Reviews by MathBrush

This game reminded me of Princess Mononoke crossed with Hybras from Sunless Skies.

You are essentially a gig worker trespassing in a national park to scavenge various psychotropic mushrooms which have properties far beyond the ones we have in real life. Normal mushrooms give you 1 cent a cap (fairly consistent with real gig jobs like Amazon Turk), while the King's Breakfast could pay off your rent.

It seems that worldbuilding by far is the biggest part of gameplay. More than half of my play time was spent reading the guide book, and it could have served just as well in static form, but it made finding mushrooms later on more fun.

It's weird to say, but I think that later gameplay reminded me of nothing more than the original Zork. I remember playing Zork as a kid and finding some weird stuff and thinking "I have no idea how this all connects", and getting the idea that there was way more out there. I later went and looked at the code of this game and found that there was way more out there, but the effect still persisted.

I don't know if that particular combination of deep lore dive + unpredictable trip in the woods worked for me interaction-wise, but I appreciated the polish, descriptivenes, emotional impact and replayability of the game.

This is a charming short parser game in which you read a text in Latin in your room at night, translating each line as you go (provided with a dictionary and grammar that you can LOOK UP things in). You must frequently match adjectives with nouns that share their declension, so for language fans this is heaven.

The atmosphere in the game was quite nice as well.

+Polish: This kind of thing is pretty tricky to program; I'm impressed!
+Descriptiveness: The Latin itself provides most of the flavor
+Interactivity: As a language fan, it's great.
-Emotional impact: It was fun, but I didn't get creeped out as much as I might have.
+Would I play again? I think I definitely will come back to this at some point for fun.

Like Will Not Let Me Go, this story is a well-written long Twine game about the effects of old age and Alzheimer's/dementia on an elderly man and those around him.

It plays out over ten days and ten nights. You struggle as a young at-home attendant for an elderly man named Carl who wavers between lucidity and violent forgetfulness.

At night, you have 4 tasks, the same every night. On the fast version, you do these once, but miss out on some important plot points. On the slow version, you do them 10 times every night, but they're tricky and shift around in very plot-relevant ways.

The 10-times version is hard but rewarding the first night. By the third night, though, I misclicked five times in a row (which restarts the night) and had to stop. It's hard because the image pushes all the text below the screen, so I had to scroll down for each image on a trackpad laptop.

The images are gorgeous and really contribute to the game. I wonder if, for the nights at least, it could have helped to put the image to one side and the text to another.

In any case, the story was meaningful to me, especially talking about divorce and changing relationships with one's spouse. I loved it, and appreciate the author writing it.

This game in the Grand Guignol part of Ectocomp 2020 was pleasant to play and looked good. It's written in Twine (I assume), but it's been heavily styled with colors and background graphics.

The design is tight and there are real choices with long-lasting effects. You have a specific deadline and a lot of options.

In this game, you're a werewolf that is at a college-type party trying to fit in, have fun and leave before you transform in an hour and a half.

The lycanthropy can easily be read as anxiety (especially given the name of the piece), and I've had the feeling many times of being at a party and trying to stay just long enough to feel comfortable leaving.

The one thing that keeps this from being amazing for me is the signalling of choices. My favorite choice-based games allow either deep characterization of the protagonist or strategizing, and it was hard for me to do either one here. I feel like having more hints about the possible effects of choices could fix that, but it may just be a personal design choice and not something that needs to be 'fixed'. I had fun either way, and played through three or four times.

This was an odd game for me. It's very possible that it being in Spanish affected my interpretation of it, because I found it difficult to read due its large number of obscure words (you're essentially a grisly warrior fighting heretics in a fantasy world).

This is a short parser game, probably a speed-IF. You're in a room with a few clothes and some empty containers, and...that's it. There's a door, but it's locked. If you look close enough, you find that key. But the door has no keyhole! But again, that's all there is, right?

I looked at the source (very happy the author provided it!) and it seems that progression through the game involves doing specific actions several times, including (Spoiler - click to show)dropping the key and some actions that I've never really done in an IF (like (Spoiler - click to show)peeing in a jar).

