Reviews by MathBrush

This game is a longish twine game with lush but sometimes confusing writing.

In it, you play as a woman who is to be married off to settle her father's debts, but is late to the wedding. You stumble, chased by wolves, into a cathedral that is abandoned and stripped of religious symbology. You then dive deeper into the earth, discovering a series of trees that give sin-related dreams.

This felt pretty long. The writing has me going back and forth. On the one hand, it shows skill in word use and sentence formation. On the other hand, I had great difficulty keeping track of what's going on. Sudden shifts in perspective and topic aren't just common, they're essentially the majority of the game. Here are a few excerpts I had trouble parsing:

(Spoiler - click to show)There’s something happening at the police headquarters. It is an invitation, something thrilling but also dangerous. You had invited him over, for beer, for weed, the usual dissolutions, to assay your desire. This change of scenery could represent an escape procedure; the police headquarters, the inkcloud from a squid’s mouth. Yeah? Shall we drive over?

Clogged up, I imagine. I came by bike. He did not even intend to down his vodka club. You invent an obstacle. Bum tire on mine. Haven’t had a chance. An embarrassing fabrication: your life is nothing but chances. Hop on mine. He finishes the drink in the end, two thrilling gulps, pulls you from the bear trap of a lounge chair, positions you at the rear, to the private torments of discretion. Keep hold."

Another one:

"You keep turning over the question of death as if it were a weekend trip to the zoo. You’d heard about the albino crocodile, of course, the caged mandrills, the rhino whose tusk is slowly curling back into his skull. I’d like to go into town this evening, for an hour or two. Do you feel up to being alone? It’s a matter of practicalities, really, that’s what everything comes down to. Do we have a gun? She is sniffing at an orchid even though it’s plastic. Of course we don’t have a gun. The coffee is undrinkable. She must give you back the machine at least. Not even in your purse? It’s a rough-and-tumble neighborhood.

The storyline is interesting, and every part involving the marriage story was great. I just got bogged down in the middle and very intro and am not sure what was going on or what the themes were.

This game is about you, a vampire, being offered a cure for vampirism. But it's more than that.

It uses a variety of multimedia to enhance the experience: unusual colors and fonts, scrolling tickertape that changes depending on what you mouse over, music, and stock photos in the background.

To me (and possibly the author, although I don't want to attribute intent when I don't know it), the game is mostly about the relationship you have with the vampire who created you. It turns out then when a vampire makes another vampire, they override the personality, emotions, and memories of their victim, making essentially a new person. That new person is completely changed to be the image of the one who made them. And you have a chance to undo them.

It made me think about relationships, like one I witnessed where one person did everything they could to make the other person be like them, including having them stop talking to their family, move away from friends, be rude to people at work, play the same games, watch the same shows, have the same religious beliefs. And, just like the vampire creators in the story, they moved on afterwards (although our personal vampire 'sire' is different in this story).

Overall, I thought it was effective. The game has some variation; I played it 3-4 times to try to understand it and I saw some significantly different content each time.

This game is run on a retro mac emulator running Hypercard. I played a downloadable version, but I believe I read on the itch page after that you can play online.

It is graphics and music heavy. Like I usually do, I loaded up the game on my computer to have ready to play later while I finished chores, but I was surprised to come back to find it had been playing an opening sequence on its own, so I restarted to see what I had missed (quite a lot, it seems).

In it, you play an injured mech pilot who now (in embarrassment, I think) resupplies the other mech pilots. They come in, talk to you about small talk and also needs they have, and you need to deduce from that how many parts to order for them.

Throughout the story, you encounter a woman who always has and inspires tense emotions; this seems to provide the main thrust of feeling and plot in the game. However, the game is unfinished, so we'll find out more later on, and I'll likely revise my review then.

This is story-focused twine game that uses dithered graphics (I recently learned this word) and is set in a diner at the end of all worlds.

You survived an apocalypse that destroyed everyone in your world. You were able to leave, and your travels eventually brought you here. Now other versions of you from other abandoned worlds have built a community.

The story focuses on your perceptions of and interactions with the other copies of yourself. Some you embrace, some you despise, some you have hopes for. Of course it can be read as a metaphor for our perception of self and our self-worth. And it works well as both allegory and story, as most good sci-fi does.

The story progresses in one direction, but you can pick what order to encounter some things and in some cases you can choose which branch you'll interact with. I didn't feel a need to replay (as it felt complete) so I didn't see all branches.

Overall, good for someone wanting a polished, self-reflective sci-fi fix.

I almost completely misunderstood this game.

It's navigated via a clock-like interface where you click on squares to advance the story.

It's about two people who tell each other stories each night. One makes up stories with CYOA-style "A or B" choices (like, 'was the villain the WITCH or the PARASITE?'). The other tells the story of a girl who turns into a sparrow when troubled.

There's a question mark button in the middle that I didn't notice. So after the first pair of stories and 'The End' I figured that was the whole game. I reset a couple of times to try out different stories. I couldn't figure out why the sparrow one seemed so incomplete.

That's when I realized that there are actually like 12 (or maybe 8?) sparrow stories all spread out, and you make your own stories in between. That made the game way more satisfying than I had originally supposed.

The individual small stories are interesting. They feel kind of allegorical in many ways, and the choices you make, while they matter, weren't always obvious in the effect they'd have. Especially when you choose who the villain is, the narrative often made them out to be sympathetic or not really more villainous than the other path, so I feel like there's some overall message I'm missing.

