Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

This game is heavily centered on world-building. It's a Twine game and it's focused on you, a person who is not quite alive and not quite dead, who has to stop your mom from destroying the world.

The main attractions here are the characters and world-building. This definitely seems like a setting and a group of people the author has spent a great deal of time thinking about, from the murder-happy girlfriend to the html-breaking Ataxia monsters to the mother figure herself. All of them seem well developed and polished.

I think what's in this game is solid (nice use of text manipulation, too), but I'd love more chance to explore the world and see more of these concepts in play. I guess I'd either prefer a tighter focus with the current level of interactivity or the bigger story with the wider exploration.

This is a cute little game made together as a family.

Your goal is to retrieve the Sacred Shovel of Athenia, which is stuck in the road. Unfortunately, you can't do that right now, because you aren't a cat lover, so a kind of restrictive device has been put on you until you are kind to a cat.

That doesn't really make much sense, but that's okay, because the game wasn't made to make sense. It's mostly a framing story to help a kid learn how to be kind to a cat.

I struggled a bit with the parser here and there, like trying to figure out how to use the fishing rod. Overall, the core concept of the game is good, but it just lacks a bit of cohesion and polish.

This is a wordplay game centered on the phrase 'Beam me up Scotty'.

You play as Captain Kirk, and gameplay consists of the presentation of some silly scenario involving you, Bones, and/or Spock, as well as Scotty. To get out of the situation you have to type 'B____ me up scotty', where the blank is some word starting with B.

So it's all riddles/wordplay, and mostly centers on finding synonyms for words in the text. You either get it or you don't; if you just can't get it you pass. I got 70.86%, so I had to pass a few times.

At a basic level it's pretty funny, but I kind of found the hints and pass system abrasive. They're basically 'ha you loser you're dumb and didn't get it'. But why would I like that? It's just a made up game and I'm playing it for fun. The author doesn't even know I'm playing it. I'm just deciding of my own free will to have a computer say I'm dumb. I'm not really into that.

The humor is the best part of this.

The first Marie game, Pre-Marie, was the first Adventuron game I ever played, and it gave me a good impression.

This one fleshes out the details significantly. It's in PunyInform, I think.

I'm giving it 5 stars, but not necessarily because I think most people will adore it. It simply had a nice combination of things I like: a vague conspiracy, a tense mystery setting, logical but kind of sticky parser puzzles and a lot of standard parser gameplay. And the in-game timer provided some tension. So for me that's exactly what I was looking for in a game.

The idea is that you are investigating a kind of conspiracy related to you and your town, but you've been kidnapped and stuffed somewhere. There's just a hint of the supernatural, possibly a fakeout or even unintentional. Most of the game involves escaping from your situation in progressively larger containers/rooms/locations.

Pretty fun, if you just want a brief chill parser game. I fought with the parser a couple of times, but it was overall pretty smooth.

This game is almost a pure 'time cave', a style of game structure that was popular with a lot of paper CYOA books. Basically every choice branches, with each branch having a different ending. I say it's almost a time cave, since some paths end up recombining later on, but there's not a lot of state tracking in the story itself.

The main drawbacks of such a story are a lack of coherence in the storyline and boring repetition of early material. This story addresses the first by being wacky and nonsensical (so incoherence is a plus) and the second by adding a 'checkpoint' system once you find enough endings, of which I found all 26.

I'm usually not impressed by zany humor but I genuinely found this game funny. It reminded me of Simpsons humor a bit. I've seen that it fell flat for some other reviewers, but humor, especially surreal humor, is so subjective that you're always going to have enjoyers and disenjoyers. I liked this enough to play through all endings.

This game has a lot more in common with roguelikes than standard IF gameplay (unless I've deeply misunderstood roguelikes). There is a fixed map with seven important items randomly generated in it, and an enemy that moves around the map and reacts to you; additionally, there are several difficulty levels that basically give you 'extra lives' or make the enemy a bit slower.

I beta tested an early version of this game.

Here are my overall thoughts:

+Polish: The game claims to be a beta, but I found the version I played (near the end of Spring Thing) to be fairly complete; I didn't find any bugs, and objects had a lot of detail.

+Descriptiveness: The map is both overflowing and sparse. Each room is detailed, but many of them overlap in the items they have (filing cabinets, screens, etc.). Items are utilitarian but hint at a greater cause. It's an interesting mix, and I found it fairly evocative. The map is very helpful.

+Interactivity: The frantic scrambling around to find the seven items isn't something I've seen a lot before, and it was a fun change from the usual staid, considered type of IF game I tend to play. There is a parkour element, but it never came into play for me, playing on the easiest non-tutorial setting. Its main effect seems to be to help with escaping, but I only ran into the Predator once, near the very end. Perhaps in harder difficulties it is more useful.