So for me, I liked the descriptiveness and it felt spooky, but the interactivity and polish felt lacking. If this was a speed-IF or first game, it's actually pretty good! But it doesn't measure up to longer parser games.

This game was nominated for the XYZZY awards, and was one of 2 commercial games I hadn't heard of.

This game is based off of the lyrics to the song "Pushing the Speed of Light", which I looked up after playing. I think they add to the gameplay.

This game branches into 3 paths and each of those paths has a success and two failures, I believe (one for too slow, one for too fast). The three paths you choose between give you different backstories and goals.

I thought the writing was well-done, and my opinion of it improved as I replayed. I especially like the 'singing' path. It reminds me of a lot of the sci-fi in the 60's to 70's. It's not necessarily poetical or lyrical all of the time, but it places humans in a situation impossible in our present reality and uses that to give insights into our nature.

Here's my score:
-Polish. The game uses the standard Twine styling, and paragraphs have no line between them, making reading a little bit hard for me.
+Descriptiveness. This is one of the highlights of the game, the detailed descriptions of the technology and its effects, as well as your feelings and the crew's.
+Interactivity. Wildly branching games like this only work well if it's short, and this one is. Does what it's supposed to.
+Emotional impact. Hmm, it's kind of back and forth for me. I liked it but didn't really identify with any of the characters, and I feel like identifying is important for this piece. I'd give this 1/2 a star for emotional impact, but I round up.
+Would I play again? I've already replayed it several times.

This game has you working in a call center with 99 calls to finish. There are only a few options, including going to a cafeteria or looking out the window, before you go back to the main loop.

It uses video a lot; it seems to be autoplaying youtube videos that are so enlarged the youtube gui is off the screen (only autoplaying after you click a link, since Chrome disabled regular video autoplay, I think).

It's very abstract, and the game slowly changes. I played before looking at other reviews, but later sought ought more in case I was missing something big. I thought this game reminded me of Degeneracy (a parser implementation of the same concept), and I saw that Emily Short said the same thing years ago.

I rate games on a five point scale.

+Polish: A lot of effort went into this, and it was smooth.
+Descriptiveness: The sounds, videos, and text made the message clear.
-Interactivity: I was left wondering if I was missing something, and so it didn't work well for me.
-Emotional impact: I bounced off the high level of abstraction.
+Would I play again? I might; it was interesting, and I would try different paths.

This was one of most vivid games I have played. The story reminded me of some of my favorite books I read as a teenager. I'd rather not spoil any of it here, though.

The implementation was very interesting, using a combination of standard inform commands and keywords for conversation.

The puzzles were simple, and written in such a way that you always knew what you should be trying to do, even if you hadn't figured out how to do it yet. The game seemed thoroughly tested, with multiple endings.

I'm giving the game 4 stars instead of 5 purely because of length. As a shufflecomp game, it is among the very best I have seen.

At the time I first played it, this was the only Twine game I'd played through multiple times. It takes less than 20 minutes to play, with some very mild puzzles. The genre is creepy horror (as opposed to grossout or Lovecraftian).

The writing is well done. Of the four main areas, I felt one was weaker than the others, but on the second playthrough, I found it even creepier than the others.

The reason I enjoy this game is something others may not care about. I enjoy it because it almost feels ritualistic, like a Greek mystery play about life. The format, the pacing, the repetition, is very successful, in a way different than Porpentine's use of the same elements. I see myself revisiting this game every now and then for the fun of it. Others may have different responses.

Exceptional Stories are odd games. They are framed within the larger Fallen London game, which takes months and/or years, yet they themselves can often be completed in an hour or two. They have a really, really big wordcount though compared to what it feels like, especially since they often branch significantly.

This one was good. There is a struggling family trying to re-enter society. You can support them or their snooty cousins. All along, though, the butler has his own plans.

I'm not opposed to society machinations, but they're not my favorite. I like Jane Austen but prefer the Brontes. This game has horror depths that I like, but the particular genre didn't grab me as much as it could. Hannah Powell-Smith's excellent writing skills makes it worth playing, though.