Reviews by MathBrush

I beta tested this game.

Devotionalia is a shortish but replayable fantasy game that is all about atmosphere and contemplation. It is a choice-based game, but not immediately recognizable as Twine, due to the extreme customization: graphics, music, many variants of link types, and more.

The game comes with a helpful instruction page. Essentially, you are a priest of an ancient religion, the gods almost forgotten. You wish to learn from them, and thus you make your devotions.

There's not an action-driven story or a big cast of characters. It's a somber reflection on life. If you've ever seen the painting "The Monk by the Sea" by Caspar David Friedrich, this game is essentially the interactive fiction version of that painting.

This game is listed as educational, but I found it to be amusing and well-written as well.

You play as a character being asked to repair a sort of magical computer, with a crystal ball instead of a screen and an abacus and magic soup as part of the internal units.

The style seems more like old CYOA books, with most paths leading off to death. I think a 'back-up' button or more cluing could make this less frustrating. As it was, I was put off by the frequent deaths and didn't finish the game. But the writing was enjoyable, and the illustrations were very well done.

This game is a sequel to an earlier IFComp game, Dream Pieces.

Both games consists of rooms where you are given a few highlighted objects. These highlighted objects are words that can be broken up into their syllables and recombined.

This game centers on creating and using doors and other exits. I found it clever and interesting. The Quest engine was a little blocky and chunky (for its own reasons, not the game's) and I didn't feel emotionally invested in the game, but as a puzzle game it was effective and fun.

Intelmission is primarily a long conversation, with an introductory segment.

You and another spy are captured together and have to talk. The game features many many topics, and makes you aware at the end of how many you explored. You can choose what to discuss, or allow the game to choose for you after a certain time.

In a way, this game reminded me of Mirror and Queen. Both are conversational games with a ton of work behind-scenes to provide many topics and allow for user flexibility. But in both games, that flexibility gets communicated to the user more as mirroring what you choose rather than gaining new information. There were few surprises, narrative twists and turns.

I did enjoy this one though, and Mirror and Queen.

This game is based off of the Stanley Parable, which I've never played. This version is set in a school.

It's short, and deals with ideas of autonomy, player/author relationship, and meta narratives. I don't know if the enjoyment is higher or lower for those not familiar with the Stanley Parable.

It seems, though, like someone thought, "I like this popular game, so I'm going to adjust it to my circumstances and make a Twine version of it." The writing and structure of this game make me think that if the author tried a new game after this based on their own ideas, that it would be pretty great. I hope you write again!

This reminds me in an odd way of a more optimistic and gender-swapped version of In The Friend Zone from a few comps back. In that game, you explored a world that was a giant woman.

In this, you are aboard a giant male-shaped spaceship. It is a riff on Star Trek and general science fiction tropes. In style, it reminds me of 80's college humor movie.

The level of explicitness is similar to Leather Goddesses of Phobos on Safe Mode.

It's polished, descriptive, and amusing, although I didn't personally care for the subject matter.

This game is by (I think) a commercial team that had a different approach to IF than most of the authors in the competition.

This game is lavishly decorated as a book, with occasional beautiful illustrations.

You play as a wolf who is friends with a young child.

It has essentially one choice per 'chapter', with the later chapters having the strongest effects. This is in contrast to most twine-style games, which encourage frequent irrelevant choices or gradual choices. This game's style is exactly what I would expect Netflix's choose your own adventure shows to be like: long segments punctuated with individual, large-effect choices.

This game was featured in IFComp 2018. It has a beautiful custom interface featuring pixel-art animations, and includes sound.

Basically, love goes wrong on a train. The sequence of events just interrupts everything.

But, you have a chance to go back and change that sequence!

This is a wonderful premise. By going back and changing the order of things, you can unlock 7 preliminary endings and then a final ending.

However, I found the choices opaque. Instead of being able to strategize, it came down to more or less random guessing. There are some hints in the text (changing options, for one thing), but even with the walkthrough, I never reached the final ending on my own. I saw what it said, though, and I thought it was beautiful.

Because I struggled with the interactivity, I didn't receive the full emotional impact of the game. Other than that, I enjoyed it.

Edit: With help from the forums, I finished this, and I loved the ending.

Where I got stuck was (Spoiler - click to show)Forgetting to confess for the 'love' ending.

This was an IFComp game that I liked quite a bit more than, it seems, many of the other IFComp reviewers did.

This is almost purely dynamic fiction, a style of interactive fiction where you mostly read a linear narrative, with different special effects adding to the atmosphere and some scattered choices. "My Father's Long Long Legs" is a classic example of the genre.

This story is about a woman whose mother tended a bar and was obsessed with 'polishing the glass'. It's a story about growing up in a broken household, coming to grips with our parents' problems, and the spiral of obsession and addiction.

There's probably a metaphor here, but it's abstract enough not to be clear on what the metaphor is, which makes this game much more effective for me.

This game is lavish, with a medieval-looking font and scattered illustrations and capitals.

Presented like a book, interactivity is done by either turning the page or by selecting between binary choices.

There are quite a few paths in this game that you can take, and I found it overall impressive. My 3 stars is because I didn't feel an emotional involvement in the game, being put more at a distance by the elaborate presentation. I also didn't feel an inclination to play again, due to the energy required in poring through the text.