Reviews by MathBrush

This is a relatively brief game where you simulate life as a Brain Worm.

It was entered into the Neo Twiny Jam, with 500 words or less, so each part of the game is pretty sparse.

You wander around different areas, with options to do things like change aggression of your host, switch hosts, or eat brains.

No matter what you do, you'll likely die soon, with a screen showing what you could have achieved.

There were some funny bits, and I liked the variety on replay. I did find it difficult to tell if my actions were having any real difference or not, though.

This is a relatively brief game about tea with a lot of branches. While some branches converge, many of them lead to wildly differing results, often with different implications for your identity and how the world works.

All of them have to do with tea, which you are carrying in your inventory. I played to a few endings, and don't remember the inventory coming into play much.

The playful and silly endings are the highlight of the game, which pokes fun at overly serious people.

I like surreal creepy games set in modern times (like creepypastas or the game Cannery Vale). This game is in the same kind of vein, and it was fun.

It's a fairly brief choice-based game. In it, you're headed home for the day when you hear a ringing coming from a phone booth.

There're a lot of customization options at the beginning and several branches later on. I first did the 'go along with everything' ending and then tried various non-compliance endings.

Due to the surreal nature I couldn't tell if the 'ignore everything and go straight home ending' had a bug in it or was doing a creepy memory thing. I like the second interpretation more.

A fun game overall.

Jacic is a well-known (to me) choicescript author that has done some cool mythological games in the past.

This pair of games has a similar high concept and some complex, interesting writing, but fails to due either of those justice in its short time frame. Each half-game is just a few choices; the second one is actually just a single choice.

The concept is fun, though. You are an unnatural being, and you don't know if you'll live to see the next day. Walking the streets of a city, you have a dangerous encounter that makes your powers known.

Fun idea, nice writing, but it felt like it could be more.

This PunyJam game shows a lot of skill at different programming tasks but feels like it was incomplete. I'd be happy to bump up the score if it were expanded.

You wake up in your room on a day that feels like it will be long. There are no instructions besides telling you that you should wake up.

So I wandered through the building, picking things up as I went. On my way out I grabbed some coffee, and then I went to a new building, solved a simple puzzle, and the game ended.

The game does enough that I can tell the author has some pretty good programming and the writing was interesting (like with the three objects in the box at the beginning of the game). It just felt like a lot was missing, like overall guidance or more material.

It's possible I missed some secret that hides the 'true' gameplay so feel free to let me know if that's true!

This was a Spring Thing game in the year I started participating in IF (2015), but I never played it originally.

It's a poem that seems to have a lot of autobiographical parts (although of course it could just be written that way). Lines of the poem can change if hovered over or clicked, and icons can appear, or words change into icons or images.

The poem (and some prose elements) is about Doggerland, a place in Northern Europe that is now submerged under water. The game also mentions things like IVF, body dysphoria (briefly), global warming, etc.

I thought it was really well done. There is one choice, as far as I saw, but a lot of interactivity.

This game looked familiar to me, so I know I've seen it, but for some reason I never played it. I think I assumed it had explicit content (which it doesn't, although it does have intense events and adult situations intermingled with romance, so maybe I made assumptions).

It's really well-written, as any fan of Harris Powell-Smith might expect. You play as a cob in a kind of cyber future who has to go to a nightclub to see their informant. Their is an emphasis on emotions, sensory descriptions, and music.

It's a texture game and pretty short, but there are a lot of options and it felt like I had real agency, whether that was an illusion or not. A lot of effort went into customizing the 'hover' message when dragging actions over objects.

A nice, short game.

The games by this author have been heavily advertised across Reddit for a few weeks now, so I decided to check them out.

This game, when I downloaded it, had text that seemed to be somewhat repetitive. There were tons of extraneous details to it as well. It mentions things like a vital journal or an important clue, but if you type X Item or TAKE item like the HELP menu suggests, nothing happens. The only way I can find to interact with the world is to move with compass directions. But things mentioned in the text like a hut can't be entered, all you can do is move around.

There is a timer at the top as well. The combination of the timer, the downloadable exe, and the barebones mazes remind me a lot of the group DBT, who released 53 different similar BASIC adventures before. I don't think it's the same people (and I didn't have any problem with their work), I just wonder if there's some sort of template for BASIC adventures that includes a timer.

I'm going to put 2 stars for now, as the interactivity and polish are low due to not being able to interact with objects. It's possible I missed something really big and you can actually do more than just move around, so I'm happy to bump up the score if that's the case.

This is a relatively brief Inform game written with lush language and originally entered into Spring Thing many years ago.

Every word is dripping with luxury. You are a Khan and have excellent food and wine and everything you'd ever want at your feet.

The game is pretty short, but has some surprising events in that brief time. I'd say that it's highly unusual for both its subject matter and its style of language.

It is mostly polished, with a distinct voice, but some default responses sneak in that contrast harshly with the desired tone. The interactivity is also difficult to guess at times.

However, it is descriptive and captured my fancy, and I could see myself playing again.

This is an unusual game from a long-ago Spring Thing. It's a choice-based game where you play as a hexagon that lived inside the pages of a geometry textbook at a school. Now that school's out, you can wander around.

You basically get three choices (where to go, who to talk to, approach them or turn back) and the vast majority of the twenty or more paths is "they kill you because you're not like them". There are 2 paths I found where you win.

It might be a metaphor for discrimination, but I get the feel it was just more fun for the author to come up with new polygon-based deaths. Overall, I chuckled at some of the geometry but found the game design unsatisfying.