruelty, wealth, lands, etc.) and more light comes to the castle, but each is also tinged with blood. The last two doors only bring darkness to the castle and the end is one of eternal suffering.

This is really four games in one. I started on the 3rd first and I don’t recommend that, as I thought the game was just being very silly (tons of links that do nothing but repeat the same text). It made way more sense starting from the first.

The fourth link doesn’t seem thematically or structurally related to the other three at all, or even really with the same vibes. It’s a cyclical story of inescapable enmity with amusing undertones.

The first three are all the kind of nightmare you have where something is hunting you but you never really see it, so you’re just nervous all the time and can’t explain why and your chest is pounding and everything feels helpless and hopeless.

While I can certainly identify with many emotions in this piece, the interactivity left me frustrated at times, wondering if I was getting the point or getting stuck. That fits thematically, yet I still felt frustration at times.

This was a fun little game that involved writing a text that varies depending on your inputs. Given that the game was written in 4 hours or less, I doubt it uses full procedural generation, but there is at least some visible variation in text and it gives the feel of procedural generation in a good way.

You play as Edgar Allan Poe (or equivalent) and you're trying to compose what is essentially *The Raven*. You get distracted, so you you have to battle to be either gloomy or happy. Whatever you pick, it affects your writing.

I love the idea, although there's not enough time to really expand on it, so we only get a couple of stanzas. I had difficulty making and executing plans, as I couldn't figure out how to maximize gloominess or cheerfulness. I did get 2 endings, and had a good time.

This is an Adventuron game that is a nice small nugget of a game, with classic adventure gameplay (TAKE and DROP feature prominently).

You play as someone who often walks by an abandoned house at night but who finally decides to break in and see what’s going on inside.

The game was written in 4 hours, so many things aren’t perfectly polished. The author does foresee this issue and says ‘You won’t have to ____ in this game’ a lot, which helped reduce frustration by reducing verbs. It would take substantially more work to implement every reasonable action, but this approach isn’t bad even in a polished game.

The font and color combo was hard to read for me; I’ve seen some Adventuron games that have a font selection option, and that would have been nice here.

Fun overall!

paravaariar, the author of this game, is (in my mind) well-known for literary, high-quality spanish Parser games.

This game uses fi.js, an interactive fiction parser platform for web. It uses a small number of verbs (provided in the ‘manual’) which makes gameplay easier than most parser games.

The background image of the game is a beautiful field of stars. The story of the game is that we have woken unexpectedly early from cryogenic storage on a kind of space station. We need to explore to understand what’s going on, but, more importantly, to understand ourselves.

The game is compact, both in design and in story. In the game, a repeated idea is that there is no room for wasted space, and nothing is wasted in this game.

I think the main idea could have supported a longer gameplay, but I think the game as it exists is well-done and very poetic and literary.

This is a German Grand Guignol game that is about Ghostbuster’s in everyway except the name.

It’s a simple, lovely tribute game. You’re in a Ghostbuster’s museum with wax statues, but every exhibit is missing an important object. Your goal is to find all the objects and return them to whence they came.

Size-wise it feels like a game that started as Speed-IF but which the author turned into Grand Guignol (I can’t confirm this). The detailed descriptions of the Ghostbuster’s equipment and objects were fun; you can tell the person who wrote this really likes ghostbusters.

There is some sparseness, which is what made me think it might be upgraded speed-IF. At point point it is said we see a distant Universe, but this cannot be examined (as far as I can tell).

The game does have an independent NPC in addition to the mannequins.

Overall, this game gave me fond memories of Ghostbuster’s and was easy to play as a non-native speaker (needing just NIMM, X, GIB, SCHIEBE ___ [direction], and WIRF, as well as directions).

This is fos1's third game, I think, and it's been nice seeing them progress over time. This is his most complex game yet, I think. It still is rough in some areas but I enjoyed playing.

The idea is that you are in charge of a fireboat on the Hudson river in NYC, and you are visited by a strange ghost who begins to leave you messages.

The game is both hard and easy. It's a little hard because some things aren't coded in, like some synonyms, and you have to use nautical navigation (although that wasn't too bad). It's easy, though, because the game tells you exactly what to do.

I enjoyed zooming about the river and having memories of my family. Places that I think could use improvement in the future are improving conversation and replacing Inform's default 'you can see a ____ here'. The best way to do that (for an author who wants to) is to type the name of the object in the room description with brackets around it, like: 'Lined up in a row are some [map charts], a [dial], and [a compass]' (if you had those three things).

Anyway, I look forward to future games!

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).