Reviews by MathBrush

Hmm, this game is really intriguing! I had a bad experience at one part and good experiences at the other.

The idea here is that you play as a guy who, together with his best friend, enters a high-stakes two-player video game competition.

Except, things are not as they seem…

The intro is generally a linear story, although there are definitely opportunities to add your own flavor to things. There are extensive images and some background music; it seems like your characters are designed to look like anime high school protagonists.

Once the game starts, you have a lot more freedom. I had fun playing a character playing a character (the ‘Gameception’) and felt like I had real options.

But then…the game changed. And man I got really frustrated!

It becomes a ‘gauntlet’ where you have two choices at a time. One is right, but the other makes you die.

I was worried I’d have to play the whole game over. But it just took me to the start of the gauntlet.

But that’s the only checkpoint! And the gauntlet is really long with some timed text!

I tried 9 times and got so frustrated I had to quit. I ended up opening up the code; I guess I was really close to the end. And also there’s an almost entirely complete other game in the code too, which is pretty wild.

So, mostly fun game, with one super frustrating part. If that part just added some more ‘checkpoints’ I could have done better. Literally everything else was fun though.

Pseudavid has been consistently putting out thought-provoking games that are near-historical or near-real with cool UI for a while, so I looked forward to this.

The engine for this game reminds me a lot of Gruescript, and has clickable buttons but otherwise operates similar to a parser, for a parser-choice hybrid.

The idea is that you are exploring the woods at a time you aren’t really supposed to, taking pictures and looking for things to bring to school to show others.

The game has enough nature to feel like a nice walk through the forest, like the game The Fire Tower. But it’s odd enough to feel unusual. Plastic is seen as something exotic and rare. An abandoned hut contains what seems to be evidence of torture…or dental care.

I liked the overall vibes, and thought the game looked great, especially the background changing over time.

The game implied I missed out on something at the end, or at least my character did. I didn’t see any opportunities to do more than I did (I crossed the bridge and, looking at the walkthrough after, I had done everything in it).

Sometimes it was a bit of a chore to have 4 different things to click on every thing (the original click to look, then photograph, then smell/touch, then collect).

At times I struggled to use items. I can’t tell if there were bugs or just my way of clicking was bad. At times I thought that clicking to use an item and then clicking on a scenery object would bring up an option on that scenery object to use the item. At other times I thought that clicking on the object itself would bring up the option to use it on the scenery item. I suspect the latter was the case most often.

Also, it seemed like the map kept getting bigger (which was awesome) but at some point the X got stuck in the upper right.

Overall, I enjoyed this a lot; the complaints above are minor things, while the core game itself was something good and interesting.

I think I can summarize this game for me by saying that it very effectively told a story that I didn’t like.

It is a long twine game about a sniper fighting in Afghanistan, told in non-linear style through different points in his life. It uses a lot of interesting styling, has music, and uses images generated by OpenAI, according to the end credits. The images look almost like hallucinations, fitting for this grim and unpleasant story.

As the author has stated, this story includes scenes of torture and violence. The author writing this has talent, and has used that talent to effectively show the horror of torture. This is not something I enjoyed or wanted.

With multiple wars going on and massive disinformation campaigns causing me trouble in real life it was interesting to spend some time thinking about the game. It does show (and this is something I believe) that most people at the ‘bottom’ on both sides aren’t there out of hatred or desire to kill but because their government or other leaders have pushed them into it. It’s a terrible job where the better you are at it the more lives you ruin.

On the other hand, it depicts the Afghanistan enemies as being particularly despicable in terms of torture and murder. I’ve always thought that in the past, having grown up during the 20 yr-long war in Afghanistan, so I looked up ‘torture in Afghanistan’. The first thing that came up was the long-term torture and death of two Afghani citizens carried out by the US. The second was the torture of a British officer by the Taliban.

I don’t know, this isn’t the kind of stuff I want to read about or really even think about. I would like to help end war, for sure, and I think there are ways I can do that privately and publicly. But I don’t think even people who were captured and tortured want other people to learn to vicariously suffer for them. And I don’t need more convincing that war atrocities are a very bad thing.

So, the writing on the story was very effective, the use of media and nonlinear narrative was expert, and the math calculations were interesting. But I did not enjoy the game and certainly don’t want to play it again.

This is a longish Ink game where you are Osiris, recently deceased pharaoh and newly resurrected God.

