Reviews by MathBrush

This was a refreshingly well-designed game. There were a couple of things that didn't work out for me, but this game had the kind of smoothness I'd associate with experienced authors like Ryan Veeder or Zarf.

The conceit is that you are a space bureaucrat in a future technocracy. You are in charge of delivering a technical manual, but it's after hours and every chapter of the manual was assigned to a different subordinate. You have to track down each person's personal copy.

There was a lot of light office and space-bureaucracy humor, some fun romance, and a lot of little niceties (like the 'press anything' button being an ascii art anchor and having exits listed).

One nice feature was having all verbs listed, and once you found something using that verb it was crossed off the list. This was very satisfying.

The author seems to have found the lack of verbs a weakness instead of strength; typing the wrong thing too many times gives you a big apology about how they didn't have time to implement responses to everything not on the list. But constrained verb games are their own genre and are fun, and having the player get repeated errors isn't negative, it's just a fact of parser games; the errors are the 'boundaries' of the world, and having firm boundaries can make a game better.

I had a great experience with this. The main thing I disliked is that 8 cubicles are mentioned but you can only ever interact with two, despite learning the names of the others. I'd prefer it if it recognized, say 'Becher's cubicle' and just said 'that cubicle is boring' or something.

This game reminds me of bits of a lot stories--Armageddon, Sphere, Alien. But it's it's own thing.

This is a choice based game where you are a oil rig diver on one last job. You're told that something bad happened down there and you have to fix it. But things get...weird.

The game had a pretty small default font and for me only used about 25% of my screen. Most of the choices were between 2 or 3 options, and I felt like I had real interactivity. There were some weird repetitions in the text some times, like when asking questions at the beginning.

The story didn't really resonate with me the way the choices did. Instead of building up tension it revealed things early, then acted as if you didn't know them, and big plot events didn't have buildup while big buildups had no payoff.

Still, I'm glad I played and had a good time.

This is choicescript game entered in Seedcomp, based on a seed by Slugzuki.

You play as an artificial intelligence that has woken up hundreds of years after humans left the earth through flight or death. It is your assigned task to prepare the earth for humans to return.

However, your stores have been heavily damaged. Your goal is to manipulate several different factors to make the earth whole again. You may, however, encounter opposition...

The main gameplay cycle is to wake up after a year or so, consume a piece of Human writing, handle any alerts, and re-evaluate your priorities.

My game ended after about 4 or 5 cycles; there may be more endings.

The media were interesting; I encountered the writings of Du Fu for the first time, which was nice. Looking him up was fun, and I got to read more of his stuff, although most of it was more contemplative than the active poem featured here. There was also some larger writing not entirely meant to be consumed at one sitting (?) like a tylenol label, and some writing I couldn't find when googling, so either from obscure books or not from published works.

I liked the main overall cycle, I liked the writing and the vibes. I think the only thing I could have wished was either that it lasted longer with more cycles and depth or that it was shorter with a tighter focus on the writing segments. Many of the were poignant but I felt like the game was pulling two different directions a bit.

This was a nice little treat, but was over as quick as it began.

This is a seedcomp game based on the prompt that players do a closed door game without using verbs, just adjectives and nouns.

I spoiled myself a bit here by not clicking the links in order; because I went out of order, I skipped about 1/3 of the game, which was red herrings.

Overall, I like the cute ideas expressed in this. It was polished to me, and descriptive in its own enigmatic way (what does the paintbrush mean? interesting). The interactivity worked well for me, but I didn't have enough time to get really drawn in. I'm glad I played.

This was a fun game, as yet unfinished (I would definitely bump up the rating once/if it gets done).

You play as a down-and-out detective who gets a last chance at making rent--a client whose beauty is so great that it overwhelms you, a beautiful baker who has been accused of a grave crime.

You have to go an investigate the 'corpse', and get to poke around the 'murder' scene and interrogate the suspect.

The animations and text styling is excellent. The interactivity, though, left something to be desired for me; for much of it, it is a 'gauntlet' style game where one option ends the game immediately and the other continues it. Undo exists everywhere except at endings, so it leads to their essentially only being one option at a time, since you have to pick the good one due to being unable to back out of bad one (unless you save every screen). This is not the case in every scene as some let you have a wide variety of interactions.

For me, the writing and characters were fresh and fun, and I'm intrigued by the mystery of the client's effect on the PC (outside of the obvious ones). Would definitely play a finished version.

This Twine game has you enter a beautiful cabin that you can customize to your hearts content. Drinks, decorations, everything is what you like.

There's even a holoscreen, which is nice. And the game can end this way.

Or...

There is an alternative world you can enter that strongly contrasts with this one. It reminded me of Porpentine a bit (mostly the juxtaposition of a pleasant holochamber with (Spoiler - click to show)body horror, so there's a ton of people in similar genres, but I'm not widely read in that area, so I go to Porpentine first).

It also reminded me of a grimdark video my son and I used to talk about called the Rainbow Factory from the MLP fandom.

