Reviews by MathBrush

I liked this game quite a bit until I ran into some snags.

You play as an older kid/young adult who is making some food at home. You have to balance the demands of your family while still cooking. It even comes with a neat meter to show how much patience you have left.

I found it hard to strategize or figure out what’s going on. I thought there were only two endings after 5 or 6 playthrough sans still haven’t found one, but there are four in total. It’s not clear what options decrease Provence or whether that changes an ending, and it’s hard to say why one oath ends in catharsis while another in unhappiness. So I felt like there was a mismatch between my attempts at communication and the game’s response.

I did like the lively setting and the character and world details. Very descriptive and fun outside of my struggles.

This was a fascinating game. It’s a tour of a city with building pictures and a variety of destinations to pick from, which can all be selected eventually.

I thought it was completely fictional at first, then saw real elements, but Google and Google maps simply don’t recognize Blossom, NY at all. Looking up the Ebenezer society, which features prominently in the game, led me to West Seneca. Eventually, looking at Google maps, I found Blossom.

The story is similar to many in my own life. The Ebenezer Society paralleled the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which started in upstate New York before migrating to the Midwest, and which had a history of leaving behind buildings that were eventually appropriated for other uses (including a temple, where we believe Christ visited, being used as a barn!). The pictures look like Westlake Ohio, where my ex’s grandmother lived and which had experience some decline while remaining beautiful in its own way.

It gives the feel of a real community. I can almost smell and feel the wind in such a town.

The narrative was a bit dry, but the format was an enjoyable one for the digestion of such material. Which is why I didn’t download the grad report, as the same information in static form would not thrill me as much.

My kingdom for a crumb of context!

I liked the setup of this a lot. The art, intro and the fact it was in the Dialogue jam got me in the mindset “I will enjoy this”.

And I did. This is a brief dinner conversation between two individuals, the text spooling out in a format like SMS messages in different colors, but representing a spoken conversation.

I felt like I had a lot of control over how I reacted. I could be the overly fussy partner, the silent one, the gently encouraging. Despite only one ending, my oath there had agency.

However, almost all context is absent from the piece. I have started drawing a lot recently, and I usually spend 90% of the time getting the outlines right and 10% shading. I’ve noticed that the shading tends to add a lot more than most of the rest of the work, even though it’s small.

I feel like context is like the shading here. The format of the story is perfect, everything in place is right. But who are we? What kind of situation is this? What are we? Who is “him?” I don’t think everything needs to be spooked out, but it would be nice to add little grounding touches. Are we cooking on a wood stove? Was our train late? Do I hang up a wet overcoat? Was “he” smoking again? Little details like this could add so much flavor to this.

However, it’s not completely necessary. This works in its own sense, formless and abstract, but it may be nice to state that as a goal to prepare readers for a state of mind ready to accept an abstract situation.

This game was fun. I immediately felt invested in my little rat character. I learned more about the little world I was part of, my fellow rats, my simple life.

Alas, it ended quickly, and before I could interact with this ratty world. The description given is fun to read, but this felt like the beginning of a narrative arc, rather than a complete one.

This game features a portrait of a single person, currently resting.

It’s a fairly compact game, arranged in a network of interconnected nodes rather than a linear or branching narrative. Each lingers on a distinct feature of the man in question (I believe it’s a man due to pronoun use).

The writing is evocative and clear, making it easy to imagine this person. The narrative voice seems to care about him quite a bit. And the game is thoroughly polished.

However, despite the clear vision, I didn’t connect emotionally with this guy. Maybe because a purely physical description of a man isn’t something that interests me in real life, unless it were a relative or a friend. Maybe some extra background revealed through hints could carry this even further, or a mystery that can only be pieced together in pieces.

But it doesn’t have to be expanded. What’s here accomplishes several things, like providing a vivid picture of one person. It is labeled as following the rules of the former IF art show, and would be an appropriate entry for that former comp.

This fairly short game uses old German lettering and a conlang, or constructed language, (with some translations given) to show you as a soul who desires to achieve their true body.

You have to interact with a doctor’s office, every choice you make (including your use of the conlang)showing what you are like. When you reach the doctor, you ask for your true body, but the doctor will only grant this if you have modeled the right behavior.

It’s easy to read this as a trans metaphor, whether it is or not, with some doctors requiring you to exhibit “correct” dysphoria before receiving hormones, but it has enough of common experience in it to apply to many situations.

I’ve had this game on my wishlist for 9 years, and it doesn’t seem to have any reviews.

I think that may be because it is unfinished or buggy. At least, the version I played on philome.la was; I’m on mobile right now and can’t access the zip so it may be improved. I found a game-killing bug opening a medicine cabinet and a page with no links to click on in the basement, as well as some “image goes here” text.

Outside of that, this game is pretty interesting as an exploratory comedy Twine Lovecraftian game. It has some fancy looking graphics and a “self esteem” and inventory system.

Your high school has weird noises and things coming out of it on a weekend and you decide to investigate. As you do you encounter some math puzzles and a lot of Lovecraftian stereotypes played for laughs.

A charming game. I hope the zip version has less bugs because this game has a lot of potential, but the low number of reviews suggest other would be reviewers may have gotten stuck.

This game seems to be one giant loop. It's a pretty amusing representation of the frustration of starting a new board game and trying to get everything set up.

It's just a small bit of game, so there's not too much to say. If there were some explanation that was missing, that could make it more interesting, or if there were some hidden code, but the twine file doesn't show any interesting hidden material.

This is one IFComp game I was never able to play due to its use of an outdated Java platform that you have to pay to download.

I was able to decompile its files and port it to Inform (which I've added as a link here).

It's a small game, with only a few puzzles. You're exploring an abandoned building after trying to grab some loose change. The biggest puzzle is finding a mouse running around a maze. The logic of the maze is pretty frustrating: (Spoiler - click to show)You have to predict where the mouse will go and get a number to light up beneath it. Randomly, the mouse will go check the key. If it was happy before and had the right number lit up, it will push it out, otherwise it won't.

So, pretty small and kind of frustrating, but the java code was really neat to work with.

This game has been on my 'to play' list for several years. It was one of the earliest Spring Thing games, in fact one of 4 games in the first year that Spring Thing had more than one entrant.

I've made a Sherlock Holmes parser game before and for me it was really hard to keep it from being 'type exactly what sherlock did in the story to progress'. I don't think I really succeeded.

And I don't think this game does either, although it had different goals than mine. It begins with an extended sequence of giving yourself cocaine, and then becomes a 'guess the next part of the book' sequence, with large chunks of text directly from the book (just like I did).

But after some point, it becomes very different. Sherlock burns with anger; an assassin is sent after him. And Sherlock decides to (Spoiler - click to show)blow up a ship.

I don't think this game is really possible without a walkthrough. The help menu gives many detailed ways to talk to people but you actually have to do very different things (like (Spoiler - click to show)hire willis instead of using ASK ABOUT or TALK TO or TELL.

It was a wild story in the end, but it makes a lot more sense than the original story, which was one of the duller Sherlock Holmes stories.