Reviews by MathBrush

This story uses media in unusually good ways. It has audio, graphics, animation and text effects.

The game is creepy on two levels. On the first level, it has overtly 'horror'-type text, almost over-the-top. On the second level, it serves to illustrate what something experiencing sleep paralysis could encounter, and I found that much more disturbing.

The story had a narrative twist that I found lessened my enjoyment of it as a game, but heightened my appreciation of it as a piece of art or a means of communicating thoughts. Because I think the artist intended it more as a story or art, I've considered it as such and given it 5 stars

Uses slow text, but in an appropriate way. I usually hate slow text, but it makes sense here. The whole piece is well-considered and designed as a whole.

I expected this game to just be a straightforward implementation of the classic logic puzzles (involving getting a fox, a duck, and some grain across a river. Other versions have a wolf, a goat, and some cabbage, and so on).

However, the author assumes that everyone already knows this puzzle. Instead, each step of the classic solution is hampered by a different difficulty.

I felt that most of the solutions were of the moon logic variety, or like late Sierra point and click games. Also, the implementation was at times spotty with the rope, which is a notoriously difficult thing to code.

This is a fairly short science fiction game with 5 or 6 puzzles.

As the other reviewer noted, it was under implemented, with several locations having no description at all. There were other things that were strangely over implemented, such as a certain action in the first room having more than a dozen responses.

The idea was clever, overall, but the game has a real penchant for attacking the character with strong profanity and insulting many things that you do. It has a narrative purpose, but it seems like the sort of thing a young author thinks is intense and meaningful before they begin to get more experience.

I would have given 2 stars, but the puzzle bits were satisfying, so I gave it 3.

This game is a sequence of surreal puzzles. You've woken up in a world where Half-Life 3 has been confirmed, and this is a clear indicator that reality has been warped.

The setting is goofy and charming, but this quick game doesn't have the author's usual polish and guidance. Puzzles, including the very first puzzle, rely on some very unusual logic, making the game more difficult in somewhat unfair ways.

The character descriptions were good, though.

The original Lurking Horror was one of my favorite Infocom games, so I was interested in seeing Veeder's take on it.

This game is closer to Captain Verdeterre's Plunder than to any of Ryan's other games. Like Verdeterre, this game has a tight timer that sends you to your death, and you must play over and over to beat it.

This game exploits that structure for the story in amusing ways, though. You pick up in G.U.E. Tech (from Lurking Horror, itself inspired by M.I.T.), stuck in a time loop caused by the awakening of an Elder God. You are very aware of your previous iterations.

Progress is similar to Hadean Lands, in that you progress by gaining knowledge that your later iterations use. But instead of being tracked in-game, the knowledge is stored in password-like spells. The spell names include mangled versions of the author's name and a scrambled name of a D&D slime demon.

I enjoyed this game quite a bit; the solutions were generally very reasonable, and there was a nice 'power boost' or two near the middle of the game, with the end requiring you to tie everything together. I got impatient with one puzzle in the middle, when I had half a dozen unused spells and the same number of unsolved rooms and I couldn't figure out which ones went together. I decompiled to get past that stage, and didn't have any trouble after that.

This game seems like an advance upon the simple structure of Texture. In both game systems, you drag keywords onto other words. But in this game, you find the keywords, drag them into an inventory, and can pull them out whenever you like. A four-item inventory limit causes pressure in the game.

I like the system. The story is generic hack-and-slash, but I like generic hack-and-slash, so it wasn't bad. It was deeply implemented for all reasonable responses, though.

With a larger inventory, this could support a long and complicated game. The interactivity in this particular game though wasn't quite what I enjoy; it was mostly a try-repeat-again game, and it was frustrating losing at the end due to choices I made at the very beginning.

This game was inspired by the debates in America surrounding the law passed in North Carolina restricting transgender individuals from using bathrooms besides those of their biological gender.

This game isn't really an allegory, as exactly the same things are happening in this world as in ours. Rather, it reframes the discussion using fantasy techniques to give events a greater emotional impact.

I played through one branch to the end, and rewound a bit to get three different endings. The Twine styling and coding was beautiful, with links represented by +'s for links that furthered the study and *'s used for asides.

It took less than 25 minutes for me. The interactivity was interesting, because it spells out the consequences of your choices in an in-game way.

Fans of DeNiro's other works or of topical commentary will appreciate this game.

This game has a great premise: you are a trolley driver on a monotonous route who has a plan which is only slowly revealed to the player.

This has all sorts of potential, and the game throws in some interesting characters and narrative twists.

But it has two main issues: one is a lack of synonyms and other implementation errors; and the other is a lack of in-game guidance.

Other than that, I found it a pleasant game, with a surprising ending.

This was a strange game. It has some great ideas: extricate yourself from a pile of rubble (which reminds me of an old comp game where you start in a pile of dead bodies and have to crawl out). You then explore a small underground complex with a Lovecraftian vibe.

But the game has a lot of implementation problems, leading to numerous judges missing out on big chunks of the game.

I didn't have too much trouble getting out of the pile, like some judges did, but I didn't even so the cabinets or the slicing machine.

Worth trying. I wish it were expanded.

I beta tested this game.

This is a TADS game where you are on a spaceship, and anything you do (for long enough) results in a different wacky ending.

The author keeps you from meeting too many error messages; if you try to do something usually not allowed (like going down when you shouldn't) it justs adapts the game (like having you burrow through the metal). It even includes a battle-ship type game.

It made me laugh, it is pretty descriptive, but it's not polished in some sense that I have trouble grabbing hold of; and I felt confused without the hints.