Reviews by MathBrush

This game has you tapping the space bar in rhythm to simulate swimming. As you continue to swim, the game's story progresses. If you stop swimming, you get an alternate version of the story. By progressing between swimming and not swimming, you finish the story.

It's a magical realism story centered on one moment in time, as you swim from one beach to another. I found it effective, but the interactivity wasn't quite what I liked.

This game is purposely modeled after Depression Quest. Instead of Depression, it models Anorexia, and was constructed as part of an academic sort of study.

This game is fairly long; if you load it up in Twinery, it has a huge amount of nodes and more than 5 endings.

However, the game often felt detached to me, and I ran into several broken pages that I had to back out of.

This game is chock full of atmosphere, with compelling story and writing. Many 2017 IFComp judges found it compelling, and I predict it will receive at least one and probably several XYZZY nominations.

You play as a young witch in a Finnish village whose mistress has died. A dream has haunted everyone in town: a fighting force of strangers is coming in boats.

The game is fairly short, but well-done. There were a few guess-the verb spots, though. Overall, I recommend it.

This well-done game presents a murder mystery/creepypasta through a series of faux Wikipedia pages.

By clicking on link after link, you slowly come to realize the scope and depth of a deep plot. Unlike a normal murder mystery, this one has creepy pasta vibes, similar to SCP or the Russian Sleep Experiment, except more grounded in reality.

I found it interesting and compelling, although I felt it was a bit pulpy, and occasionally became tedious finding the links. It's the kind of game I wish I would have thought of.

This game is pretty aimless; you are on a bus that runs into something on the street, then you go around the park.

I think this part of what 'slice is life' is defined to be; there are no real goals. You can buy soda, talk to an old man, take Tylenol (which has very different effects than the Tylenol I'm used to. Unless it's Tylenol pm; maybe that makes more sense).

I found two different endings.

This game is mid-length; it has you play as an assassin infiltrating a house to avenge their daughter's death.

I have to wonder if this is a troll game. It is over-the-top, and includes a random adult scene (in metaphor form), and involves toilets and superglue as weapons of death.

There were several bugs and the writing wasn't especially polished.

This game was entered in IFComp 2016, but disappeared shortly thereafter.

However, lglasser recorded multiple playthroughs, which completely shows the gameplay, as it is a disjoint collection of sequences/videos triggered by clicking on labelled items on a screen.

The game is graphics-heavy, with pure white silhouettes against hand-drawn backgrounds. It also comes with music.

After hearing good things about the game, I was surprised how angsty and profanity-laden the game was. There is a whole genre out there of shocking confessions, which isn't my style, but this story is well done in that genre.

This is a sort of word maze based on the lyrics of the nanobots album song Lost My Mind.

Every word leads to other words, going around in a cycle. There is a secret to solving the maze, but it's fairly complicated to finish it even if you know the secret; but if you keep trying, it should work out. I thought it was fun.

This game is similar to both Murder on the Orient Express and Dracula.

You awake from your coffin on a train to discover that a passenger has had their blood drained--and not by you.

This game has many of the usual speed-IF problems (undercluing and underimplementation), but it is in the top 10% of all speed-IF, and quite enjoyable.

This game surprised me by its quality. I can't vouch for the writing quality; as Spanish is not my native language, anything written in it sounds nice to me. But the concepts were really beautiful.

You play as a young person on a bus home, when things take an unexpected turn. The situation you find yourself in is at once relatable and deeply uncomfortable.

The game made good use of text effects, switching colors of the background and text, using different font sizes, etc.

There was some overarching Thing which I didn't get because of my poor Spanish, something about (Spoiler - click to show)graduation and getting covered in floor and eggs?

It seemed fairly linear to me, but a second replay had about 40% new text, so I was impressed. I would have rated this game somewhere in the 7-9 range in IFComp. Well done. My only wish is that there was some more consistency in how mid-game links were handled, as it was hard to know what clicking on different texts would do. On the other hand, given the general feel of confusion the game evokes, it may have been an intentional design choice.