Reviews by MathBrush

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.

This game had me on the edge, and toyed around with my emotions. I was kept in strong suspense, thinking 'This is either going to get 1 star or a high score'.

This was a translation, and it was translated well; it felt idiomatic to me. The writing in general was good.

Very short.

I generally like Andrew Schultz's wordplay games, but this one seems ill-conceived.

It has a concept that is very restrictive, and everything in the game is built up according to this scheme.

You are asked to find a friend and set a clock to a certain time. The issue is, there is no hinting as to the correct solution, yet the game only admits one solution. I thought of other solutions, afterwards; why not allow (Spoiler - click to show)5:04 as LIV? or 10:49 as MIL? I know there are time constraints, but the cluing is off here. On the other hand, Schultz's IFComp 2017 game is one of his most accessible, so I encourage you to try that one out.

This was a short Ectocomp game written in 3 hours or less.

In that time, the author provided nice background music and good text styling.

The game is fairly linear; all of your choices affect only the next paragraph, until the end, when your choices open up a few different ending options.

I wish I knew more about my choices so I could feel better immersed as the character. The storytelling was good; I could definitely see myself enjoying a longer game from this author, and I enjoyed this one.

This game was, in its way, the creepiest of the Grand Guignol games.

The actual horror elements are played down; you have 12 hours to work on your animation project. At each hour, you can work, explore (until you use up the storylets) or relax.

Creepy stuff can happen, but soon daylight comes, and all the supernatural elements seem not frightening at all. But as you go to your final exam, you begin to realize how horrifying real life can be (at least I felt that way).

This game was entered for Ectocomp 2017.

Like the author's other entry, this game is written using big blocks of text. Unlike the other entry, this one had more typos and grammatical errors, and seems to have been checked a little less.

The story revolves around fellow soldiers Abe and Shep, a psychiatrist, and Mary Shepard, a young woman who seems to have passed away. I had trouble following the timeline and who the narrative character was.

The highlight of the game was the scattered bits of poetry, which I think worked out well.

This is a shortish Ectocomp game with nice styling and some interesting text-hover effects.

You play as a schoolgirl who makes a bizarre discovery with her friends. The game branches quite a bit, with each branch fairly short.

I'd go into more detail, but the interest of the game lies entirely in the oddness of it all.

I found one small issue; the 'cockroach' link led to a page which was just a blank line; this was my first playthrough, and I had to restart. I ended up playing through 3 times.