Reviews by MathBrush

This is a game kind of like the stories Ethan Frome or the Yellow Wallpaper, where you have a kind of growing sick feeling in your gut, not from gore or sex or anything like that, but from a disturbing psychological predicament.

This game is set in medieval times, and deals with faeries and the fey. Or does it? It's hard to tell. You are outside gathering eggshells, and soon you discover what purpose they are for.

This game has stuck with me for a very long time. It creeped me out. I don't want to give away too much, so suffice to say that you can make strong moral choices.

This enjoyable game is more story than puzzle, although it uses a parser. You play a teenager with access to an online community. Actions are strongly limited, mostly TAKE, LOOK, and SHOW. You investigate an abandoned house, and have to entice others to come with you.

What made this game work for me was the contrast between your friends online personas and their real-life selves, including yourself. Chris and Maximus gave especially funny contrasts.

The game in the end works as a slice-of-life story. There is one significant choice, and unfortunately it comes at the very end of the game, with no opportunity to save, which prevents lawn-mowering (i.e. trying every branch).

Fail-Safe is my absolute favorite Jon Ingold game. The game has an unusual plot device which you discover quickly. I won't talk about it in this review, because the game is strong enough without it.

The game is set in a damaged spacecraft that must be explored. The difficulty and fun lies in trying to figure out how the spacecraft actually worked.

The game has some timed events (which are fun but hard) and some hard-to-find exits (which is annoying but fun if you can find them).

This game can be played enjoyably multiple times and has a several, interesting endings.

Dead Like Ants is indeed about ants. You play an ant in red overalls sent by the queen to appease 5 creatures located on your tree.

The game uses non-standard directions (such as "widdershins") and it provides other surprises that toy with your expectations of interactive fiction.

The numerous NPC's were surprisingly charming. The writer derived inspiration from Hans Christen Andersen, Lewis Carroll, and the musical "Into the woods". The game has an overall fairy-tale feel.

Once you pass the initial surprises, the games puzzles are not very difficult. This is a game to be finished in less than half an hour. I recommend it to everybody, because it has a great effect and doesn't take long to play.

That sinister self is a great, linear, short-to-mid length twine game dealing with body image. Like Astrid's other stories, I found my heart racing a bit.

There are multiple endings and some mild language.

The game incorporates some special effects which lend it much of its appeal.

This game contains excellent writing, but that is easy, because more than half of the text comes from the writings of Lord Dunsany, a fantasy writer predating Tolkien and Lovecraft. The writings chosen are about the world wars; it may have been picked as something "dry", but I was actually very interested in the text.

The material surrounding the text is somewhat less well written, relying on some stock ideas common in the 2010's. The visual format is very interesting, trying to mimic a folder of html files (well, I guess it really is a folder of html files; isn't everything?), and then incorporating more and more material.

There are some parts where it is difficult to read due to (Spoiler - click to show)every letter being turned around. It was a little frustrating.

The game incorporates twitter in a fun way; unfortunately, I did not want to use my twitter account (due to it being very public), and I did not want to start a new account, so I didn't get to try it out.

This Twine game centers on a woman with a special ability who visits a town. She has many choices regarding the use of this ability and the flow of her conversations, which results in a large number of endings.

The writing is well thought-out and supplemented by several graphics, but it never really drew me in. Therre is a content warning on the site about a graphic sex scene which is easy to avoid; there is a similar violent scene. I decided to check them out and regretted it immediately, skipping through quickly. Next time, I will listen to warnings.

I played through it twice to try some variations on the reputation system. As I said, I did not find the story compelling, but it was based on some song lyrics as part of a competition, and did well in bringing them to life.

This is a game of mini-games. As the author says, each of the three short games are unrelated except by concept. Each game strives to make a philosophical point by putting constraints on the user.

The games vary in enjoy ability. One of the games was actually quite enjoyable, with dynamic constraints. The other two were not very exciting.

The writing is melodramatic; it really reminded me of what you might expect if you told a university English class to "write something deep". It's hard to tell, though, if the author is doing this purposely or not, which is a point in the game's favor.

There is unnecessary profanity in the first game, a strange departure from the tone of the rest of the game.

For those who have played through all three games and read all of the author's additional notes and material:

(Spoiler - click to show)There is a fourth "endgame" which, I believe, is what the author refers to when he says part of the game is inspired by House of Leaves. At first, I really enjoyed this game, but then I began to realize that the game seems to place the new staircase only when a large percentage of the map has been explored, and then places it in the unexplored spot closest to the entryway. Because of the House of Leaves reference, I do not believe this puzzle is intended to be solved.

This Twine game takes place in a forest as you try to scrounge up enough change to catch a bus. The game takes about 30 minutes to play.

Unlike many Twine games, there are a few actual puzzles here, but each one is not that hard (one was just hard enough to be fun). The writing is choppy at times, but it fits into the game's "hey, let's be goofy and have fun" atmosphere.

This is a Twine-based game that consists of a set-up phase where you personalize your character, followed by a standard Twine game where you choose from a variety of sequences to achieve one of numerous endings.

It is a medium-sized, puzzle less game that is meant to be a sort of academic essay. It was submitted as a dissertation, I believe, and parts of it read like one, but it is not completely dry, and manages to have some fun.

The authors seem unaware of the field of interactive fiction. They describe this as a proof-of-concept of "ergodic fiction", which is defined by the 1996 book Cybertext as fiction that requires human participation and choices to shape the experience. It is clear from the book's definition that almost all of interactive fiction is ergodic fiction, and in fact most interactive fiction is "cybertext", which is ergodic literature requiring calculation.