The sparrow story was also symbolic, but as it took place over a longer time I had time to see more repeated themes and feelings, and I liked what it was expressing. It includes a lot of scenes that I've seen frequently in LGBTQ story games (like a desire for transformation, parents who disown you, friends that captivate you and help you change), and it executed them very well.

Neat visually and well-done with the overall storyline.

This game was part of Shufflecomp and was based on three different songs.

In it, you go through a sequence of surreal worlds with strange and evocative imagery, like diamonds in places diamonds shouldn't be and hallucinations in an antique film viewer.

The three scenes feel mostly unrelated, except each ends with a 'hook' for the next one, linking into a loop at the end.

The game uses a variety of colors to distinguish the different scenes.

I liked the surreal feel and the variety. I felt like I wished for a little more elaboration in both the story and the code, as sometimes things felt a little rushed or underimplemented. I'm glad I played it though.

I loved the worldbuilding in this Vorple game. (side note: I'm not sure why it's Vorple; I didn't notice any graphics, sound or text effects in the version I played).

You play as a kind of shepherd for lost souls in an afterlife filled with ritual and restriction. This view of the afterworld reminds of things like Spirited Away or the Royal Guards in Bleach, with a variety of ritualized systems with specialized individuals running them in order to process the deceased.

Parts of this setting are reminiscent of the author's room in Cragne Manor (one of the earliest reachable parts of the game), which is nice because I liked that as well.

This game felt overwhelming at first, but the map doesn't branch much and most objects have one well-hinted use. I had the most trouble with the cake, but was happy when I figured it out.

A couple of things felt a bit underimplemented (like some text that fires every time you approach the statue) but I didn't have any bugs or typos that negatively impacted gameplay.

In this game, you meet a group of new friends and decide to hang out with them. Unfortunately, you end up trapped by one friend in their own treehouse which has a collection of bizarre puzzles to keep you inside.

I liked the balance of this game; it's complex enough that it gave me pause but forgiving enough that I could complete it without ever feeling really stuck. It has a lot of charming parts but also manages to be really creepy without ever insisting that you be afraid.

Gameplay revolves around exploration, information gathering, and object collection. The coding looks like it must be complex at parts, like with the random comments from your host as the play games or with the way the rope is handled.

The game isn't perfect; at times the layout can be confusing and its not clear which clues connect to which puzzles. But it satisfied all my criteria for a 5 star game: polished, descriptive, emotional impact (creepy mixed with pity), would replay, and interactive).

I remember hearing stuff about this game from other people who were judging the Short Games Showcase. Even though that's over, I wanted to try it out.

It's a multimedia-enhanced, well-written visual novel that is (I think) entirely linear, but which has good pacing and has the amount of text per click and screen tuned well enough that it never felt like a chore to click through (also because the writing is compelling).

The protagonist is cool (a writer who is passionate about visual novels and indie games with plenty of experience and education who gets a shot at working on a popular franchise), and its fun to see things from their perspective.

But they're also problematic. At first, it felt like we were meant to sympathize with her 100%, but as it went on I could see the issues coming up, things very similar to ones I had in my first job(s). Amy, the hero, focuses her workplace happiness on romantic relationship with coworkers rather than the job. She zones out in meetings, feels like everyone is fake and not real LGBTQ allies, and doesn't bother to try the games of the company she's working for before getting hired. She makes radical suggestions to gameplay to the experienced team and gets mad when they won't make them, and when the team comes up with a project suited exactly for her skill set, she is upset because it's designed to be catered to the audience rather than her own ideals.

I know exactly how she feels, especially with having to write what others want than what you want. One thing that helped me so much with that was someone's advice about writing (looking up, it was an author named ferkung):
"It's just very "I know what works, I am a professional, if you do not want what I think is 100% right, then I can offer 80% right and meet your goals."" And as for hating that the team poo-poos her ideas, I remember a lot of early teams I was part of where I jumped in and criticized what they were doing, only to find out later that they had tried my ideas before and found failure (as I did) and just didn't want to rehash it.

So I expect the fictional Amy will be a lot happier if she survives in the industry and finds a team she loves (or grows to love the team she has). It's like a coming-of-age story for a working professional, and a great representation of one at that.

I was struck when starting this game by how lovely the visuals were. The colors were rich and vibrant and the style was kind of impressionistic, allowing some flexibility in how to interpret things.

Most of the game is a series of conversations with 'Elias'. I don't want to give spoilers, but I don't think that would even be possible, since the game is not definite about what's going on.

'Elias' looks like a kind of plant monster. The real Elias was your boyfriend, but this thing can talk like him and seems to have some of his memories and feelings.

You are someone living out of their car, where everything is, and no other person is visible anywhere in the deserted areas you drive through. It's just you and 'Elias', whom you've trained or asked to re-enact your past memories with.

The art, music and lyrics are haunting. I thought at first it would be a shorter, poetic piece, and thought it was coming to a close, so I was surprised when it went on for quite a while. The ending was transcendent in the literal sense, as it passed from clearly understandable phenomena to something more. I didn't fully understand.

The game is mostly linear, with some choices along the way that may have had story impact but felt more like (good) flavor. I felt like the goal here was to write a game that gave a certain strong impression or feeling of combined nostalgia and alienation, and I think it achieved its goal.

One thing that could have been nice would have been a way in-game to know how much of the game I had completed or a way to save (maybe there was one; I didn't know any UI) to ensure that I could plan to experience the whole thing at once. But it was a charming experience and I found it really beautiful visually, one of the nicest-drawn games I've played in a long time.