Reviews by MathBrush

This is a poem entered in the Neo Twiny Jam, with 500 words or less.

It's styled nicely, with beautiful fonts and illustrations and transitions and some music.

It's mostly just a poem, the feelings someone has for their 21st birthday, The freedom is in what order the poem is explored.

I liked it overall, but a lot of the enjoyment of a poem is either in symmetry or purposeful asymmetry. But there was a bit of unevenness, like rhyming 'skills' with 'skills' and varying between exact rhymes and almost-rhymes in a non-symmetric fashion; and some of the lines were hard to fit into the meter when read aloud. However, the sentiment was strong, and those features I described as lacking may not even be desired by the author, although I feel like they could be introduced with some mild revising.

This game was pretty hard to beat. It was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

At first, it seems extremely short, even on replay. But apparently you have to play 3 times before it changes, which is a bit weird.

It has images that were drawn on notebook paper and scanned, which I actually think look cool!

You have to explore different things in the coma, but you have little time due to constantly dying. Even worse, there's a counter in the corner and you fail the game completely once it ticks down, with no way to undo.

I eventually realized that (Spoiler - click to show)There's exactly one action that can be indefinitely be repeated to raise the counter. Overall, it was pretty tricky. I'm not sure I loved the counter of doom and the initial 3 replays, but it was interesting enough that I wanted to finish.

This game/story/poem was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

It's all on one page with expandable text. I read it at first, seeing in it obtuse musings on relationship.

Then I read the trigger warnings, which gave me insights into themes I hadn't identified. Then I realized the poem has a different structure that first appears, a sort of meta puzzle.

I ended up liking piecing things together, having to reach for what's going on. Very nice. Vivid imagery.

This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

It looks nice, with a black/off-white/gold color scheme.

It's a bit of a self-referential story, as you encounter a typewriter that is creating a world but is limited in the number of words it can use.

Unfortunately, it just feels cut short. That's literally what's happening in the game, but even if it's being pointed out it's still a little 'cut-off' at the ends, and could use a bit more of an ending. But that's just my opinion and not a fact.

This game was written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam.

I manages to have multiple locations, puzzles, inventory, essentially a whole world model. It's brief, and the puzzles aren't difficult, but it was nice to see how smooth everything is.

You end up locked in a hotel room and have to find your way out. The only part I felt was missing was perhaps some final twist or surprise at the end, or otherwise an explanation, just a sentence.

This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

It's a simple story, mostly linear, with some hover-links.

But it depicts a part of life that many of us have experienced, when money is running tight and we have to make choices that might betray our values or require us to swallow our pride; the point where we have to admit that we can no long live by our own means.

Not a lot of structure here, but relatable and detailed.

This game is written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

It uses its words more or less all at once, spooling them out into a mostly linear essay/story with occasional expandable text. A lot of parts of it are customized.

It's a piece about humanity colonizing the stars and how it must feel to start processes that will not be finished for thousands of years. About what it means for worlds and humans to evolve. With minimal structure, it's relying heavily on the styling and the text itself here, and I liked both.

This short Frog game was written in 500 words or less for the Neo Twiny Jam.

It's a cute story and written from a frog's perspective in various phases of life, including egg, tadpole, and adult (I think).

Each part is written in minimalistic style. At times I lost the thread of what I was reading, trying to figure out what the terse words corresponded to. The ending was pleasant.

This game was written for the Neo Twiny Jam in 500 words or less.

It does a great job of getting use out of those words.

At first, it just presents a kind of opaque technical screen that I didn't really understand, and then more of the same. I was so lost, all this scientific research-type jargon about chemicals and samples. It ended quickly but with some mysterious notes.

So I replayed 4 times and got deeper into the mystery. I don't think I ever completely solved what was going on but I got plenty of hints of horrible things going on.

Some background: I wrote a game for Choice of Games a few years ago, but it did really poorly. I ended up playing and reviewing all the 100+ available COG titles at the time to figure out where I went wrong and ended up seeing a lot of different patterns in their titles and in what sells well.

At the same time, I kept seeing hints of a game by Emily Short coming out, who is one of the most respected IF authors with some of the most well-known games in her repertoire (Counterfeit Monkey, Galatea, etc.) But it was always delayed, and disappeared for years.

