Reviews by MathBrush

This is a choice-based game written using a parser. At the time it came out, 2008, choice-based games had a long history already but they had never been popular in the IFComp or r*if usenet communities. The reviews from that time indicate that people found its choice-based nature unappealing.

The game is based on a writing prompt, and that prompt is essential to understanding the game. You begin in a cafe with three people around you called B, C, and D, and an American couple, one with a lisp and one with a stutter.

The speech impediments are part of the prompt; it can be difficult to write impediments in a way that doesn't come of as either condescending or mocking, but I think this pulls it off well.

For a choice-based game, this is actually quite complex. Time progresses no matter what you do, but you can focus on talking to each of the three people with you, or Wait. Each person you're talking to has a variety of options on what you can ask them about. I found that the game could recognize even small parts of the prompt, so if a question started with 'ask whether...', then typing ASK WHETHER was enough to solve it.

I remember trying this in the past and thinking it didn't go much beyond the prompt, so I was surprised this time that there was a major twist in the story. I had to reread to make sure I was understanding right. I'm surprised the other reviews don't mention that.

I genuinely liked this game; I liked the twist, the parser added a little 'crunchiness' to the choice interactivity, and it was well-written. The only thing that seemed 'off' was that choosing to just 'WAIT' ends up with an interaction that doesn't seem to fit the story as written.

This is an example of dynamic fiction, where you have no interactivity (although there is one instance of cycling text) and the entire purpose of the links is to pace the reading.

I’m not really against dynamic fiction. It’s useful in shorter stories to hide the total length of the story and keep you guessing where the end will come. It’s less useful in longer stories, as players get frustrated. Thankfully this is pretty short.

This game is about wormholes opening up and taking away things and people, with the reasons for it slowly revealed. I liked it, and I appreciated the sentiment it was trying to impart.

I generally like Bez’s work, as my view on creative writing is that it’s a way to share parts of our experiences and feelings with others, and Bez’s work is generally very effective at communicating how they feel.

This is a shorter game, drawing on some of the cozier seeds. It uses a warm color palette and a background sound of (I think) a fire crackling.

It has you sitting and thinking about all the bad things in your life, picking over the negative thoughts with a fine tooth comb. I remember playing it for the first time, feeling like it was going to be a downer game, but then I was pleasantly surprised to see things turned on their heads.

Overall, a good game and one that had a positive impact on me. I do think I slightly prefer Bez’s longer games, but that’s about it.

This was a nice game to end the comp on. It’s a relatively brief and poetic Twine game that uses sound (which I believe comes from the seed being used) as well as line drawings to convey a story.

The idea is that you’ve found a journal that talks about someone missing someone else, and the journey it’s taken them on. I can’t tell if it’s metaphorical or literal, but either way it’s interesting.

The game is very short, but it serves its purpose well.

This choice-based game is inspired by Shakespeare’s Sonnet 128, as well as the Reverse a Poem prompt (and the surprisingly popular Color Palettes prompt, which has been used in at least 3 of the games I’ve seen.)

I enjoy Shakespeare (although his sonnets and other poems are the works of his I’ve studied least), so I was interested to see where this goes.

It’s split into 4 pieces, each reflecting part of the sonnet, and inviting you to compare the storyline with the sonnet itself as you go.

You show up at a Valentine’s party for older singles, some of whom your friendly with and others less so. Interaction comes from choosing who to talk to and how to interact with them.

I tend to immerse myself in characters as I play and to suspend disbelief, imagining me to be the character myself. Obviously characters sometimes do things that I wouldn’t do, like theft and murder. But I had to pull myself out of immersion in this game, as I was presented with a woman, told that she is married but separated, and given a chance to put my hand on her thigh. An extramarital affair is something I’ve seen happen multiple times in real time and they have cause the majority of pain I’ve experience in my life, so I had to eject my immersion and puppet the character like an astral projection the rest of the game. I don’t think that was the author’s intent at all, and they certainly can’t anticipate every person’s reaction to different themes!

Fortunately, I could simply just not click on certain options and the game came to a satisfying conclusion. I found myself intrigued by the drama and drawn into the action.

The best parts of the game to me were the characters who are painted in vivid detail. I felt like I already knew Jack and Henry and Aline, like I had met them before and could picture them in my eye (I saw Henry as a younger Robert Redford).