Most of the game consists of travelling to different locations and interrogating different Gods. There is some freedom (in which Gods to visit first) and some saving of state (some topics only come up after you talk to others elsewhere).

There was one math puzzle which I both overthought (by getting tripped up by the mention of Base 12 beforehand, which turned out not to be important) and underthought (by just not getting it).

The characters were very diverse and interesting. Some gods were nice; Geb was a big loser who smoked weed and acted like a peeping tom.

I classified murder mysteries in an earlier post. This one was the kind (as far as I could tell) where you complete puzzles and the mystery solves itself in the process.

Overall, the setting and characters were the biggest strength to me. I didn’t derive enjoyment from the sex scenes. I did like the reimagination of the Egyptian mythological world, and thought the styling looked good.

This parser game had a really strong storyline and distinct worldbuilding, with some pretty fleshed out characters and interesting UI.

You are a beat witch; you see, some adolescent girls wake up one day with the power to be hurt by music and to use music (and other things?) to affect others.

The entire city has been blasted by an EMP and thousands are dead, so everyone’s blaming you, and you have to set things straight.

Music is frequently mentioned in the game, and is included in the game itself through vorple. Color is also used, and there is frequently either timed text or text that scrolls when you hit a button (I think it’s mostly the latter).

The story is at times gruesome and at times cruel, with some kindness mixed in. There is a lot of control, whether through magic or force, and a lot of deception. The villain is a definite villain, and some of the lines are darkly effective, although some are a bit weird (I swear at one point they said (Spoiler - click to show)I’m gonna squeeze you like a fart.)

The gameplay seems entirely linear; at times there are choices you can make which are remembered and mentioned later on in the game, but mostly it seems like the game is designed for you to find the trigger for the next cutscene. Its generally smooth and I rarely had difficulty finding what to do.

So, overall I’d say this is pretty high quality. Something for me seemed slightly missing from the story; maybe more breathers from the intensity of the action? Something to add more contrast to make the dramatic moments pop out more. But the styling is excellent and the writing is very descriptive.

This is a game by Andrew Schultz, an author who excels at wordplay-based games.

But, instead of a parser game, it’s twine!

The conceit of this one is taking pairs of words in pairs (so 4 words total) so that if you switch the first letters or (or chunk of letters) of the first pair, you get the second pair. Just like the name: ‘Trail Stash’, if you switch the TR and ST, becomes 'Stale Trash".

I wondered how effective Twine could be in this format. After all, this is a similar concept to the parser games; would it be less effective here?

But as I played, I thought, ‘hmm, this is great!’. One of the difficulties I often have with the parser games by Andrew Schultz is that it is often uncertain how to interact when you have an item in a location; do you type the solution of the wordplay puzzle, or use a verb with the object?

Twine solves this problem by limiting possible interactions.

This doesn’t make things easy, though! I had difficulty near the end game where just nothing seemed to work. Then I realized that I had missed an important solution early on and missed out on three locations!

So overall, this worked well. The only caveats I had are below:

My one caveat is that there was no apparent connection between some of the items and the solutions. For instance, you have to detect losers, but the object is . Although, now that I think of it, I guess ’ has multiple meanings. So maybe it’s just my lack of imagination.

I’ve liked Xavid’s parser games before, so this twine game looked interesting.

It reminded me of an extended version of Astrid Dalmady’s game You Are at a Crossroads, which is the first Twine game I really liked and the game that got me into choice-based games originally. Both of these games involving ritualistic revisiting of locations, unlocking more content by having net items in an inventory.

I like Astrid Dalmady’s game, but it’s pretty small. So this game is nice way to get that same kind of feel, although this game has quite a bit of its own structure and story that is unique to it.

You are packing up, ready to move out of a home, but every in your house are pictures of a man who is someone close to you, a boyfriend or spouse or lover. You have worries and fears and concerns, and you begin to explore those in a symbolic way.

Several helpful people guide you as you go along, exploring memories of the past in a symbolic format. At first there is much you can’t do, which can get frustrating, but eventually your new capabilities give you more strengths.

The feel is almost a parser/choice hybrid, with its extensive set of locations and inventory items. But it manages to tread the thin line between too many options and too few; I occasionally found myself trying to lawnmower all options, but in each case I realized that it would be easier to just step back and think.

So overall, a strong game. The psychology of it isn’t unusually insightful, but the symbolism employed was enjoyable and interesting to me and the descriptions were evocative.

This game was loosely based on 'The Blessings' by Dar Williams.