So I was excited to hear that it had been finished (with a little boost from Hannah Powell-Smith, another very popular author), I was excited to hear about it.

So for the game itself. My first go-to with a choicescript game is to look at its stats page. The best-selling games tend to have clearly defined and cleary differentiated stats, while the less popular ones often have confusing or overlapping stats. Here the stats are a bit overlapping: discretion vs self promotion, practicality vs daring, loyalty vs idealism, populism vs elitism. If you speak out to a billionaire and say you hate the wealthy (not an actual in game example), is that populism, idealism, or daring?

So in games where the stats are confusing, it can be hard to min/max, so I tend to just imagine a very specific persona and pick only what I think that person would do. This game responded to that very well, and I got a good story out of it, which is a good sign.

You play as a concierge to the rich. Billionaires ask the company you work for to arrange parties, trips, housekeeping, etc. Kind of like a fancy butler. I felt some connection with this theme as I work at a private school, and helped supervise a trip to Spain this summer, something I could not have afforded on my own. I don't work with billionaires, but sometimes with millionaires.

In the game, you encounter a series of challenging or intriguing clients. That's another aspect of this game compared to other CoG games: this is much more character focused than plot focused. I've heard some say it ends early; with a 500K wordcount, that's not really true. I did finish it in 3 hours or so, while I've had some CoG games take 10, but there are ones like Choice of Dragon that are finished in 30 minutes but don't feel like they end early. I think it's because the plot arc is fairly flat; there's not really a sense of continually rising drama with a dramatic climax; instead, there's a rolling succession of parallel character-focused subplots that each have their own rise and fall.

Going into more detail, rather than having dramatic overall events, we have things like examining in great detail the life of a trans billionaire who is uncomfortable with wealth; the life of a rich woman with a troublesome child; the life of fellow coworkers, bosses, etc. Much of the game is about reflecting on your views on them and life in general and on yourself and your feelings for them.

And reflecting is a key concept here in terms of other CoG games. The real big bestsellers tend to have actions have direct and dramatic consequences. Do you spare the life of the prisoner, or execute them? Do you take the evil crystal or smash it? On the other hand, a lot of the lower-selling games are reflective. Here's what you do: why do you do it? It's much more passive. This game is in between. You do get some pretty big choices, but a lot of things just happen to you and you reflect on how you feel about it.

This makes this game not really fit with the power fantasy that most Choice of Games fans look for. You're not stomping around destroying things. You're not constantly winning despite the odds. There are failures and takebacks (like a long sequence about a helicopter near the beginning) where you lose ground, something a lot of fans distinctly dislike.

But the games that do these things often win awards for writing, like Rent-a-Vice. Having the reflection, the failures, the character drama all are associated with games that have won awards. So if I had to predict anything about this game in the long run I'd wager that it will likely have middle-of-the-pack sales (definitely better than mine!) but be nominated for at least one writing award.

My particular narrative arc worked out well. I played a people pleaser who is mildly uncomfortable with the status quo but not enough to do anything about it. I ended up (Spoiler - click to show)becoming the CEO and marrying my coworker. I was interested enough to try another playthrough. I clicked through the first four chapters quickly trying to do bad. A lot of the early storyline was similar in the major plot points, although wildly different in the details (I somehow picked up an aunt I didn't have the first time). Later chapters were completely new material; in my first game I had several chapters about blackmail, while in my second I had a kind of international investigation storyline, which was very cool. Overall though I don't think it sells its branching very well; my first playthrough looked like I had hit up most major content, while the second was quite different. Signposting that more content exists is hard (more greyed out choices than we have here, chapter numbers with subletters, etc.).

I liked customization; I was able to refuse a drink and say it was because I was a latter-day saint, which I've never been able to do before.

Overall, this feels like a story about real people in real life situations. It feels like a biography more than a fantasy novel. I like to think of IF writers as opera composers and I've often thought of Emily Short as like Verdi, finding some similarities in their tones and settings. This is more like Beethoven though, with a clear aesthetic free of unnecessary clutter.

I don't think this will be a bestseller. But after having played more than 100 of these games, I think it's unique and high quality, and worth playing. I got really burnt out after playing them all and have started a few I never finished, but I played this all the way through in one setting, taking it to the library and reading it on my phone there, and even replayed it. I'm glad it was published; it would have been a terrible shame to leave this work incomplete and in storage.