Reviews by MathBrush

This game reminds me of last year's spring thing game Niney, where you gathered up 'roles' and distributed them to other characters.

This game isn't similar in form or content, but it's similar in creativity. Your motions affect time, and there are hidden stats affecting what you are able to do.

My main interest in playing this game was piecing together the backstory, which was fun.

There were some unifinished corners here and there; many of the standard responses (like X ME) are left with their standard forms. But I enjoyed this.

This is the first game to use Liza Daly's windrift system besides her own.

I found the writing in this game to be sharp and evocative; I loved it, and might nominate this for best writing of 2018 when that time comes around.

It's very short, and the interactivity is quite limited, but the visuals are placed very well, and the styling and writing come together in a really pleasing way.

I found this short horror story compelling. You are someone, somewhere, intentionally vague, and you have a knack for finding faces on things.

The game is more than just that, of course, but I found it compelling, especially with the multimedia.

I don't want to say too much about it, because experiencing it all is the point. I wasn't satisfied with the conclusions of the piece though, even after experimentation. But that's something that's due to personal taste.

This has nothing to do with my rating or even something I think the author should do, but I wish the game had included a gallery of found faces. But I can satisfy that interest by my own searches. I like this game.

This game allows you to experience three different randomly generated tarot readings, complete with illustrations.

This is a polished game, and it incorporates information from a survey done about people's impressions of the cards. So it's almost like having a reading randomly selected from several dozen other people's readings.

It was impressed, but I saw it as an intellectual exercise without gut feeling.

This game starts you in a dark room with several voices talking to you. There are eight doors, some locked, and others not. Your goal is to escape.

The different voices seem to represent parts of your psyche, and the short game is a game of self-discovery. It is illustrated with hand-made colored pencil drawings.

The writing is littered with typos, and the storyline is somewhat confusing. It was descriptive, though, and good at evoking emotion.

This is a fairly brief game written in free verse. It seems to draw on the writings of four famous women who died, mostly in controversial situations (including deaths that resonated in the trans and African-American communities).

The writing was interesting, but the free verse format made it hard for me to make an emotional connection to the writing. It was interesting looking up the four women in the story.

This Twine game uses appropriate styling and occasional graphics to tell a slice-of-life story in a world where cybernetic enhancements are common.

You have encounters with two different friends whose lives are different than most people's, and explore some unusual technology.

It feels like a brief vignette of a larger world, either a fan fiction, a taste of the author's own universe, or an introduction to a longer game.

This is a short Twine game that leans heavily on standard detective tropes. You, a hard bitten male detective, have a female client come in with an extensive backstory that you explore through various links. A lot is made of her appearance, but more in a deductive way than a seductive way.

The woman's story is about suspected adultery. The story uses standard Twine styling and has a heavy amount of text per choice, making it more like a story with distinct branch points and less like a mechanics-driven game or visual art piece.

Overall, I would have preferred some more deviations from the noir formula or some more compelling mechanics, but what's here is done well.

This game is part of the They Might Be Giants Nanobots tribute album. This 'album' consists of Twine games inspired by the songs and their lyrics, and is a sequel to the Apollo 18 Tribute Album of parser games in 2012.

I passed over Nouns at first, as it's fairly minimal. I was learning Twine at the time and downloading games to look at the code, and Nouns had a tiny, tiny 'game map'. Then I realized it was all javascript.

The game consists of one passage, almost all of whose words are links. Clicking on each link transforms the game.

I thought it was random at first, but on subsequent playthroughs, I realized there was a specific pattern involved. I liked it.

I only took off one star because I didn't engage with the game on an emotional level. Otherwise, the game is polished, descriptive, with good interactivity and a nice overall experience.

This game is billed as just a demo for doing relationships in twine, which affected my perception of it (in the sense that I assumed it wasn’t a fully fleshed game), but it manages to have a lot of heart and some neat tricks.

It is based on a riding school with three different ponies/horses, who you interact with in a couple of branching choices. Each one has its own likes and dislikes, which affect the ending.

It succeeded in its goal of making twine seem more like choicescript, and made me laugh a few times. If it was going to be fleshed all of the way out, I wish it were longer and had better cluing as to the effects of the relationship choices and more endings. But as it is I like it.