Reviews by MathBrush

This game looked familiar to me, so I know I've seen it, but for some reason I never played it. I think I assumed it had explicit content (which it doesn't, although it does have intense events and adult situations intermingled with romance, so maybe I made assumptions).

It's really well-written, as any fan of Harris Powell-Smith might expect. You play as a cob in a kind of cyber future who has to go to a nightclub to see their informant. Their is an emphasis on emotions, sensory descriptions, and music.

It's a texture game and pretty short, but there are a lot of options and it felt like I had real agency, whether that was an illusion or not. A lot of effort went into customizing the 'hover' message when dragging actions over objects.

A nice, short game.

The games by this author have been heavily advertised across Reddit for a few weeks now, so I decided to check them out.

This game, when I downloaded it, had text that seemed to be somewhat repetitive. There were tons of extraneous details to it as well. It mentions things like a vital journal or an important clue, but if you type X Item or TAKE item like the HELP menu suggests, nothing happens. The only way I can find to interact with the world is to move with compass directions. But things mentioned in the text like a hut can't be entered, all you can do is move around.

There is a timer at the top as well. The combination of the timer, the downloadable exe, and the barebones mazes remind me a lot of the group DBT, who released 53 different similar BASIC adventures before. I don't think it's the same people (and I didn't have any problem with their work), I just wonder if there's some sort of template for BASIC adventures that includes a timer.

I'm going to put 2 stars for now, as the interactivity and polish are low due to not being able to interact with objects. It's possible I missed something really big and you can actually do more than just move around, so I'm happy to bump up the score if that's the case.

This is a relatively brief Inform game written with lush language and originally entered into Spring Thing many years ago.

Every word is dripping with luxury. You are a Khan and have excellent food and wine and everything you'd ever want at your feet.

The game is pretty short, but has some surprising events in that brief time. I'd say that it's highly unusual for both its subject matter and its style of language.

It is mostly polished, with a distinct voice, but some default responses sneak in that contrast harshly with the desired tone. The interactivity is also difficult to guess at times.

However, it is descriptive and captured my fancy, and I could see myself playing again.

This is an unusual game from a long-ago Spring Thing. It's a choice-based game where you play as a hexagon that lived inside the pages of a geometry textbook at a school. Now that school's out, you can wander around.

You basically get three choices (where to go, who to talk to, approach them or turn back) and the vast majority of the twenty or more paths is "they kill you because you're not like them". There are 2 paths I found where you win.

It might be a metaphor for discrimination, but I get the feel it was just more fun for the author to come up with new polygon-based deaths. Overall, I chuckled at some of the geometry but found the game design unsatisfying.

This game is a lovely metaphor for many things in life. In this game, you die every single day, and it's very inconvenient. You have to find ways of arranging your life around this fact. No one else really seems to notice, or if they do notice, it gets downplayed. Giving into it completely can ruin your income and friendships, but overdoing it can kill you faster or make you feel hopeless.

This metaphor seems a lot like the 'spoons' metaphor, where someone who has low energy (such as from chronic illness or depression) uses spoons to measure how many activities they can partake in during a day.

So you could see this game as being about chemotherapy, depression, anxiety, fibromyalgia, endometriosis, losing your faith, etc.

I played through to two bad endings first. I wondered if the game would show that there really is no good solution, or if it offered the hope of their being a solution of some kind. If you want to know which type of ending it has, I guess you'll have to play it.

I definitely think there's a lot of value in its overall messages. I have mild to moderate depression and am a single dad, so there are some things I struggled with for years that now I take shortcuts on, like using paper plates to cut down on dishes. Overall, I think this game will resonate with many people and I expect it to place highly in the Petite Mort competition.

(I also liked the self-referential part of the game about making a game. Is this the long version or the short version, or is it mostly ficitional and not self-referential at all?)

This was a clever game. I was nervous at first at how much text per page there was, so I clicked random links without reading to see how long the game was. I was surprised to see it end after one choice and two linear links.

But I was wrong.

This is a gauntlet-style game, where you have to make the right choice to proceed, or the wrong choice and fail. There are three choices.

The overall concept is one from old folklore (the kind recently popularized by SCP-4000) [actually, that was 6 years ago. So not that recent]: faery creatures must be spoken to very carefully to avoid shenanigans.

In this case, you have made a deal with a supernatural being for money. And to receive it, you have to be exceptionally careful in what you say; the exact kind of care you need to take is revealed as you play.

Overall, this was lots of fun, with a cool ending transition.

Making a conversation-based parser game in 4 hours is dicey, but can be rewarding. I made Halloween Dance in 4 hours, an ectocomp conversation game. It wasn't really very good, but I adapted its system into later games.

This game is even harder than Halloween Dance was, because I was doing an topics inventory-based conversation system. This game is more like a chatbot, where it picks up on words you type.

So it makes sense that, despite its remarkable achievements, the game still has some rough boundaries. It also doesn't have an ending; that, combined with unimplemented topics, makes it hard to tell if you've hit a roadblock because you can't guess what to type or if there's nothing left at all.

The story as far as I can find it is that something has been watching you and wants you to die and has mingled love and hate for you. I wasn't able to find any further distinguishing characteristics, besides it not being a ghost. The line-by-line writing was good; characterization-wise, it was rather one-noted.

So for me, as a game, this seems average. As a tech accomplishment, it seems above average. It's like how lifting a 20 lb weight isn't too impressive, but doing a one-handed backspring with a 20 lb weight is impressive. Writing a keyword-based conversation game in 4 hours is impressive.

This was a pleasant, compact Adventuron game. It had a feature I'm not used to seeing, where right-clicking on yellow words brought up possible actions. I don't think it was all possible actions, because in both cases I tried it it only brought up 'Examine', but I thought it was cool!

The idea is that you've accidentally released the ghosts of your ancestors and you have to capture them back into the box you got them from.

There are two main ghosts to catch, each with a couple of puzzles. These puzzles were well-thought out; it looks like this Petite Mort game went for polishing a smaller-scope game rather than pushing out a bigger untested game. I think that was a smart choice! This setup would easily allow expansion if the author ever desired to do so, and I would look forward to that. Still, it's pretty good as-is.

I liked the way this game was structured a lot. It has two major branch points, and at the end it lets you revisit them right away.

The game is about 9 archetypal people who land on an island in search of an archaeological treasure. Each is referred to by their profession, with you being The Linguist (like the game Clue, I guess).

In classic creepy story fashion, a curse appears that kills one and lures in others unless they can truly trust each other.

So the rest of the game is about talking with your crewmates and deciding who to trust.

I got one choice wrong the first time but replay was easy. I found the storytelling easy to read and clear in plot structure, and the countdown-days format sidesteps one of the biggest problems in choice-based IF: setting expectations for play-time. Quite of a few of the most popular Twine games are split into days with recurring patterns.

Overall, I did struggle a bit with understanding what clues were important in the choices, but this is honestly quite good for a 4-hour game and bug-free as far as I saw.

This is a short Choicescript game. I wondered if there were two endings, but I could only find one.

It's a family drama/mystery/surreal/slice of life game (?). You play as a dad whose child starts calling you the wrong name. They say it a lot, and the mom starts agreeing. Things begin to get a bit strange...

I liked this game. There is some ambiguity to it that let it apply to many things. It reminded me of relationships where people are hiding a dramatic secret, and of changing identities, and of the strange alienation that can come when you first become a parent and your entire life changes. Very fun.