Reviews by MathBrush

This game was pretty cool; I replayed it about 4 or 5 times.

It's a Neo Twiny Jam game written in 500 words or less. But in this case that's distributed to two separate games: one about curing a biological virus, and one a technological.

The biological one is basically just a branching tree. But the computer one had a few fun parts, including exposing its own code in a clever way and having a text-entry puzzle that was complex enough to be fun.

Splitting up the text into two games may have been a mistake, though, as each part is almost painfully brief in terms of both descriptiveness and gameplay.

This game was entered in the Neo Twiny Jam, which restricts text to 500 words or less total.

This makes it hard to make a big, polished game. But this author managed to achieve that with background music, complex UI, fancy fonts and styling, etc.

There's not much time to tell a big story here, given the word limit, but there's a lot of world building that paints a bigger picture.

This is pretty good and I'd give it 4 stars, but I think that there's something missing from the story that ought to be there and I can't put my finger on it. I'd like to say it's more emotional complexness or a surprise or something, but I can't say exactly what it is. Very good, though.

This is the final game in the series, and while it doesn't pull out too many surprises compared to the first two, it's a fitting conclusion.

Like the others, you put in a couple of names and choose between two worlds. This is a bit surprising, as the main character of the last two games (Spoiler - click to show)died, but it makes more sense as you play.

I enjoyed the small trio of games. It was perhaps a bit overwrought at times, but it works with the styling.

Like the previous game in the series, this is a very brief twine game that allows you to enter names for you and a loved one, and then cycles between two options, each comparing different worlds.

I always liked 'two world' stories from a young age (I think light world/dark world in Zelda is what got me into it). This is short, but I like seeing the contrasts.

This game was written for the Neo Twiny jam, in 500 words or less. It is part of a series of 3.

The interactivity at first appears intentionally minimal, with the option to enter two names at the beginning and the option to toggle between two variations in a cycling word.

But as I went to write this review, I realized that that cycling word changes much of the rest of the story. It's clever and subtle; the piece is still slight, and must be so to fit into the confines of the jam, but I enjoyed this large-scale choice.

This game is essentially a love poem about a couple, describing their sexual experiences.

It is written in less than 500 words, and interaction occurs in two ways: clicking arrows back and forth, and mousing over text which expands the legible text.

The wording is poetic, and the UI is well-done and artistic. The game had content warnings, which I should have heeded, as it was much more explicit than most games with similar content warnings.

This set of 4 games was a special entry to the 2023 Spring Thing consisting of games written by a teacher and students for their own mini-Spring Thing.

Each game has the theme of Mirror, and I enjoyed seeing how that theme played out. In one, it was an incidental but crucial part of a real-life story; in others, it represented portals; in another, the device used to play the game.

Each game had some imaginative thought, but each could be significantly developed. Many stopped early, only partway through a story; all had a little bit of typos to be cleaned up; many had difficulty figuring out how to branch effectively (like offering choices but some choices are 'fake' and say 'you have to try the other choice'). The biggest thing they all need is time; however, for a school assignment, it is difficult to find such time. But I could see all of them making complex or richly descriptive games in the future.

This game is an Inform/PunyInform game that centers around you, a young priest, receiving a charge to search for the Ark of the Covenant that had been entrusted to your local church for generations and hidden in times of war.

+Polish: Like most Garry Francis games, this is smooth and polished. Many interactions have been anticipated and coded for.

+Descriptiveness: The text is straightforward but detailed. Locations are described both by form and function, with nice little details thrown in about the history you have with things.

+Interactivity: Puzzles were set up in a way that I could form hypotheses and strategize and carry out my plans with just enough difficulty.

-Emotional impact: This game combines two very weighty topics ((Spoiler - click to show)the ark of the covenant and vampires) and treats them in a pretty matter-of-fact way. Dramatic actions like (Spoiler - click to show)unearthing the corpse of a beloved friend and (Spoiler - click to show)burning a vampire to ash are given the same treatment as unlocking doors and climbing ladders.

+Would I play again or recommend? Yes, I think people will like this.

This is an Adventuron game with a forward impetus: no UNDO, no going backwards on the map, only forward, often with a choice or two on how to do so.

The focus is a lot on your companion, a friend you've done many mountain races with who is not feeling as strong as before.

+Polish: The story is well-polished, free from bugs and typos as far as I could see, and responsive to commands.

+Interactivity: The inability to go back or UNDO is annoying in a puzzle game but thematically appropriate for a game about the march of time in our own lives. Good coupling of puzzle with theme.

+Descriptiveness: The locations and people were described in a way that I could easily picture it all in my mind. The changes in the weather and the passage of time were evocative.

+Emotional impact: It made me think of important events in my own life, like a funeral I attended yesterday where I didn't know the person who died but I did know some of their friends.

+Would I play again? Maybe, after a long time, but I think one time is best for now. But I would recommend it to others.

This game was kind of a rollercoaster experience for me.

I started it up, and it looked like a simple tutorial adventure, like a TALJ game intended to be succinct.

But I soon found that I couldn't type, as it looked like it was auto-completing everything I typed, and into weird things.

So I tried experimenting a while but just didn't get it. I saw that ? gave instructions, so I tried typing that.

It turns out that different keyboard keys are mapped to whole actions, and typing that key will give that action. It's not quadratic in complexity, it's linear (1 key 1 action, no nouns as they are context-dependent).

So overall it's an interesting effect, similar to Gruescript or other parser-choice hybrids. Some of the choices for commands were a bit odd, and some (like arrow keys) seem like they wouldn't translate to mobile well (which I didn't try).

Overall, the puzzles were clever and the game was polished. The interactivity definitely threw me for a loop and I'm pretty sure I'm not a fan, although it's hard to say if that's just because I'm not used to it or because it would be perennially awkward. I guess I could compare it to the text adventure equivalent of QWOP.

Overall the charming and complex puzzles are why I'm giving a higher score.