Reviews by MathBrush

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.

The author is going for something very different here, something out of the norm. As they state on the Ectocomp page, this game is a short story with no choices.

It's a vaguely mysterious game, with hints of influences from Asia (parts of it reminded me of China, India, and Israel). The blending of different cultures was the most important part to me.

The formatting was very hard to read, though. Pararaphs weren't spaced out, and the text was presented in large blocks. The dialogue could do with some pruning; it had a lot of the quick back-and-forth nothings that real dialogue has, but which do little to improve narrative writing without careful implementation, which was lacking here.

I liked the ending. On a technical note which is not due to the author (I think), I couldn't scroll down, and had to zoom out to read the text.

This is a purposely obscure short Twine game. It makes extensive use of color shifts and effects.

The story centers on a young (?) couple who have been forced into hiding while people like them are hunted down.

The first part was a lot like the diary of Anne Frank, so much that I thought that would be the final twist.

But it devolves into a dissociative mess near the end, in a pleasing way. The hard thing was that I didn't really know what sort of effects my choices would have, but that's unavoidable with the chosen subject matter.

This is a short Twine game entered into IFComp 2017.

It branches in a non-trivial, interesting way. You are lying in bed after an evening with some man and you realize you need to wash your hands. But it's dark, and you don't really want to.

This is a character whose life is centered around routines, and around keeping secrets. I found it interesting, but not compelling.

This story is fairly linear, more like dynamic fiction than puzzle-based or branching cybertext.

In this game, you read the story of an old witch who, out of loneliness, creates a girl out of turnips.

This game has Megan Stevens' most imaginative writing of her IFComp games, and presents an interesting analogy between the witch/turnip girl and parents/millenials. It's short, and worth reading.