Reviews by MathBrush

It was great to see something as complex as an audio game entered.

The controls are simple: 1 to say yes, 2 to say no. It uses Unity. I wished there were a pause button, but that would matter more in a longer piece.

The game is made using voice changers. The main 'scary' voice is highly distorted, but I was able to hear it most of the time. Your character's voice is like a chipmunk.

The story is that you've been kidnapped after signing a waiver, and you have to answer questions from a questionnaire. My game ended after two questions.

B Minus Seven writes games that are more surrealist poetry than anything else, and this is no different.

It's unabashed in its content, using profanity, brashness, confusion and vulnerability. It's also very short. You pick from three things in a cross between a recipe book and a shopping list, each one with 1-3 more options before returning.

It didn't really gel together for me, but for fans of B Minus Seven it is a great addition to the oeuvre.

This is a political game by what I presume is a non-native English speaker who is very experienced in their own language, as there are numerous typos together with a very creative story.

The game also contains a great deal of offensive material, but it's difficult to tell who it's aimed at; I could see it being equally offensive to everyone, but curiously inoffensive at the same time.

The central storyline is that slugs have changed the world into a hyper-connected group of individuals that subsist on trashy news stories, including stories about Soros and Clinton.

Playing this game was certainly an experience.

This is a speed-IF game, written in just 4 hours, but it has some pretty good heft; I've seen some IFComp games with less material, and it has nice styling.

It presents a scenario in which you've run out of biscuits, and the effects of Brexit have made it difficult to get enough food.

There are multiple paths, most of which have no choices (which makes sense for a Speed-IF), and the game encourages replay. Probably the best use I've seen of Twine in a Speed IF for creating the most material in the shortest amount of time. A nice game to add to Benson's growing portfolio.

This is a neat little puzzle/story written up in just a few hours.

You are in one of Caleb Wilson's bizarre worlds, a world of blood and ectoplasm and strange gods.

You are provided with a multitude of items and left to sort it out for yourself. Every object has a use, and in the end there are 7 ways to finish the game.

The best part of this game is the immersive worldbuilding.

First, a note about my ratings. This game is very short and is necessarily unpolished (as a game written in just 4 hours). So I took off one star for that.

But I found it had emotional effectiveness, I would play it again, the interactivity worked for me, and the writing was descriptive.

You are having a terrible nightmare and feel paralzyed. There is only a small amount of time to help yourself.

It took me a couple of play-throughs to get through it, but I was impressed at the level of craftmanship in an Ectocomp game. Well done.

I found this game to be touching. It's an online-only Inform game that asks you to make a certain moral choice.

It has a unique sort of interactivity that is only available in an online game. Due to the specific response I got, I'm not sure if this kind of interactivity is still operational.

It is short, and deals with the nature of story vs. game (among other things).

This is Pacian's only Twine game I know. Entered in the popular Twiny Jam competition for twine games of 300 words or less, this has a Time Cave type structure. You can see all endings by lawnmowering, but it might be more fun just to explore 4 or 5.

The story is grim and gritty. You are part of a jetbike gang, and the cops are coming. All of the branches are short, and they all paint out a dystopian world of grime and flame and bad relationships. It is a vivid world.

This is a complex Twine-and-Javascript based game that reproduces the help-desk environment from IT. You are given a bunch of tickets or help requests to address. You can dismiss them, respond to them, rank their severity, etc.

But instead of normal IT, you're troubleshooting a device that creates impulses in others.

As you progress, your performance is evaluated, and others might respond to you. The story slowly splays out.

It's an odd story, too. Like Morayati's other works regarding technological dystopias (Laid Off from the Synesthesia Factory, Take), the game explores uncomfortable parts of the human condition.

The game takes real-life issues (like the below-minimum-wage oppression of gig jobs like Mechanical Turk, having to buy cheap knock-offs of products that can harm you, workplace harassment, etc.) which people have gradually become numb too and puts them in a startling new light by applying them to new situations.

If you liked this work, I strongly recommend the two other games I mentioned earlier.

This was from the Mystery House Taken Over competition, where IF authors were tasked with revamping the old, famous adventure game Mystery House.

As far as I can tell, this game only allows directional commands, and all that happens in each room is that a piece of original, poor quality line art is replaced with a piece of badly cropped clip art as a joke. I found it amusing, but the game is so small and light as to be hardly there.

If anyone finds additional content, let me know and I'll revise my review.