Reviews by MathBrush

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.

This game placed low in IFComp 2016. It is in Inklewriter, a beautiful story-focused engine that is now being discontinued.

Snake's Game has several variants depending on the play through, but most seem to deal with a world where time and space can be warped at will, taking you to hell and a variety of other places.

It's fairly short, and the writing felt unpolished, but the other had a lot of heart, making this game more emotionally powerful than most low-ranking games, to me.

This game was coded in 2.5 days by a first time author with one beta tester. It requires what is generally an annoying way of interacting with a game. By all standards, it should be a fairly horrible game.

But it placed 19th out of 35, and wasn't really that bad. I like fairly campy, psychological horror, and this game provides it. It had great descriptions, and spookily changing descriptions.

This is a very short game. I liked it, in the end.

Saving John is a Twine 1 game with the standard CSS and formatting. In it, you find yourself in a dangerous situation and have the opportunity to construct a backstory for what happened.

The backstories involves jealousy, betrayal, love, profanity, and so on. The game is fairly short, but can be replayed several times.

The writing was descriptive, and the interactivity worked, but the story just didn't click with me, and It didn't feel all the way polished.

This game was created in 2012, and uploaded recently by someone besides Porpentine. It was created at least as early as March of that year, since it's mentioned in an AdventureCow forum.

It is the shortest of the early experiments (which include Myriad and a few others). However, it contains a lot of Porpentine's signature style, including body transformation and horror, protagonists which evoke multiple emotions simultaneously, and surrealism.

This is not the kind of game I imagine Porpentine would release today, but it's interesting as a historical insight.

This is one of the short Twine games for the nanobots They Might Be Giants tribute album.

You play as a slowly evolving hive mind created in MIT by accident. You have several choices as to how the hive mind will evolve and adapt.

It made me smile, and I found it fun.

This is an ultrashort game, written for the nanobots They Might Be Giants tribute album.

The major idea of it is that (Spoiler - click to show)there is a single sentence
where every word is a link; each word that you click takes you to the same sentence, about decisions. It seems like a commentary/joke on the nature of choices.