Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This is a brief choice-based game where you're vibing inside your spaceship.

It has atmospheric background music and custom font and some illustration.

In it, you make a variety of low-stakes decisions about how to spend your time. Snack, or eat a meal? Look out the window of your spaceship at the stars, or watch a movie?

There are two possible endings, and the very end was the strongest part in my opinion.

The writing is fairly non-specific in a way that it can apply in a lot of situations. This makes it more of a self-reflective exercise in some ways than a story to be told, so if you're looking for a game to help you relax and mirror yourself this is a good option.

This is part of a long series of Adrift games which generally consist of big maps, lots of NPCs, magical abilities, knights, wizards, etc. with traditional adventure puzzles. There have been some exceptions in the series (like a timed game and a small casual game) but this game is in the main vein of the series.

In it, you are on a quest to a magical labyrinth. To get there, you must first explore a forest, a strange and unusual world with things like (big spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)cars and asphalt, and finally the labyrinth itself.

There are usually 4-6 puzzles available at each moment, with not a lot of red herrings, so it's not too hard to solve most puzzles by experimentation, especially as there are a lot of hints given. On the other hand, each area has a puzzle or two which would be pretty hard to figure out without help. Sometimes implementation is lacking, like a (Spoiler - click to show)puzzle piece where (Spoiler - click to show)PUT PIECE ON PUZZLE or PUT PIECE IN PUZZLE don't work but (Spoiler - click to show)FINISH PUZZLE does.

Since each area has a puzzle that's hard due to either being a tricky puzzle or rough implementation, this game can take a long time to finish. I used a walkthrough for most of it. If you do do so, I'd recommend stopping once you get some spells and enter the labyrinth, as there's a fun segment that isn't as hard as the earlier parts and which would have been more fun without the walkthrough.

This is the second game by this author that I've played that was entered in the Neo Twiny Jam. Both are parser games.

The other game had a really creepy atmosphere that worked well with an unfinished/minimalist vibe. This game is less so.

In this game, there is an eight-headed giant you have to confront. Each head will request something different from you.

To prepare, you need to talk to everyone in your office to grab something from them. Then you can use those to defeat the giant.

There are some noticeable typos and despite the COMMAND command listing vocab, it's not often clear what to do or how the solution to a problem is supposed to be devised.

This is a pretty short twine game with about 2-3 screens.

It uses a lot of imagery in a way that it was hard to know what's going on. There is a great battle, and a promise to come back from a fight. There's a woman you love, and there's the moon, and they might be the same?

It's very hard to tell. It's clear the author felt some strong emotion while writing this, and while I can't discern their intended message or atmosphere, I can be grateful for the author communicating their feeling to me.

Like other 30x30 games this has really small text with a settings option to make the text larger.

This game was hard for me to understand. I played through it three times. I'm going to summarize it here as best I can.

It seems to me to be a science-fiction story where you live on a moon with your girlfriend, Eris. It also seems that (Spoiler - click to show)Eris was part of a Wandering Fleet where she murdered many people as a soldier. At some point she fell from the sky and was left brutally wounded. She is now older with grey hair. At some point (possibly when she landed) her heart was exposed and her aorta severed, and you were left coated in her blood. You watched the wound heal to a small scar. Eris is wiry and has trouble with cold and gravity. At some point you were also violent and followed her like a lap dog and killed people and supported her killing people (this is the part that didn't make sense so is likely wrong). Now you crave more close physical affection but you both hate and love her and she's kind of standoffish so everything kind of sucks but you kind of like it.

It's relatively brief, with complex writing and choices that lead to substantially different material on different playthroughs.

This game was educational and fun. In it, you are a ruler of Sumeria and must discover the cause of a plague and pray to the Gods to ensure that it is cured.

Gameplay is fairly simple; you're given a description of the current issue and have to figure out what would most please the Gods about what you do.

It's a little different than 'guess what the author is thinking' since instead we're guessing what people thousands of years ago are thinking, as this is based on historical documents. I found that really fascinating!

This game features a friend who says things that make you feel uncomfortable, or that are otherwise inappropriate.