A few times I felt like the pacing could have slowed down a bit to explore some of the more interesting moments, like a certain violent moment with a bottle. This is an author who I think would do equally well with long form fiction as with short form fiction.

The styling was well done and the overall presentation looked great.

This game is about someone experiencing the worst the world has to offer: isolation, hunger, infection, homophobia, perpetuating cycles of abuse, and, worst of all: cryptocurrency.

It’s a short game, well-designed with animated background transitions and varying fonts and colors.

You play as a recluse without stable unemployment who has recently fled a discord server where they were picked on and called various slurs. They find hope in a new discord for a cryptocurrency.

While all of this is happening, their house becomes increasingly moldy.

I didn’t put it together until now, because while playing I thought these two storylines were disjoint, but the spread of mold and the cycle of crypto’s crash and boom have a lot in common and those parallels must be what the other was on about.

There are several kinds of creepy moments here, from strange questions to plenty of physical horror. The slurs made me most uncomfortable; it was clear, though, that their use was not positive and was reflective of the ill mental state of the character.

Overall, a thoughtful game. Reminded me a lot of when crypto first got really big; I looked up how it worked and couldn’t figure out how it would be sustainable due to the need to keep long lists of past transactions in each interaction, so I tried to code up my own and got it to work, and my dean decided to use it as fake currency for his econ class (we made proof of work really easy so that it wouldn’t destroy the environment). I thought it would make it clear to the students how silly crypto was, but they got really into it. But the mining was annoying so they eventually abandoned the crypto part and made it fiat by putting it on the dean’s spreadsheet, which pretty much sums up the usefulness of crypto in real life (it’s not).

Anyway, a good horror game but definitely check the trigger warnings.

This visual novel in French has you play as a character named Erika Wolfenstein. From what I gather (my French is imperfect), you have been sent by a spacefaring organization to visit a planet abandoned by the gods to retrieve a divine artifact. Along the way, you encounter vampires, etc.

I had about 2 or 3 choices in this excerpt from the unfinished game, and a lot of story. There were a few different backgrounds, and one main character sprite.

Overall, the unfinishedness made it difficult to know how to feel. A lot of plot options are set up but never finished (some even say "I will tell you later" but can't because the story ends). It's possible it could be finished into a great game, but what we have now is only the possibility without the proof. I would have liked more choices early on, even if they didn't matter, but I know that visual novel conventions differ from those of Twine or Choicescript. Alternatively, if it became a kinetic novel, it might be nice to explore some of the plot points more deeply instead of hopping from thing to thing quickly. In any case, the character seems interesting and the worldbuilding could turn out good.

I played this game as part of the short games showcase.

This game is a murder mystery, but a condensed one. It has 4 locations, each with their own person of interest (although one is mobile).

Each one lets you ask a long list of questions. You can then gather from them what information you need. Upon leaving the manor, you can guess who the murderer is.

There isn't too much replay value, as the true murderer is pointed out to you upon the first guess. There is voice acting in a way I haven't seen much in IF; I think it uses various text-to-speech voices, including a stentorian butler voice.

Overall, the system feels smooth. I do think that a more drawn out game, with some choices you must carefully consider (like things you can say that cut off other options) might increase the overall value if a longer mystery were to be made.

This game reminded me of the first Star Trek movie in many ways.

It's a Strand game, a system that's been in development for some time. This game uses 3d-art custom made by the author, much of it quite good, especially the character art.

The game itself is short, with a nice core concept but somewhat rushed-feeling prose, kind of like a tech demo. I almost felt like this was a way to show off the Strand engine more than a stand alone story, as there's not a lot of time to get to know the characters before the big ending.

Overall, there are a lot of strong parts here, but it could have benefitted from more people, more places, more things, and more time for the plot to develop.

This game seems, from its itch page, to have been made as part of a doctoral program.

It's a bipsi/binksi visual novel and includes the original poem with some of the original drawings that Lewis Carroll included in his book. It also includes a branching portion where you explore the world described in the poem, with multiple endings.

I got two bad endings; I think I know how to get the good ending, but I was hitting the arrows fast to get through the text quickly and ended up treading dark paths.

Overall, its competently done and reworks a poem I loved as a youth (I liked it when I was older too when I saw how translators translated it). I think I might have liked more long-term effects of choices to allow strategizing, but overall this is pretty good.