Reviews by MathBrush

This game was entered in the short game jam.

At first I thought it was that weird Ink game that turns on your camera and notices when you blink. But it's not that at all.

It's just (Spoiler - click to show)a game that ends instantly.

A cute idea, but not much there.

I'll grade this on my (usually internal) 5 point scale:

-Polish: The game is very dark on my screen and hard to see.
-Descriptiveness: The poem in game is very short and minimal, but also not very clear
-Interactivity: It was hard to know what to do and, do to lots of looping, to know if there was more game or just the same.
-Emotional impact: I didn't really feel anything.
-Would I play again? Probably not.

This is a fun short story by Ambrose Bierce which has been converted to Twine (without choices) and had multimedia added. The original story is about an abandoned, 'haunted' house and the new multimedia is about an abandoned, overgrown house that bears a remarkable resemblance to the one in the story.

So it's mostly choiceless, and all the text comes from previously existing material.

But it's good material, and the matchup between the two looks good. So there's not a lot of 'interactive', but a lot of good 'fiction'.

This game is made in a powerpoint format, which is pretty neat. It has two formats, one in portuguese and one in english. I played the english version.

The text is minimalistic, with 3-10 words per page, and usually 1-3 choices. It was hard for me to piece the story together; it seems like you are a knight that awakes in a dungeon, in captivity. With some effort, you begin to explore.

I found someone (or something) to accompany me, found an area of horror, and made a choice...but I'm not sure of what.

There were several noticeable typos, which I think a pass through some online spellchaecker could help (I also get lots of typos in my own games). I did find the game confusing, including the title screen...what does 'soom' mean?

This is a short humorous twine game about trying to crash a screening for a new movie.

It uses 'copyright safe' versions of famous movies (for instance, your character is holding a 'light saver').

There are a lot of branches, and while there is some continuity between choices, each one is pretty random.

Overall, the game is pretty brief. Most of what's here is funny, but overall this felt more like a light snack than a substantial work.

This game is interesting; I went back and forth a lot on what to score it.

It's a cozy type of game, and more of an unfinished prototype (at least, several plot threads are left hanging). It's visually lovely though, with a rich background texture, pleasant fonts and colors, and icons of food.

The gameplay is simple, even (to my feeling) overly simplistic; while there is a little bit of planning required, just clicking every link one at a time generally solves things.

But it looks good, and feels good, so I'm still giving 4 stars. Feels kind of like an ascended tech demo that turned out better than expected, or a planned large game that had to be cut short.

This game is a little bite-sized Inform game. Such games can often be underimplemented or full of bugs, or hard to follow, but I found this one was pretty reasonable and made effective use of its small size.

You play as a gentleman waiting for a train, with no one around but one other passenger. Things progress from there.

There was a review I read once for the game 'Fine Tuned' that praised it for how the humor was participatory, not just descriptive (I can't find it now, unfortunately). That's what makes this game work for me; everything that's funny about it is something that you personally take part of.

The author encourages not knowing the plot ahead of time, so I've omitted that.

This game has you play as a kind of spellcaster desperate to reconnect with lost memories and lost people. I think. It's kind of hard to know what's going on; it reminded me at first a bit of Dreamhold, where you're an amnesiac in a magic place. But here, the character seems to know what's going on, even if we don't.

The game includes gore, the type that would be horrifying in real life but in text has looped around to be something cold, distant, and removed from emotion.

It's a short game. The main choices I saw were that you can pick from several different potions to toss in a bowl, each of which provokes a different memory. The ending itself did not seem to vary for me, other than one very brief early alternate ending.

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

It's designed to show what life is like when you're part of conservative Christianity. You are given many options, but your options aren't always things you can actually do.

This reminds me a lot of families I knew growing up. I remember one family that banned The Little Mermaid because her outfit was inappropriate. Another family I know banned soda pop and trick-or-treating.

That level of restriction was generally ineffective; the people I knew that were most straight-laced as kids grew up to be the most wild when older.

So the game is very relatable in that sense. It's also pretty brief, which can often be effective in this type of message, but for me, I just didn't feel a big impact. It's completely subjective, someone else might feel very differently.

This game has some good potential in it, but is unfinished. It's the beginnings of a choicescript game mingling characters from Megaman X and Creme de la Creme, the choicescript game.

I hadn't played Megaman X but played the earlier megaman games, so that part wasn't too hard to follow. But it's been years since I played Creme de la Creme so I don't recognize the names off-hand; seeing what their characters look like or act like would have worked better for me.

I liked all the things built up around the game. If finished, I would probably give it around 4 ratings, but not all projects need to be finished. Great work needs a small series of 'aha' moments, which you can kind of force if you need to but are better left around. If nothing 'clicks' for the author with this concept, it would make sense to leave it alone. But it's definitely neat!