Reviews by MathBrush

This game was entered into Shufflecomp.

The author projects finishing it or adding more at a future date.

Basically, there is some beautiful poetry filled with nature imagery and her falling or transforming. I'd be more specific but the story itself is pretty vague, I got more 'vibes' from it than plot, and the vibes were nice. There is a branch early on and the two paths are wildly different. In one, the words become more sparse naturally.

In the other, you pare down the text by removing words. These removed words are placed into a kind of gallery where eventually they form a larger poem, but the game can end under certain criteria before you get to see the finished one some times. You also have the option to go forward and back, but there are also word links that move you forward, and I'm not sure what the difference between those two options is.

Fun concept.

This is story-focused twine game that uses dithered graphics (I recently learned this word) and is set in a diner at the end of all worlds.

You survived an apocalypse that destroyed everyone in your world. You were able to leave, and your travels eventually brought you here. Now other versions of you from other abandoned worlds have built a community.

The story focuses on your perceptions of and interactions with the other copies of yourself. Some you embrace, some you despise, some you have hopes for. Of course it can be read as a metaphor for our perception of self and our self-worth. And it works well as both allegory and story, as most good sci-fi does.

The story progresses in one direction, but you can pick what order to encounter some things and in some cases you can choose which branch you'll interact with. I didn't feel a need to replay (as it felt complete) so I didn't see all branches.

Overall, good for someone wanting a polished, self-reflective sci-fi fix.

This short game toys with the notion of the holographic principle, which is that it's possible that the universe is encoded on a two-dimensional surface and that the 3d effects we see are just a weird side effect of string theory.

In this future, companies have taken advantage of this by having quantum computer read and write directly to that surface as if it were magnetic tape, deleting people and moving them elsewhere.

The game follows either two groups of people or one (it's hard to tell). In one story, a man is sent in a long real-life journey through space to deliver a package for a company. In another, a couple is reunited after one is 'rewritten' (I think). The man might be the same in both iterations.

The atmosphere was nice. I had to play twice to understand a little better; one ending is very abrupt, while the other has an animation and some more explanation. Reading the wiki article on Holographic Principle helped as well.

There were a lot of typos. I understand, because I make a lot as well; in a future release, the author could use the 'proofing file' option in Twine to get something that can be run through a spellchecker.

I almost completely misunderstood this game.

It's navigated via a clock-like interface where you click on squares to advance the story.

It's about two people who tell each other stories each night. One makes up stories with CYOA-style "A or B" choices (like, 'was the villain the WITCH or the PARASITE?'). The other tells the story of a girl who turns into a sparrow when troubled.

There's a question mark button in the middle that I didn't notice. So after the first pair of stories and 'The End' I figured that was the whole game. I reset a couple of times to try out different stories. I couldn't figure out why the sparrow one seemed so incomplete.

That's when I realized that there are actually like 12 (or maybe 8?) sparrow stories all spread out, and you make your own stories in between. That made the game way more satisfying than I had originally supposed.

The individual small stories are interesting. They feel kind of allegorical in many ways, and the choices you make, while they matter, weren't always obvious in the effect they'd have. Especially when you choose who the villain is, the narrative often made them out to be sympathetic or not really more villainous than the other path, so I feel like there's some overall message I'm missing.

The sparrow story was also symbolic, but as it took place over a longer time I had time to see more repeated themes and feelings, and I liked what it was expressing. It includes a lot of scenes that I've seen frequently in LGBTQ story games (like a desire for transformation, parents who disown you, friends that captivate you and help you change), and it executed them very well.

Neat visually and well-done with the overall storyline.

This game was part of Shufflecomp and was based on three different songs.

In it, you go through a sequence of surreal worlds with strange and evocative imagery, like diamonds in places diamonds shouldn't be and hallucinations in an antique film viewer.

The three scenes feel mostly unrelated, except each ends with a 'hook' for the next one, linking into a loop at the end.

The game uses a variety of colors to distinguish the different scenes.

I liked the surreal feel and the variety. I felt like I wished for a little more elaboration in both the story and the code, as sometimes things felt a little rushed or underimplemented. I'm glad I played it though.

I loved the worldbuilding in this Vorple game. (side note: I'm not sure why it's Vorple; I didn't notice any graphics, sound or text effects in the version I played).

You play as a kind of shepherd for lost souls in an afterlife filled with ritual and restriction. This view of the afterworld reminds of things like Spirited Away or the Royal Guards in Bleach, with a variety of ritualized systems with specialized individuals running them in order to process the deceased.