You can choose to either unfriend them or still be their friend. At each stage it says that the probability of you unfriending them for that specific comment is .1% times the number of times that you've ignored your friend's comment.

If you eventually unfriend them, it will list the cumulative probability that you ever would have unfriended them.

The whole thing is a thought experiment: while minor things can seem too small to end a friendship over, the cumulative weight of many things can be a good reason.

For me, the whole game is centered mechanically around the probability scheme and narratively around the friendship idea. And the probability thing to me isn't as effective as it could be. It does teach the idea of cumulative probability and how even small percentages can grow, but there are three weird things. First, the probability that we'll quit right then has no bearing at all on what we, the players, do. Are we intended to simulate the game and only have a .01% chance of quitting on the first term? It doesn't count what we do and simulate it. It's possible we could be watching someone else's universe where they have a percent chance of quitting, but since we're in control, that percent isn't true.

Second, why does each individual chance of quitting go up linearly?

And third, if we want to demonstrate the snowball effect of independent successive probability choices as an educational lesson, why not fix the probability of 'quitting each turn' and show that even with a low constant probability, the cumulative probability can get large? As it is, it might confuse players into thinking that the large cumulative probability is primarily caused by the increasing individual probability and not by the cumulative effect.

The friendship part is interesting to contemplate and a good thing to ask ourselves. Do we forgive people for their past transgressions? Do we conditionally forgive people as long as they stop doing the thing they shouldn't be doing? How many times do we forgive? So I think leading to that contemplation is the game's highlight.

My view on this game seesawed wildly over time.

I played it while going through the short game showcase in fairly rapid order. I felt dismay at seeing the large chunk of text in the first passage. Then I clicked through as fast as I could without reading to estimate the size of the game (since most choice-based games lack such indications, although this one turned out to be in acts). I found out that it was essentially 'click to move forward', and I sighed; the sigh deepened when I realized each page had many 'aside' links that went to several-page long linear texts.

So this, in the end, is just a long story, with mild nonlinearity. That means that, rather than judging it against all interactive fiction, where bad writing can be made up for by clever mechanics, I would instead be comparing it to all written stories.

And in that vein, it is good, getting better as it goes on, due to its slow buildup. But I feel like the narrators could have been more strongly differentiated in voice (all felt pretty refined, educated, resigned and frank, despite describing very different events) and that more of a plot arc could have been built up; the climax seemed sudden with no denouement.

I do believe this is just a matter of taste; I prefer more pulpy/genre fiction than literary fiction, and I can think of several people I could recommend this to who would deeply enjoy it. For me, I don't think my time was wasted and I'm glad the author has made it, but I missed the things mentioned above and, as a work of IF, I would have loved more involvement.

On a side note, the 'restart' button is in the lower right corner, and the 'move on' button was right next to it, and sometimes the way to move on was clicking a word, so I ended up clicking 'restart' on accident several times, often when the passages were most exciting. I feel like this is more my fault than the author's fault, so I'm only mentioning this so that others can avoid being dumb like me.

I played through this game once and then backed up a choice or two to try a couple more endings.

You're in a pond. Why? Because your one true love has been cursed, of course! He's been turned into a frog!

Unfortunately, it gets a bit more complicated than that. Over the next few screens of gameplay, you have the chance to try to track down what really happened to your love.

Overall, I found this charming (pun intended). The idea could have stood up to more depth. I think there was possibly a bug with frog color, as I was told a certain frog was eaten then got an ending involving that same frog, but I might have misread it. The writing was the highlight in this game for me.

I could identify with this game for sure. It's pretty small and doesn't dig in-depth in its topic, but I'm rating it higher because I see myself in it.

In this brief Choicescript game, the protagonist is constantly late (it doesn't say to what; school? work? church?). Most of the game is about how you feel about that. Are you going to do better? Did you find the cause? Do you just self-recriminate?

For circumstances partially within my control, I've been late to work more than 90% of the time over the last 6 years. Like the protagonist, I know it's possible to be on time because it's happened before, but also like the protagonist I find it pretty difficult (in my case, partially because I transport other people to other places).

So I was glad to find this little piece that was like a self-reflective poem to me (it's not structured as poetry, but it itched the same part of my brain).