Reviews by MathBrush

I beta tested this game.

This is a story that only branches twice, but does so in an effective way. You are the wife of a puppet master who performs across the country, but you have to make a difficult choice when he turns to dark means to support his work.

It's fairly short, and it uses type-writer effect text on light backgrounds with music/sound effects.

This short Twine game uses specialized styling to give a retro sci-fi fi feel, and the story fits that vibe as well. You are visiting a base on the moon which has been terrorized by space animals. It borrows heavily from the feel of the Alien movies.

However, it is fairly short, and the writing has a few problems that could be remediated by some more careful revision and beta testing. Overall, though, the basic storyline was interesting.

This short Twine game has you acting as a witch's assistant for fetching a magical flower.

Every choice that you make leads you either to instant death or further along the path.

The witch who owns you refers to other cats; could this be other lives, or do you play multiple protagonists? A careful reading can reveal more.

The writing was well done, but I would have preferred a different kind of interactivity.

This game reminded of another game, which I couldn't remember for a while, but now I recall is the author's 2016 game, Light Into Darkness. I liked that game, but this one is better.

It's a brief moment in time. The game definitely plays around with the typical speed of a parser game, where major events can occur in one command.

I hit on a good ending perhaps by chance, early on, and replayed to stretch it out as long as possible. If I hadn't guessed the command, I might not have liked it as much, but it was good.

This was a strange game. When I started it, I thought, 'Oh, so this is writing which might be something really good, or just fluff'. As I played through, it all sort of fell together, and I liked it.

It's bizarre; a sort of mix between 80's neon punk and Jack the Ripper's London. Plus some of ancient Rome thrown in.

I had a bit of trouble at first figuring out what to do, but I grasped it in the end. I think this was my favorite of La Petite Morte, and perhaps of the whole Ectocomp competition.

This is a short Ectocomp game that branches strongly.

You play a recently deceased woman who has the chance to go back and haunt one of three different people: her daughter, her old flame, and her enemy.

The game is sort of a gauntlet, because many of the choices are wrong, but you don't always have to restart completely.

I found it charming, with some interesting mini-twists, but overall I had to replay a lot of different sections to see it all.

This is one of those short games that is more like enacting a ritual than solving a puzzle. You find yourself inside a dream, with an unusual purpose.

Like another game which I enjoyed in this comp, your character is more nuanced than the typical interactive fiction protagonist.

It's a speed-IF, so it's fairly short, but it's well-polished. There weren't many surprises due to the foreshadowing, but the imagery was vivid.

In this game, you play someone who's been reading too many scary stories alone in a house, and you're too scared to go upstairs.

This is a great, relatable setup. Things are sparsely implemented, as is to be expected in a speed-IF, but I found no bugs and it had a fun verb choice.

The ending felt abrupt, which was disappointing, but I understand that not much is possible with speed-IF. This had the most relatable PC, for me, of any game I've played this year.

This game is confusing; I played it through 3 times. But it's polished, with descriptive writing, had a haunting emotion, and I've already replayed it a few times. So I'm giving 4 stars.

Most of Groover's purposely opaque work is an allusion to some known fairy tale, which provides a framework for understanding the piece. His original stories tend to provide more in the way of explanations.

This piece is a hidden-object fetch quest, with a sort of standing-up-to-bullies theme that reminded me of Andrew Schultz's frequent theme of 'everyone told you you were worthless and now you'll show them'.

I enjoyed the meta-puzzle of trying to piece it all together. It never gelled for me, but that's okay; having some things left unresolved improves the atmosphere.

This is a fairly clever game with no real choices, and quite long for an Ectocomp game in terms of text.

The idea is that you are part of an RPG party (feels more like MMORPG than pen-and-paper RPG), and everyone dies, but you linger on.

It dwells a lot on your existence as a ghost, and some parts of it were unique, even for fantasy-based ghost stories.

So, it's mostly a short story, but paced well by links, and its a good short story.