Reviews by MathBrush

Hmm, this game is really intriguing! I had a bad experience at one part and good experiences at the other.

The idea here is that you play as a guy who, together with his best friend, enters a high-stakes two-player video game competition.

Except, things are not as they seem…

The intro is generally a linear story, although there are definitely opportunities to add your own flavor to things. There are extensive images and some background music; it seems like your characters are designed to look like anime high school protagonists.

Once the game starts, you have a lot more freedom. I had fun playing a character playing a character (the ‘Gameception’) and felt like I had real options.

But then…the game changed. And man I got really frustrated!

It becomes a ‘gauntlet’ where you have two choices at a time. One is right, but the other makes you die.

I was worried I’d have to play the whole game over. But it just took me to the start of the gauntlet.

But that’s the only checkpoint! And the gauntlet is really long with some timed text!

I tried 9 times and got so frustrated I had to quit. I ended up opening up the code; I guess I was really close to the end. And also there’s an almost entirely complete other game in the code too, which is pretty wild.

So, mostly fun game, with one super frustrating part. If that part just added some more ‘checkpoints’ I could have done better. Literally everything else was fun though.

This piece was good for me, I think. I’ve encountered different people with stuttering over time, and some of them I was kind too and some not. I had a group when I was younger that was both in church and scouts together. I never hung out with them alone but it was essentially my “friend group”. There was one guy who had a strong stutter. As a whole we often didn’t treat him well, and I regret it looking back.

Now I have a student who stutters a lot, due to having a stroke in his youth. I find it a lot easier to have patience with him and listen to his thoughts. He’s also an incredibly prolific writer (having written over 200 scripts each over 20 pages for a tv show idea he has.)

This game presents the experiences of one person with a stutter. They have a day to go through a list of chores and tasks.

I thought it was effective. It does have timed text but I made it work by playing it on my phone during a very boring work meeting where having it long and drawn out was a benefit. And I imagined the game itself as someone with a stutter and practiced being patient with them. After all, a lot of things that you would never do or like normally are acceptable or good when dealing with disabilities (like someone with IBS having frequent smelly farts).

My ex wife and son both use wheelchairs so it was interesting to see how similar some experiences are across disability, especially with other people under or over estimating the difficult of tasks. (Like “come to my house! It only has one step up, a few inches, that shouldn’t be a problem, right?)

So overall, lots of polish and good work and helped me reflect on life and saved me from a boring meeting.

This is a Texture game, a system that uses a drag and drop of verbs to pull over nouns. The text was small on the buttons, which is a bug I’ve seen before that’s due to the system, not the author, I think.

I really liked this game. I’m into weird short horror/terror and the author has an excellent command of character and setting and is able to effectively spin a tale that drew me in.

The main commands are APPROACH, REFLECT, and TAKE, and I loved how each of these took on different meaning throughout the game. I also felt like I had real agency; there was an interesting object early on I intended to look at but lost the chance as I progressed; yet there were still interesting things to do. It made me feel like the game was replayable.

I found one ending (The Captain, I guess you could call it). It seems like there are more, but I felt satisfied with my playthrough.

I would definitely read more by this author, good work. It suits my particular reading tastes, and I can’t guarantee that others would have the same experience.

Pseudavid has been consistently putting out thought-provoking games that are near-historical or near-real with cool UI for a while, so I looked forward to this.

The engine for this game reminds me a lot of Gruescript, and has clickable buttons but otherwise operates similar to a parser, for a parser-choice hybrid.

The idea is that you are exploring the woods at a time you aren’t really supposed to, taking pictures and looking for things to bring to school to show others.

The game has enough nature to feel like a nice walk through the forest, like the game The Fire Tower. But it’s odd enough to feel unusual. Plastic is seen as something exotic and rare. An abandoned hut contains what seems to be evidence of torture…or dental care.

I liked the overall vibes, and thought the game looked great, especially the background changing over time.

The game implied I missed out on something at the end, or at least my character did. I didn’t see any opportunities to do more than I did (I crossed the bridge and, looking at the walkthrough after, I had done everything in it).

Sometimes it was a bit of a chore to have 4 different things to click on every thing (the original click to look, then photograph, then smell/touch, then collect).

