Reviews by MathBrush

This game was educational and fun. In it, you are a ruler of Sumeria and must discover the cause of a plague and pray to the Gods to ensure that it is cured.

Gameplay is fairly simple; you're given a description of the current issue and have to figure out what would most please the Gods about what you do.

It's a little different than 'guess what the author is thinking' since instead we're guessing what people thousands of years ago are thinking, as this is based on historical documents. I found that really fascinating!

This game features a friend who says things that make you feel uncomfortable, or that are otherwise inappropriate.

You can choose to either unfriend them or still be their friend. At each stage it says that the probability of you unfriending them for that specific comment is .1% times the number of times that you've ignored your friend's comment.

If you eventually unfriend them, it will list the cumulative probability that you ever would have unfriended them.

The whole thing is a thought experiment: while minor things can seem too small to end a friendship over, the cumulative weight of many things can be a good reason.

For me, the whole game is centered mechanically around the probability scheme and narratively around the friendship idea. And the probability thing to me isn't as effective as it could be. It does teach the idea of cumulative probability and how even small percentages can grow, but there are three weird things. First, the probability that we'll quit right then has no bearing at all on what we, the players, do. Are we intended to simulate the game and only have a .01% chance of quitting on the first term? It doesn't count what we do and simulate it. It's possible we could be watching someone else's universe where they have a percent chance of quitting, but since we're in control, that percent isn't true.

Second, why does each individual chance of quitting go up linearly?

And third, if we want to demonstrate the snowball effect of independent successive probability choices as an educational lesson, why not fix the probability of 'quitting each turn' and show that even with a low constant probability, the cumulative probability can get large? As it is, it might confuse players into thinking that the large cumulative probability is primarily caused by the increasing individual probability and not by the cumulative effect.

The friendship part is interesting to contemplate and a good thing to ask ourselves. Do we forgive people for their past transgressions? Do we conditionally forgive people as long as they stop doing the thing they shouldn't be doing? How many times do we forgive? So I think leading to that contemplation is the game's highlight.

I played through this game once and then backed up a choice or two to try a couple more endings.

You're in a pond. Why? Because your one true love has been cursed, of course! He's been turned into a frog!

Unfortunately, it gets a bit more complicated than that. Over the next few screens of gameplay, you have the chance to try to track down what really happened to your love.

Overall, I found this charming (pun intended). The idea could have stood up to more depth. I think there was possibly a bug with frog color, as I was told a certain frog was eaten then got an ending involving that same frog, but I might have misread it. The writing was the highlight in this game for me.

I could identify with this game for sure. It's pretty small and doesn't dig in-depth in its topic, but I'm rating it higher because I see myself in it.

In this brief Choicescript game, the protagonist is constantly late (it doesn't say to what; school? work? church?). Most of the game is about how you feel about that. Are you going to do better? Did you find the cause? Do you just self-recriminate?

For circumstances partially within my control, I've been late to work more than 90% of the time over the last 6 years. Like the protagonist, I know it's possible to be on time because it's happened before, but also like the protagonist I find it pretty difficult (in my case, partially because I transport other people to other places).

So I was glad to find this little piece that was like a self-reflective poem to me (it's not structured as poetry, but it itched the same part of my brain).

This game reminded me of Baby Tree, in a way. Both games are minimalistic with imagery that is means to be anywhere from mildly upsetting to deeply disturbing (depending on your particular phobias).

In this game, a 12-legged box is relentlessly pursuing you. There aren't that many options for directions. As you explore, you find some objects made with ASHII art (which is what I assume the game calls ASCII art, maybe with some modifications).

I got lost a couple of times (in one case not recognizing that something was a room exit), but there's a guidebook. This was written for Neo-Twiny Jam, so it has less than 500 words total.

I think that when going for an unsettling feel, a minimalist, mostly unimplemented game like this can work better than a more polished game. I could see this being the kind of game described in a creepypasta.

I opened and played this brief twine game for the Short Game Showcase for 2024.

It was written in less than 500 words. It is laid out as a web of nodes, making it highly non-linear. The wording is intentionally rich and requires careful reading.

It has a nice background image and overall impressive styling. I didn't like how small the words were, and was going to complain in this review, but then I found the settings option and it changes that, so I thought that was really thoughtful and shows how much work went into this game.

The words in the game made me think of nature a lot. While there are many themes in the poem, the highlighted words tend to revolve around weather, plants, and time, so I thought a lot about the progression of time and of life. It was nice.

This is a fairly brief game made for the Short Games showcase. In it, you play as a traveller at an airport who is going through a crisis of sorts.

Throughout the game, it shows your mental state as distracted and unsettled. It reveals different details about your life that show it to be unhappy.

In the end, there is a single choice, centered on the main relationship you've had in the last while.

It's not a bad concept, and I liked the individual scenes. My mind didn't tie it all together, though, and the stakes at the end didn't feel as fresh as maybe they could have. I thought the writing was high quality overall.

This is a short story written in Twine that was entered into the Bluebeard Jam.

I was first struck upon playing it by its nice presentation and how well-written it was. I loved the voice of the narrator and the interesting details.

Later on, at the time the protagonist approached (Spoiler - click to show)the basement door, I began to lost the thread of the story, and I quickly became confused. The writing was still effective, I just couldn't picture the plot in my mind.

I thought there might be a choice at the end, like the Single Choice Jam, but it was just a story in the end, with links used only for pacing.

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.