Reviews by MathBrush

This is a shortish alt-game about bullying and abusive relationships. It is illustrated with various hand-drawn illustrations.

You play as a character who is in a sort of abusive relationship, and who doesn't fit in. You have to deal with this relationship and how it affects the rest of your life. It can get intense, with some strong profanity.

It gave me a good sense of the emotion involved in the game, but it felt like it could use more polish.

In this game, you are reading through diary entries of a young child going through several years of school. It's a twine-type game, and it has a large scope, going through several years at a fast space.

You have several friends you interact with, with mechanics keeping track of the relationships, but I found this fairly opaque; I wished I had more feedback on my choices. One nice feature was that choices you were not able to make due to past choices were crossed out, showing you 'what could have been'.

The game treats very serious subjects, including sexual assault. The biggest drawback to me was having trouble seeing how my choices relate to the pages you reach.

In this game, you play as a zookeeper for a queen.

This is a texture game, which is good for mobile and desktop. You grab a few nouns at the bottom, and drag them above; in this story, they nouns are mainly keys and food.

Your job is to feed the animals. This game is about exploration of the universe; your choices matter, making replay enjoyable.

The game is visually well-developed as well.

Highly recommended.

This game is Hanon Ondricek at his best. There's a million moving pieces: a book-selling minigame, events on a timer, mobile NPCs, in-depth conversational trees, easter eggs, crowds, a million little easter eggs, non-standard parser responses. It's a great game.

It's fairly short, but I think it was designed that way intentionally to allow all players to reach an ending. You just wander around, looking at everything, talking to the kids and parents, selling books, and then you pick a winner.

Highly recommended.

This game has some good graphics, excellent styling and a convenient user interface with saves and achievements. This is a great setup for a Twine game, especially one like this with more 'game'-y features.

The story was a good read, too. You are cast out of a village and left 'to the wolves', but you make a new life for yourself. Your interactions with the villagers and yourself are up to you.

The mechanics were a little opaque, and the endings didn't quite click for me, but overall, Highly recommended.

This game shows, like Stone Harbor, the power of a great story mixed with good physical and visual interaction. Both games are strongly linear, with fewer interactions, but with a great effect.

Ash tells the story of the death of the authors mom, a lingering death in the hospital. There are some interesting choices in the story with subtle effects later, but it's mostly linear. The beauty comes from the tight writing, the smooth visual effects, the appropriate font, and the way that the choices seem to reflect thought and intent more than actual decisions. You are choosing how to feel, not what to do. This worked well for me.

I finished both times with goosebumps all over my arm. This game is on the opposite end of the also great Cactus Blue Motel in terms of world model and interactivity, but both are great. Neither game resembles the super-branching wild stories that the lower-placing entries have. I love this game.

This is a mid length Twine game set in a post apocalyptic world. You awake from a long sleep, not knowing who or what you are, but knowing what to do.

The game has only a few locations, but each one is packed with detail. The other characters in the game are vivid.

I found the general setting and characters to be very compelling. A must-play for sci fi fans.

This twine game takes a lot of well-used tropes and works then into something special.

This is a 10-20 minute game with 9 endings. You seek a loved one in the fairy woods, and face a sequence of 2-3 choices at a time when finding them.

The game takes classic fairy ideas like fairy rings or greedy trolls and somehow gives them a sense of realness. The NPCS are all thoughtful.

The styling is individualized for this game and uses occasional special fonts.

In this game, you play as a young Inuit native (I believe; it never says, but you live on the ice and eat seal meat). You can summon beings from the Stars by placing runes on the ground that describe them, two runes at a time.

This game uses a parser/choice hybrid, by having a variety of nouns at the bottom which, as you click them, provide verbs to act on them with, usually two or three verbs at a time.

This system took me a bit to get used to at first, but I ended up enjoying it quite a bit. The runes become an alphabet of sorts that, like the alphabet in Ingold's adaptation of Sorcery!, allows for a great deal of variety and difficulty in a parser hybrid.

The story was slow to start for me, but grew on me. I strongly recommend this game. It took me about 40 minutes to play.

In this game, you are trapped inside a small shop with a grue (a creature from the Zork series). Just any connection with Zork makes a game more silly, but that's not a drawback here.

You have to move through the darkness with limited resources. As you do, you find different sources of light and other surprises. You're just trying to survive.

I had to replay a couple of times to get it right. It has some nice ambient sounds and good use of images and backgrounds.

I really liked it, and recommend it.