Reviews by MathBrush

This short Quest game has you go into a mysterious house. In that house, you have to solve a few short puzzles and meet a stranger.

This game felt insubstantial to me; I wished for more: more puzzles, more backstory, more descriptions, more conversation.

This feels like the seed of a bigger and better game. I could see a 2.0 version of this game being very enjoyable.

This game has you play as a father and daughter travelling to a real-life library (in Harvard, I think?)

You meet a goofy pair of twins that are mysterious and magical. And you discover a special moss that allows you to visit other times.

I felt like the game could have done more with the premise. But what's there is fun; I felt like I learned something interesting.

This is one of my favorite Andrew Schultz games. It has you in a world where pseudoscience is real and real science is pseudoscience.

You play on a giant colored cube, and have to manipulate some transponders using a mood ring.

There's a second puzzle later that I did have trouble with, but overall, I liked the concept, and the game.

This game strongly reminds me of Owlor's pony-based games, even though the game never says that the protagonists are ponies (or humans, for that matter).

Your sister has sent a curse at you, and you have to cancel it out somehow. This is a navigation-based Twine game, and you have an inventory of sorts (you can pick different birds to follow you, and so on).

This game was pretty enjoyable; I would give it 4 stars, but it has some glaring errors, like Twine 'if' errors that post big messages on pages that occur in every playthrough. If those were fixed up, I'd bump up the score.

This game is one that I changed my opinion of over time. When I first played it, I skimmed it quickly, and I sort of dismissed it. I liked the sentence-shortening puzzles, but the text was confusing.

After reading several good reviews over the course of the competition, I'll admit, I revised my opinion due to popular opinion. In this case, I went through, and re-examined the writing, and I realized that it was a good depiction of a character that I disliked, rather than dislikable writing about a bland character as I had initially assumed.

For me, this places the game in the same category as Savoir-Faire, which had a similar roguish protagonist.

This is a high quality game; I'm giving it 3 stars only because I didn't connect on an emotional level. I feel like others will enjoy it even more than I did.

I beta tested this game.

This is a unity/Ink game which takes place over several weeks in an apartment as the main character deals with life and with dreams.

Most of the choices are about how you interact with others and your view on life. The story is very malleable; your choices have strong effects on the outcome.

It turns out that the story is based on (and is an implementation of)(Spoiler - click to show)a personality test. Finding this out tied the whole game together for me. But I felt disconnected during the game, and I wish I had more idea of where my choices would take me.

I beta tested this game, and I found it very funny.

Mike Sousa has written many past IF games, and the polish of this game is testament to his experience.

This game is tied together by various real-life newspaper headlines. You are having a pretty crazy day, and you hop from sequence to sequence trying to deal with mistaken identities and rogue celebrities.

There isn't a lot of direct interactivity in the traditional sense, but there's a lot of room to play around in each scene, with plenty of coded actions.

I helped to beta test this game, which is one of the three Qiaobook translation entries.

In this game, you play as a young man who wakes up in bed with a dead body.

You have to play through a few times to identify the killer.

The game is developed with background images and sound.

I like the general 'find the killer' concept, but I found it difficult to wait for the typewritten text.

I enjoyed the story in this game quite a bit, more than just about any other game in the competition.

You play as a magical crow who is fleeing a destructive sentient firestorm. You have to hop from town to town, trying to warn everyone while fighting a bad reputation.

I enjoyed the characters and setting; it was generic fantasy, but not swords and sorcery generic fantasy, more of Diana Wynn Jones or fairy tales.

There were some noticeable typos, though, which detracted from the experience.

I beta tested this game.

This is an ambitious concept debuted here in a demo game. It is an rpg game with procedurally generated text and spinning wheels indicating combat.

I liked the system quite a bit; the styling was good, and the graphics nice. I felt a bit dissociated from the story; like real RPGs, the story was in service to the puzzles.

There is hidden material here; despite beta testing and playing again later, I didn't find the sword or defeat the giant monster. Worth checking it out to see the system.