Reviews by MathBrush

I don't say this often, but I really just didn't like this game. It shows talent in making, and is almost certainly the game that the author had envisioned when they set out to make it, but that design is not something I enjoy.

It is primarily visual and graphical in nature, with text added as flavoring. The beginning is set up in a way that the controls are unresponsive, playing a harsh dissonant sound with blinking lights while nothing you do does anything, followed by a blank screen for such a long time I thought the game had crashed. Then there are some graphical mazes with some light text.

The writing is scattered and surreal, which can be an amazing effect, but I couldn't find any thread to connect it all. It reminded me of nothing more than hearing Captain Beefheart Trout Mask Replica for the first (and only) time.

In no way does this take away from the author's skill; they seem perfectly competent. But their intentions and my reception were at cross purposes in this instance.

This game is framed as homework for translation in a Russian lit class (or similar).

You are given the poem ( a famous one: Он любил три вещи на свете by Анна Ахматова unless I copied it down wrong), and asked to translate it.

The issue is that, like most poems and most translation, it makes use of idioms that don't naturally have a unique counterpart in the other language (in this case, English).

Choosing the meaning to stick with can drastically change the meaning of the poem.

I though this was well made, and powerful.

This game was entered in Shufflecomp.

It has beautiful styling, with an easily readable font and nice color choices.

The game plays naturally, and tells you upfront what stats are being tracked, which made it easy to plan out overall paths through the game while still maintaining agency. I liked that.

The story writing is very strong, talking about a young person and the strange boy they fall in love with at a young age. Only during summers can they meet, and as the player ages, they soon must part.

The two paths contrast each other well, and overall the story is scoped just right, with a nice narrative plot arc that rises, has a climax, then falls to a denouement. I had chills for one ending. Very well done.

This game was entered in ShuffleComp and inspired by Charlemagne by the Blossoms.

It's a fun game with both strong character building and strong world building. There is a magic system sketched out, even coming with a separate 'spellbook', and multiple modes to play in.

The game itself is small, easily consumable and not enough to show off a greater system or world, but it works as a whole, paced especially well through the use of chunks of the song lyrics. This allows you to get a feel for how far you are in the game, something that is missing from so many IF games.

The worldbuilding is a mix of spacecraft and sorcery, with heartbroken people running a heist together to stop some tears of gold. Pretty fun!

In this Shufflecomp game, you play in an alternate reality where the Catholic church has eliminated both priests and Pope and has gone to use coin operated confessional booths that are resolved by computer.

Except you are 'computer' in this case. It is your job to absolve others.

The aesthetics of the game, both video and audio, are very well done, restrained but effective.

The writing is evocative and clear.

I only wish the scenarios had been a bit more daring. Few if any of the characters had done truly wrong, almost as if the game is about moral greyness, the lack of a need for confession.

But everyone knows someone who has done another wrong. Truly wrong. What about confession and absolution in those cases? There can be no forgiveness if there was no wrong. No reconciliation if there was no separation. The elimination of true regret and punishment is also an elimination of true happiness and redemption. So to see such a case would have been interesting...

This game had a few surprises for me, and I liked it. It was entered in Shufflecomp.

You play as a child come to visit your father. There are a few customization options for yourself, which I thought were nice.

What makes the game work for me is the reflective and meaningful (to me) choices you can make. They aren't really black or white, but instead give you a chance to roleplay yourself and your own relationships.

Nice writing, very thoughtful, not too long, and with nice visuals that I was trying to figure out how to emulate for my own future games.

This game was made for Shufflecomp.

In it, you play as someone on a train who is approached by another passenger. He wants to tell you stories of the six other travellers who had spent time on the train before getting off.

The game uses Decker, and has a fixed width retro font.

The stories are very diverse, and build towards the ending stories, those of you and the storyteller. Each story seems to focus on personal relationships, either in pairs or threes.

The writing was solid, and the stories made sense, but something felt missing for me that I can't put my finger on. Almost like buying a box of legos and finding that most of them are already one big molded piece, like bionicles or something. After reading each story, it was hard to say what each one was about. Maybe it was because people were acting in them not as real, flesh and blood people, but as archetypes, like reading a story about tarot cards or astrological signs.

This game is surreal. It was written for ShuffleComp.

In it, you find yourself compelled, no matter what you do, to approach (Spoiler - click to show)the unholy city.

The best part of the game is the feeling of dread and the awful feeling of (Spoiler - click to show)waking up from a bad dream to another bad dream.

Overall, I don't know if the ending had enough of a buildup to support it, but I liked this overall.

This game is a participatory game, an MMO masquerading as an MMO.

The conceit is that you are playing an old, defunct MMO which you discover is (Spoiler - click to show)connected to multiple universes. As you play, you find messages left by others. You have the option to leave a message, and doing so lets other people really see it.

I saw messages from real people I know, but they all soon disappeared. I wandered through an empty maze, seeing messages by people that could be real or fake. I left a message everywhere I went. Overkill, maybe? Shouting into the void? It's hard to know.

Very fun concept. Large game.

I liked this game. The presentation was neat, with real-time smoke in the background over at-your-own-pace text (I'd love to see more of this in games that use real time elements, letting me read as fast or slow as I like while other live stuff happens in the background).

You play as...well, you don't really know. It seems you're in a kind of group, at first, with text represented in different colors and alignments.

You have to escape a burning room in a temple. Everything is chaos.

You can play multiple times, and it can take quite a while to figure out what's going on. But everything built on each other, and I found it quite clever.

I was debating between 4 and 5 stars, as I usually use the 5th star for 'would I play again?' but technically I already played twice, so I'll give it 5 stars.