At times I struggled to use items. I can’t tell if there were bugs or just my way of clicking was bad. At times I thought that clicking to use an item and then clicking on a scenery object would bring up an option on that scenery object to use the item. At other times I thought that clicking on the object itself would bring up the option to use it on the scenery item. I suspect the latter was the case most often.

Also, it seemed like the map kept getting bigger (which was awesome) but at some point the X got stuck in the upper right.

Overall, I enjoyed this a lot; the complaints above are minor things, while the core game itself was something good and interesting.

This was a fun little game about an unfun situation.

I think I experienced this game in the best way possible, as I am a fan of the game it is connected to (Ascension of Limbs) and I got the most interesting ending first. If I had experienced it any other way, I’d probably have not liked it as much.

You play as a woman in a house that has been tormented by a thing for a long time. Years, maybe? Maybe not.

Something is in your house, a wretched thing. The game doesn’t really expand on what that is. I imagined something like a mix between a baby, a Slitheen from Dr Who, and a silverfish from Minecraft.

Most of the action in the game is generated on the fly as the wretched thing performs various gross deeds. There are a few keys ways to interact with it, but other than that there’s not much to do.

That’s probably the main thing I didn’t like. Tons of items are in the game, but almost all of them have a message like ‘that’s not important now’ or ‘you don’t need that’. That makes sense from a scoping point of view, but I felt a little sad every time an interesting item turned out not to be usable.

But I liked the writing. And the ‘good’ ending really explained a lot about one of Ascension of Limbs’ main mechanics, so that’s what I liked best about this.

I think I can summarize this game for me by saying that it very effectively told a story that I didn’t like.

It is a long twine game about a sniper fighting in Afghanistan, told in non-linear style through different points in his life. It uses a lot of interesting styling, has music, and uses images generated by OpenAI, according to the end credits. The images look almost like hallucinations, fitting for this grim and unpleasant story.

As the author has stated, this story includes scenes of torture and violence. The author writing this has talent, and has used that talent to effectively show the horror of torture. This is not something I enjoyed or wanted.

With multiple wars going on and massive disinformation campaigns causing me trouble in real life it was interesting to spend some time thinking about the game. It does show (and this is something I believe) that most people at the ‘bottom’ on both sides aren’t there out of hatred or desire to kill but because their government or other leaders have pushed them into it. It’s a terrible job where the better you are at it the more lives you ruin.

On the other hand, it depicts the Afghanistan enemies as being particularly despicable in terms of torture and murder. I’ve always thought that in the past, having grown up during the 20 yr-long war in Afghanistan, so I looked up ‘torture in Afghanistan’. The first thing that came up was the long-term torture and death of two Afghani citizens carried out by the US. The second was the torture of a British officer by the Taliban.

I don’t know, this isn’t the kind of stuff I want to read about or really even think about. I would like to help end war, for sure, and I think there are ways I can do that privately and publicly. But I don’t think even people who were captured and tortured want other people to learn to vicariously suffer for them. And I don’t need more convincing that war atrocities are a very bad thing.

So, the writing on the story was very effective, the use of media and nonlinear narrative was expert, and the math calculations were interesting. But I did not enjoy the game and certainly don’t want to play it again.

This is a longish Ink game where you are Osiris, recently deceased pharaoh and newly resurrected God.

Most of the game consists of travelling to different locations and interrogating different Gods. There is some freedom (in which Gods to visit first) and some saving of state (some topics only come up after you talk to others elsewhere).

There was one math puzzle which I both overthought (by getting tripped up by the mention of Base 12 beforehand, which turned out not to be important) and underthought (by just not getting it).

The characters were very diverse and interesting. Some gods were nice; Geb was a big loser who smoked weed and acted like a peeping tom.

I classified murder mysteries in an earlier post. This one was the kind (as far as I could tell) where you complete puzzles and the mystery solves itself in the process.

Overall, the setting and characters were the biggest strength to me. I didn’t derive enjoyment from the sex scenes. I did like the reimagination of the Egyptian mythological world, and thought the styling looked good.

This parser game had a really strong storyline and distinct worldbuilding, with some pretty fleshed out characters and interesting UI.