Parts of this setting are reminiscent of the author's room in Cragne Manor (one of the earliest reachable parts of the game), which is nice because I liked that as well.

This game felt overwhelming at first, but the map doesn't branch much and most objects have one well-hinted use. I had the most trouble with the cake, but was happy when I figured it out.

A couple of things felt a bit underimplemented (like some text that fires every time you approach the statue) but I didn't have any bugs or typos that negatively impacted gameplay.

I like the atmosphere in this short Shufflecomp game a lot. There is a bunch of mysterious worldbuilding which is purposely vague, but it seems like some disaster has driven humanity (or a part of humanity) to flee to the depths of the ocean in order to survive.

You are one of these people, although you have experienced the surface. And you are in danger as the cables that connect you to your data sources begin to fail, and you have to explore.

I actually love the writing here and the neat use of variation in text placement. I also felt like the game had some significant choices early on. I was a little bummed to replay and realize it didn't matter, but for the first playthrough it felt really cool.

It kind of ends on a cliffhanger, but it also feels complete as an episode in the life of a unique being. Fun overall.

In this game, you meet a group of new friends and decide to hang out with them. Unfortunately, you end up trapped by one friend in their own treehouse which has a collection of bizarre puzzles to keep you inside.

I liked the balance of this game; it's complex enough that it gave me pause but forgiving enough that I could complete it without ever feeling really stuck. It has a lot of charming parts but also manages to be really creepy without ever insisting that you be afraid.

Gameplay revolves around exploration, information gathering, and object collection. The coding looks like it must be complex at parts, like with the random comments from your host as the play games or with the way the rope is handled.

The game isn't perfect; at times the layout can be confusing and its not clear which clues connect to which puzzles. But it satisfied all my criteria for a 5 star game: polished, descriptive, emotional impact (creepy mixed with pity), would replay, and interactive).

This game is one of the most unusual commercial Choicescript games. It's much shorter than usual (at 90K words), is intended to be replayed several times for the full experience (rather than just finding different paths), and is self-referential.

In it, you play as one of five friends in a kind of 'outcasts' group. You work a dead-end job with an awful boss, struggle with grades at school and the lack of love at home, and play a haunted video game with your friends that can lead to death.

In this game about a haunted game you can also play an interactive fiction game about a haunted game, which is pretty neat.

The game does have a mystery component in it, and replaying alone isn't enough to solve it, so once you're ready for it it's a good idea to 'get help from others' as the game suggests.

Clever concept. Only issue I had was that the beginning somehow felt hard to get through, and I had to try three different times over a few months to get into it enough to finish it. Glad I'm did.

I remember hearing stuff about this game from other people who were judging the Short Games Showcase. Even though that's over, I wanted to try it out.

It's a multimedia-enhanced, well-written visual novel that is (I think) entirely linear, but which has good pacing and has the amount of text per click and screen tuned well enough that it never felt like a chore to click through (also because the writing is compelling).

The protagonist is cool (a writer who is passionate about visual novels and indie games with plenty of experience and education who gets a shot at working on a popular franchise), and its fun to see things from their perspective.

But they're also problematic. At first, it felt like we were meant to sympathize with her 100%, but as it went on I could see the issues coming up, things very similar to ones I had in my first job(s). Amy, the hero, focuses her workplace happiness on romantic relationship with coworkers rather than the job. She zones out in meetings, feels like everyone is fake and not real LGBTQ allies, and doesn't bother to try the games of the company she's working for before getting hired. She makes radical suggestions to gameplay to the experienced team and gets mad when they won't make them, and when the team comes up with a project suited exactly for her skill set, she is upset because it's designed to be catered to the audience rather than her own ideals.

I know exactly how she feels, especially with having to write what others want than what you want. One thing that helped me so much with that was someone's advice about writing (looking up, it was an author named ferkung):
"It's just very "I know what works, I am a professional, if you do not want what I think is 100% right, then I can offer 80% right and meet your goals."" And as for hating that the team poo-poos her ideas, I remember a lot of early teams I was part of where I jumped in and criticized what they were doing, only to find out later that they had tried my ideas before and found failure (as I did) and just didn't want to rehash it.

So I expect the fictional Amy will be a lot happier if she survives in the industry and finds a team she loves (or grows to love the team she has). It's like a coming-of-age story for a working professional, and a great representation of one at that.