Reviews by MathBrush

Adam Brendenberg has written several interesting poetic games in the past, including War of the Willows (a fighting game in poem form) and Fallen Leaves (a procedural poem generator).

This game has a sort of puzzling aspect. You wander a physical space, including what seems to be a labyrinth with mysterious controls. It's all written in Twine. The topics of the poetry include the game itself, a meditation on video games in general, and Donald Trump in a boat.

This game has you read through 5 sort of interviews in Twine. Each one has a background character from a fantasy (or science-fi or both) tale explain to you how they feel about life while you react.

Each ends with a choice, which you must explain via text entry.

Reading all 5 stories unlocks a sixth story.

I liked the interactivity of it, the text entry and so on. But because the game seems designed to be a mirror for the reader, a lot of the text was bloodless and generic, designed to apply to as many situations at possible.

It covers some fairly controversial topics, including a dedication to a notorious American criminal.

The Marino family has released several Mrs. Wobbles games over the years. This one is fairly long, and features two different protagonists.

All of these games feature a heavily costumized and illustrated Undum interface, like Twine but with a single, unbroken page of scroll. Text appears and disappears, stats are tracked, and there are several images.

This game seemed to have more depth than the other Tangerine House games; it offers two paths through the game, and a complicated inventory and even an economy.

This is a Twine game that features a number of people surrounding Trump, especially John Kelly, Stephen Miller, and Jared Kushner.

The game makes use of multimedia, with links to real-life articles, various illustrations, scrolling text aimations, and sounds.

The plot is fairly simple: you play as an intern thrust into the role of providing positive information for trump. Different factions try to tell you what to pass on, but you must choose between them.

The game has a few bugs listed below that should be easily fixed. Also, I felt like something was off with the links. I found myself frequently scrolling up and down to read the text after clicking a link, and had some trouble when coming back from aside-text (as everything became reset on the original page when I returned).

I was glad I played, as it was amusing. On a personal note not factored into my rating, I don't agree with its demonization of Stephen Miller as the evil behind the throne. Many people have been posited as the true evil behind the throne for some time in the Trump administration, and I think that shifts responsibility away from the President.

One bug report for the author:

(Spoiler - click to show)On the page near the end referencing constitutional crisis and WWIII:

The (link-reveal:) command should be assigned to a variable or attached to a hook

Also, the very last page seemed to have an error, as it showed a 'fire mueller' tweet as a graphic, while having a written text that said:

(Tweet text: "After hearing the words of my celestial grandchild, I have decided to rescind my order to fire Robert Mueller and will be resigning from the Presidency. I hope that once I am gone, we can begin to heal.)

Santoonie Corporation was a group that sprang up in the early 2000's promising a very advanced game called Amissville that never materialized in completed form. They went on to release a series of games, including Delvyn and Zero, and, finally, Lawn of Love.

Each of these games has an ambitious opening scenario that is mildly under-implemented and contains some sort of offensive or bizarre standard responses before eventually petering out in a section that cannot be finished.

This game is no exception. This game has an opening picture, a preface, an introduction, and a prelude. It features an opening scenario with conversation and detailed rooms, but with basic features missing (like when moving in an unavailable direction, where no text is printed. Apparently a sound was supposed to ping).

The story involves you meeting a pair of interesting young women, neighbors, one of whom plays a game with you. The game peters out shortly after.

If you find this interesting, try Delvyn, Zero, and the TADS Amissville.

This game was written as a learning sample of the ZIL language. It was written over just a few days.

As such, it is small and lean. But Welch has managed to put a few clever puzzles in.

I was unable to solve this without a walkthrough the first time I tried it. After the walkthrough, which is very detailed, I felt like the game required a number of fairly mean actions, but with suitable rewards.

I find this game most interesting as an example of the ZILF language. I wonder how many of the standard responses were hand-coded, and how many part of the language.

This game is highly unusual. It is a text adventure maze implemented on an emulator of an old type of computer.

The setup is fairly simple: a maze that reveals its shape to you once you fail to complete it, and which regenerates randomly each time. A single item, of questionable utility, is found in the maze each time.

The solution to the maze uses a trick I have never seen before in interactive fiction, and which is very cruel.

In this game, you have jumped down a hole into a central hub-like room with multiple color coordinated rooms branching off.

Puzzles follow a sort of game-logic, where mysterious machines and illogical creatures and locations abound.

Parts of it seem forced and/or rough. The machine that merges birds with items is fun to tinker with but some of the results seem hard to guess.

The writing takes a major downturn during the whale segment, where it begins insulting the player and taking a negative and small view of life. This is isolated, and weird.

Overall, I can say with Dwight from the Office: "A lot of the evidence seemed to be based on puns."

I love reading creepy stories and sci-fi stories, and one subgenre of both of those that I like is the time loop story. While such stories can be played just as a puzzler (get this sequence right to fix the machine, like Fingertips:Fingertips), I especially appreciate the ones that focus on human thought and feeling.

This game is well-written and focuses on character and depth. It is, as far as I can tell, completely linear (or completely cyclical, I guess I could say). It's like an endless roundabout with occasional exits that lead to the same roundabout. But it does have an overall narrative arc.

It contains some dark themes, and isn't really appropriate for children, I would say. I found it meaningful and well-done.

This uses slow text, which I usually dislike but found appropriate here (and not too slow). It also used music which I didn't listen to.

I'm a fan of Anssi Raisanen's games, and this one in particular was interesting, but it lacked a few key features that other games from this author have.

It had one particularly clever puzzle involving an extra image included with the game, one maddening guess-the-verb puzzle, and one short and sweet puzzle. Overall, it was shorter than most Raisanen games, and with somewhat less good implementation.

But if you're playing through the author's whole collection, I wouldn't skip out.