-Emotional impact: I think the writing overall is strong, but a lot of the pieces just didn't fall into place for me. The story has so many intro declarations and warnings and prefacing and guides that it almost felt bubblewrapped, designed to protect me from the game but simultaneously blunting its experience. The warnings on themselves are useful, as the game has frequent strong profanity, which isn't always in service to some overarching narrative goal. In the game itself, there are a couple of strong threads: (Spoiler - click to show)a capitalist society trying to make brainwashed slaves, (Spoiler - click to show)a fellow clone, or some other experiment, hunting you down, perhaps as a test to make you stronger?, (Spoiler - click to show)a siege wearing you down. They all tie together in game, but they feel disparate. Is your pursuer your comrade or your foe? Both are okay individually, but with both as possibilities there was less tension for me.

+Would I play again? The core gameplay loop isn't bad, and the overall polish makes for solid gameplay. I could see myself revisiting it.

This game pokes fun at fantasy tropes with a lot of silly dialogue and 4th wall breaking.

You (Elftor the Elf) and your manservant (Manny) have to save a king and kingdom from a terrible plague that makes everyone shout at the top of their lungs.

Along the way, there are plenty of sidequests--sidequests you have specifically been instructed not to fulfill.

There are quite a few endings. Overall the game is pretty goofy but I laughed several times. I also had the issue other reviewers did with the 'stats' part at the top disappearing at inconvenient times, like when it was being referenced in-game.

Overall, I liked the 'good' ending the best. A slight game, but fun for people who like dumb humor.

This is a relatively brief Twine game with some silly/goofy humor in it. It seems like the main goal is just to get the reader to laugh, like when you can choose between wearing a suit or a cardboard box for your big debut.

'Aesthetics over plot' seems right, as there isn't much plot to talk about. You're out of work and are going to a networking event, and you just choose how to react to a few different things.

I'm not sure how to approach this review, so I'll use my five criteria scale:

-Polish: The game has some typos, and I think decapitalizes your name when you type it in.
+Descriptiveness: There are some clear textual images that are pretty funny, like your character shouting out their plans at the party.
+Emotional impact: There are definitely some funny parts.
+Interactivity: There are some significant differences on replay, even though it's a short game, and achievements are generously handed out.
-Would I play again? It was entertaining, but too slight to replay several times. I did replay once to see how much of a difference there was.

This is the third Lady Thalia game; the series in general focuses around a three-pronged conversation system where you take different attitudes, as well as physical preparation for thefts.

This game focuses on the introduction of a new nemesis detective, as well as a resolution of the overarching plotline of your former nemesis, and heavily involves your husband as well.

I had a rocky start with this one. The intro heavily emphasizes your open marriage/lavender marriage, and it brought into my mind a lot of real-world experiences that were quite a bit less glamorous than those implied in the game. In addition, I found myself constantly at odds with the conversation system, not picking up on the social cues that indicate which line of approach would be best; possibly I just have brain fog after just coming back from a trip.

But the quality of the writing and characters is always, to me, solid, and as the game went on I became invested in the string of characters and situations and actions. The involvement of the husband and his lover made the game more interesting, putting you in a teaching role, which is a natural extension of the overall character arc. And unlike some others who reviewed the game, I found Mel's change of heart (Spoiler - click to show)fairly understandable; if your enemy is consistently more encouraging and relatable than your employer, who wouldn't have second thoughts about their career?

I also preferred the later mechanical segments that focused more on varying your approach rather than having 'one true' approach, as well as the 'slow finesse vs brute force' options in the physical preparation.

Overall, this one isn't my favorite Lady Thalia game, but I'd consider it one of the headliners of Spring Thing, and am glad to have it.

This game revolves around a protagonist who wakes up in what feels like a wrong body, with wrong memories, and everything hurts.

The writing is very elaborate, dense, and elliptical. The game literally begins with an exposition on the universe, stars, Noether's theorem, conservation laws, and thermodynamics, before it really kicks in.

I kind of felt trapped under the weight of all the words. I was able to piece together something of a story; one of alarms and a space station where you have to escape. But the writing is so elliptical that I had difficulty knowing if anything was real or a metaphor. Is there (Spoiler - click to show)actually another person on the ship, or is it all just a form of self-reflection? Is the main computer room (Spoiler - click to show)really made of flesh and bones and eye sockets, or is it just a metaphor for your feelings about it?

I couldn't really tell. Overall, I found a couple of different possible endings, including one really early on and a few later ones. There is a lot of body horror in terms of dealing with progressively worse injuries.

Overall, the writing was carefully planned and chosen, and the interactivity and story structure were well-balanced, but the overall elaborateness was too much for me to handle.