Reviews by MathBrush

This game utilizes a nice animation of candles that changes throughout the game.

You play a sort of medium who contacts the ghosts (or memories) of a family in a house that is slowly sinking.

The writing is good, and deals with a good deal of capitalistic consumerism, but at heart this is a good creepy story. It didn't draw me in emotionally, but otherwise was enjoyable.

This game is purposely wacky and silly. This would be fun, but it has numerous implementation errors, and a game-ending bug that prevents you from leaving a room as a scene fires over and over.

The author knew the game wasn't that well put together, so they threw in some funny stuff. The spirit guide that follows you everywhere is bizarre. The author has a lot of imagination; this game could be a lot of fun with more work.

In this game, you play Adoo, a college student come home who discovers it's going to be sold. So you decide to set up a stink bomb based on half-remembered ingredients your dad mentioned in a dungeons and dragons-esque tale.

This game has great ideas but is lacking in concept. It has many guess-the-verb problems, typos, and scenes mis-firing. But the writing is humorous and friendly.

This was an Ectocomp 2016 speed game. This is set in a MLP-type world, similar to Owlor's other games.

You are a hardened and vicious magic-using pony out for revenge. You need to go an a quest to find the ingredients for your potion.

This was relatively straightforward, and fun, with good cluing, until I got stuck on one ingredient for a long time due to misunderstanding a description.

It is unpolished and didn't draw me in, but that is due to it being a speed-IF.

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.