You are a beat witch; you see, some adolescent girls wake up one day with the power to be hurt by music and to use music (and other things?) to affect others.

The entire city has been blasted by an EMP and thousands are dead, so everyone’s blaming you, and you have to set things straight.

Music is frequently mentioned in the game, and is included in the game itself through vorple. Color is also used, and there is frequently either timed text or text that scrolls when you hit a button (I think it’s mostly the latter).

The story is at times gruesome and at times cruel, with some kindness mixed in. There is a lot of control, whether through magic or force, and a lot of deception. The villain is a definite villain, and some of the lines are darkly effective, although some are a bit weird (I swear at one point they said (Spoiler - click to show)I’m gonna squeeze you like a fart.)

The gameplay seems entirely linear; at times there are choices you can make which are remembered and mentioned later on in the game, but mostly it seems like the game is designed for you to find the trigger for the next cutscene. Its generally smooth and I rarely had difficulty finding what to do.

So, overall I’d say this is pretty high quality. Something for me seemed slightly missing from the story; maybe more breathers from the intensity of the action? Something to add more contrast to make the dramatic moments pop out more. But the styling is excellent and the writing is very descriptive.

I’ve seen a few people saying they felt out of the loop with this game since they didn’t play the earlier little match girl games. I can say (having played the first 3 but not the offshoots) that the only thing important from the first games is in the recap. This game does continuity kind of like early Adventure Time, with mostly ‘adventure of the week’ stuff with occasional throwbacks.

The game features some beautiful styling, with nice location descriptions, music, and scrolling text. I missed some of the intro timed text since my son asked me for help with something; timed text isn’t so much of a pet peeve as it is something that just doesn’t fit into my play style of fitting in games around the corners of my life. Fortunately the ending could be scrolled back if missed!

Apparently this game has a ton in common with Metroid Prime. I’ve never played that game, but I looked it up and there are quite a few similarities, even some cameos, if you can call it that.

The overall structure, like most of the Matchgirl games, is that looking into any source of fire (outside of the nighttime stars) will teleport the player to one of five or so worlds. There’s some nice variety here, including space, dinosaurs, wild west, etc. The Pirates of Penzance had a strong presence.

Each area has some kind of powerup that helps you explore other areas. In the meantime, there are different diversions (such as helping a goldfish or doing a time typing game).

I found the structure and side quests engaging and fun. The writing was flawless for me and had its moments of gravitas. I observed how it was done with interest, as my current WIP is structure much like this one, with different worlds or dimensions leading to some emotional moments. I liked how it worked here, so it gave me more confidence.

I did get stuck once. I suspected I had missed some exit. I used location based hints and quickly realized I hadn’t noticed an exit, and then solved the game soon after that.

I can see the weight of a long series making it hard for people to get invested in playing a game, but this one as a standalone might as well be the introduction to the series, as continuity isn’t really a major feature of the games. They can be played in just about any order.

It’s nice to see high quality in the comp. Between Ryan Veeder, JJ Guest, BJ Best, we have three former winners entering well-done games, as well as newcomers producing polished games of great value.

This is a great-looking Inform game. Inform has the capacity to make ‘website templates’ that people can share with each other to make projects look nicer, but people rarely use them. I don’t know if this one uses a custom template or just had css/html edited manually, but it looks great.

The concept is really funny, too. What if IKEA instructions were summoning rituals for ancient Gods?

Actual gameplay revolves around following IKEA instructions closely. I found that fun, as I like both assembling and deassembling IKEA furniture. My school had to throw out some cabinets recently that had gotten old/bug-ridden, and I had a hammer and just deconstructed it from memory (remove the thin bar, then pry the back panelling, then remove the edge pieces, then break out the last bit of wood with the hammer, etc.)

Anyway, this game scratched that itch, which was nice. Most of the puzzles revolve around clever ways to use the instructions. The game was a little smaller than I first imagined, but in a good way, as it was beginning to get overwhelming.

I did have some trouble with phrasing. It was hard to find (Spoiler - click to show)an antonym for ‘insert’. The transcript shows my flailing about. I ended up also using hints for what I’d consider the biggest puzzle of the game, but it was entirely fair, I just was getting close to the 2 hour limit.