Reviews by MathBrush

This is a brief story that is advanced by clicking. Every time you click, words fly up of the screen and new ones come in. After a few clicks, the lovely background changes, and this repeats until the story ends.

The story is about some kind of dying being who is travelling with you and plans to be part of the stars.

It's a short, pleasant experience with no kind of interactivity.

In this brief choice game with less than 500 words, you can choose to receive letters or send letters.

Both options cycle through a list of short letters that vary between poignant and witty. At the end, you get a brief extra letter.

The design was charming, and the letters were fun. Not a lot of content or choices, but what's here is well-done.

This is a pleasant game by the accomplished author Autumn Chen. In it, you are making dumplings with your girlfriend.

For both you, dumplings remind you of family, in both good and bad ways. Making them is a good excuse for both revisiting your past as well as figuring out how well you work together.

This also serves as a nice sequel to the earlier games in the same continuity, where we could only hope for moments like this.

Gameplay is card based, where you draw ingredients from the pantry or fridge and decide how to handle them.

Neat concept, well executed.

In this bird nun game, you are a bird, but not a nun. You work in an abbey as a servant, and you need to help prepare a meal for the abbess. The recipe book the cook needs is missing, so you have to go fetch it.

It's a graphical game, and contains things like illustrated manuscripts with humans replaced by birds, which is pretty funny.

Gameplay is pretty simple, a lot of it is 'find the book on the screen and click on it', so more like point and click adventures, while the rest is 'go to a room and talk to whoever is there, asking one of three questions'. I played twice, to check if I missed anything (and I might have) and I found more lore on the second time around.

I thought it was a fun idea. As an interactive fiction game, it relies fairly heavily on the graphics, but the lore details like the story of St Eider round it out for me.

In this snazzy-looking game, you play as a kid crocodile asking questions to an older crocodile.

The game is meant to be replayed over and over again until you get it right. It has a 'gauntlet' structure which means that only one answer is right and all others are wrong. The pool of answers stays the same, though, so every answer you get right makes the rest of the game easier.

The story is the same vein as Around the World in 80 Days or the story 21 Balloons. Our intrepid crocodile visits great cities and cold continents and becomes a businessman.

The structure of the game can be hard to figure out at first, so initial playthroughs are frustrating and repetitive. Originally, it had a 20 second timer, making it a challenge to read in time. But solving it is rewarding, and the stories are captivating.

This is a short feel-good choice game where you wander around a greenhouse.

There is some freedom in what to do, as you can explore different parts of the greenhouse and make real-feeling choices like confronting the boundaries of the world or not.

I'll admit, a chunk of my score is from the cute illustrations (aided by music). The little faces are a great touch, and the overall design works well.

Pretty brief, but a good example of how to make a satisfying short game.

This choicescript game is mostly about self-reflection and thinking about who you are. It has questions which are brief and whose answers could apply to many people. Things like 'who are you?' (pick between three metaphors). 'Why?' (pick an explanation). It has peaceful moments and more emotional ones.

This kind of thing can definitely be helpful. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has some exercises like this, and the early Eliza program would ask questions like this and people found it soothing.

I liked the overall positive vibe of this. I felt like a lot of the choices didn't apply to me very much right now, but some of them did. Good for someone who wants to introspect with the guidance of an author.

This game is very brief, with just a small handful of choices with a small handful of text.

The graphics are lush, though, with active elements and of lot of decorations like bar codes and other elements, giving a sci-fi feel. There is also music in the background that responds to the current situation in the game.

You are some kind of intermediary or servant for a space fleet leader, and you can choose to be rebellious or not, with at least two different endings.

Fun concept, characters are well-differentiated and the small bits of dialogue establish a setting effectively. The brevity of the game means that I was left wishing for more interaction, but the plot arc did feel fulfilled. As always, this author's writing and design were excellent.

This game is interesting from a coding point of view but a lot of it happens behind the scenes on the first playthrough.

You are trying to get home along the train tracks. The game tries to predict what you're going to do next and then does the opposite. If it can't predict it's sometimes random.

So on a first playthrough it just feels like completely random success and failure.

On subsequent playthroughs the mechanics are revealed through a guardian angel. It then can be a bit of a game to see what it responds to.

The text, while meaningful, is minimalistic and will eventually become repetitive on repeated play. So while the text isn't bad, I value the conceptual parts of this game more.

This game reminds me in a weird way of an older parser game called Byzantine Perspective. Both revolve around a strange issue with perspective that takes a while to resolve.

My first thought when playing this game was bewilderment. All of the game text was about a kind of mystical garden, frightening and old. You stumble around in it, looking for escape.

But, the choices are all about a conversation that you have on a train with a stranger who looks oddly familiar.

The game ended really quickly at first, but I realized it was called a maze. I eventually figured a way out: (Spoiler - click to show)picking choices related to connecting to the stranger next to you. Near the end, I picked wrong, but replayed and got it right.

The ending resolves the discrepancy in perspective.