Anyway, there was good atmosphere overall, the game was very descriptive, and it had some nice interactivity, but I think the overall length wasn't enough to draw me in, and the ending scene for me lacked something I can't really put my finger on. Still, it's overall a well-done game and one I hope is preserved for others to play in the future.

This is a Seedcomp game, where people leave inspiration for others who go on to make games based on it.

This game is based on a poem by Sophia de Augustine.

Amanda Walker is one of the most successful authors of the last few years, having won Spring Thing, the XYZZY Awards, the IFDB Awards, and placing very highly in IFComp, Ectocomp, and Parsercomp. She works especially well with adapting poems into games.

This game is a shattered series of vignettes, mostly on rails but that's the way memory is some times. You are driving down a road--or, were driving down a road--with a boyfriend that you have been fighting with for months.

The game jumps around in time, moving simultaneously forwards and backwards. There are pedestrian segments of daily life made beautiful (or terrible) by the emotions present behind them.

I write this as I'm in a bad mood due to feeling a bit ill, but this game really made me think of the past. I had a divorce a few years ago, amicable in the end, but divorce can't happen with some scenes like that shown in the game. And the gory parts, the description of the blood, remind me of the early parts of our marriage, when I was at her c-section; birth is wonderful but it was terrible to see the doctor's hands bathed in her blood pulling out our kid. The memory stuck in my mind for a long time, together with the rest of the day of course. So this game made me think of that a lot.

I had some trouble here and there. I tried things like (Spoiler - click to show)bind wound, compress wound, tie sweater to wound,etc. before I realized I just needed to do what was in the hint. At the end, I somehow messed up the final action and got stuck. Before I tried to (Spoiler - click to show)answer phone, I tried stuff like (Spoiler - click to show)x phone, x message, x tree, run and then it just gave me a generic message whenever I tried (Spoiler - click to show)answer phone. So I restarted and speed ran to get to the end again.

Overall, I found this game polished (the hiccups were minor), had enough interactivity for me to enjoy, and obviously impacted me emotionally. It is lushly descriptive. I could see myself playing it again.

This game takes several TS Eliot poems and combines them with some original poetry (which fits in quite well and is lovely).

It uses a stressful mechanic: a giant countdown clock in the background ticks down one minute's worth of time. Once it's over, something special happens (and is a pretty neat trick).

I like the overall vibe T.S. Elliot's work, having encountered it once in high school and again in Graham Nelson's Curses!. There's a lot of parts of his work I dislike, but this game has great chunks in it that work well. The frantic race to see things leads to quick reading and moments of 'huh, what was that??' that were fun. I guess it was the opposite of timed text; instead of the author telling me how long it will take me to read a passage, I get to go at any rate I want through the game with just the overall experience being timed.

I played through three or four restarts until I saw everything I thought I could see. I don't know if there's a canonical ending, but my game ended with a lengthy race against the clock with a piece of actual timed text that made me feel like I was some person at the end of their life just watching the last bits of daily existence before floating away.

Overall, the game is polished, descriptive, has a nice interactive twist, drew me in, and I played it several times.

This game has you play as a clever bird, a macaw, who is trapped in a cage by a kind of illegal exotic animal dealer and has to escape.

All of this is communicated through minimalistic text that primarily uses adjectives and nouns instead of complete sentences. For instance, examining a bird early on gives the response:

sunken eyes. dry skin. depleted energy.

loose perch.

With the loose perch being a clickable link.

The overall style of gameplay is similar to a single-item-inventory text adventure. You get to pick one thing at a time to hold and can use that item in conjunction with items in the game's world.

This allows for some complex interactions that can be fun to set up.

I encountered a bizarre problem on my end while playing (no other player has found this problem and it wasn't on mobile, so I don't think it's the author's fault) where the game had a missing passage or encountered some other problem where I had to hard restart, about 4 or 5 different times. If anyone else encounters this, switching the platform I was on fixed it immediately (from windows chrome to phone).

Overall, the game is very polished and descriptive. I found the interactivity was interesting, and I could see myself visiting this again.

I didn't feel completely immersed in the game, and found it more of a puzzle box than a bird adventure. But I wonder if I hadn't encountered a bug on my end if I would have been drawn in more. So I'm wavering between a 4 and a 5, but I think I'll go with a 4, because while this game was good, I found the author's other games the Good Ghost and Closure even better, by a significant amount, due to their authentic and engaging dialogue.

This is a Seedcomp game, made with Super Videotome, a branching visual novel/IF engine.

It has a great deal of glitchy graphics that honestly look great and add a lot to the game atmosphere.

You play as someone stuck in a club for hours and hours on end. So long, you can't even remember why you're there.

From there, it branches quite a bit; a feature I really liked is that you can choose to skip a choice rather than choose anything, and that felt really authentic.

Mine ended up in an explicit sexual encounter with a biblically accurate angel. I don't associate explicit sexual content in games with positive feelings, and so it decreased my enjoyment of the game, however it was clearly signalled at the start of the game that it contains such content, together with strong profanity. The profanity use reminded me most strongly of the 14 yr old boys at my high school, so that's how I imagined the protagonist.

The best part of this game is the atmosphere and the surreal world.

I thought the atmosphere worked well.