This game was good to read. I’ve known Bez for several years, and while I have not been able to be as helpful as some of his other friends, I’ve been able to watch his journey over time and follow along.

This is an interactive museum of Bez’s experiences through several different locations, with one exhibit per living location. There are photos, transcribed documents, and music from several indie musicians, which sounds good.

The museum is a well-written and fascinating look into the life of one individual. It is frank and open about challenges like debilitating illnesses (the pseudo-dementia, for instance), suicidal thoughts and impulses, homelessness, unsupportive staff and family, and so on. The fascinating part is how relatable it is; this is a very specific life with considerations that aren’t universally applicable, and yet for me the writing was relatable and approachable, and I could connect with it and consider similar challenges in my own life.

It’s not all challenges though. There are many successes and realizations and small happinesses mixed together with the hard times.

Bez has written solid games before with interesting mechanics, as well as interactive essays that are more limited in scope and linear. This game combines a lot of the best of both, with a non-fiction emphasis but with more ways to interact. There’s no need to make autobiographical fiction ‘fun’, since it’s just a story of life, but I think that the features like graphics, music, and navigation improve the reader experience and increase the connection between writer and reader.

This game features a magical protagonist that goes away to camp for magic kids.

At first I thought the game had read my mind; I named my protagonist Eduardo, and I was shocked to see Eduardo raised in a Spanish family! But then I realized it was just part of the story, especially when I saw that Eduardo was chosen to be a girl (I had imagined a boy), although gender is explicitly stated to be somewhat flexible".

The game treats many social issues, with a heavy emphasis on climate change and corporations destroying the wilderness, which gave me fond flashbacks to movies like Ferngully and Ernest Goes to Camp from my youth. Many of the NPCs were black, indigenous and/or hispanic, with a wide variety of hair types, skin tones and backgrounds. Mention was made of differing family types, including having two moms or being orphaned. And there was a discussion on how magic had been stigmatized in women more than in men.

So it seemed like social issues were a heavy topic in the game, not as a side tangent but as the central focus.

There’s a lot of promising features in the game but it is incomplete. Only the first chapter or so are finished, and there are some typos here and there, not enough to be distracting but enough to be noticeable. So once things are fleshed out I could see it being pretty solid.

There’s a lot where it’s hard for me to say if it worked or not. The personalities of the NPCs, the voice in the player’s head. A lot of it depends on where this ends up going. So I think my rating might end up a little in the middle of the range, getting bumped up or down if a continuation is made in the future. But overall there’s a lot of promise here, both in the writing and the art.

Last year’s game ‘Who Shot Gum E Bear?’ by the same author had a deeply amusing concept (hardboiled noir detective where everyone is candy) coupled with some solid writing but sketchy implementation.

This year’s game ups the notch a bit on the implementation but uses a more secluded setting.

You are called to an abandoned factory which is scheduled for demolition and tasked with finding out what happened to a missing husband. You get locked in, and have to use your wits to solve the case and to get out.

I’m going to quote my classification of (many but not all) interactive fiction mystery games:

1-Have a standard puzzle game that happens to be about murder mystery, with solving the puzzles leading to solving the mystery. This is like Ballyhoo.
2-Modelling evidence and clues in-game, which have to be combined to form a solution. This is how Erstwhile works, and most of my mysteries.
3-Collecting evidence through puzzles and conversation and then having a quiz at the end (where you have to accuse the right person). This is how Toby’s Nose works.
4-Collecting physical evidence and showing it to someone, being able to make an arrest when you have enough evidence.

This is the first type. Solving puzzles involves collecting evidence as well as escaping and once all puzzles are solved the game is over. Accusations, motive, etc. are all handled by the PC rather than the player, and I think that works well here.

The game has some suggestive/racy elements, enough that I wouldn’t want my middle-school age son to play it but mild enough that if he did I wouldn’t be especially upset, just have to explain the use of certain items.

The implementation is both really neat and kind of bad. The neat stuff is how the puzzles go beyond ‘one item one use’ in clever ways. The bad is that most of the standard responses aren’t changed. It might help for next time to use RESPONSES ALL while programming to get a list of responses and then changing a lot of them. But it’s not necessary; if the goal is just to have a snack-size fun game, that’s already being achieved here. The responses would only be if the author specifically wanted a more polished game. I think I mostly would want that because the writings so good everywhere else that seeing it in the standard responses would make the game even more fun.