Reviews by MathBrush

This is a great, character driven mixed-media game that simulates discord while also using additional text and pdf files to tell an overall story.

Bez and Josh Grams teamed up on this one, with Bez writing and Josh programming (according to credits), and I think the division of labor worked great, because the writing is on-point and the coding is very smooth and looks fancy.

The main thrust of the game is a Discord conversation between a group of friends that gathered together over the years to discuss an obscure (and fictional) poet. However, the main leader of the group is in a car crash. While this is being announced, dark secrets bubble up.

You take turns as the various members of the discord group, selecting between different variations of how to respond. It definitely seemed like my choices could influence the story heavily, but I chose a particular path of every time to get more juicy gossip.

In between the choices, there are interludes with additional information over the years.

I think this is some of the strongest writing I've seen in a while: a diverse cast of characters, realistic scenarios, people reacting the way they do in real life. It was especially jarring because I've lived through or seen a few different variations of the events depicted in this game.

There were a few quibbles I had; I was torn about the timed text, because it does make it harder to fit a game in during a busy schedule, but it definitely contributes to the overall feel of the game. Also, I feel like the game could have been just a little longer or have a firmer resolution. Otherwise, this is a game that I felt joy to play.

Edit: Apparently the poet Dorn is real. Who knew?

This is a world-building heavy game about an enormous library the size of an entire planet. In it, there are all sorts of bizarre things: living book-creatures, ink serpents, portals and non-Euclidean spaces, etc.

You are exploring it with many other archivists, including your own apprentice.

The structure is essentially a Gauntlet, where you get two choices at a time, one that keeps you alive and one that kills you. I found this a bit frustrating, and most other interaction was either 'next page' or an option to be nice or mean with words. The game ended fairly abruptly after one major event.

All this is balanced by the very cool storybuilding and fun descriptions. So there was a lot to like here as well.

This game is hard to review for multiple reasons, since it's a multiplayer game I played on my own (I've done multiplayer IF before but since this one is in French I didn't feel comfortable asking someone to wait while I slowly read it), and also describing the plot spoils it, as a big part of the game is figuring out the other person's story. So this I could basically rate it really high or really low depending on how I'm feeling today.

Overall, the setting is mostly muted and indistinct. You are at a society dinner (or maybe political dinner?) and everything is centered around that. Unlike most multiplayer games I've seen recently, which tend to have tons of text interspersed with a very small number of possible actions, this game has 30 turns each of which has ten or more actions you can choose.

However, these actions are almost all inconsequential or are only interesting once. I do have to give kudos for allowing players to pass any message at all to the other person. I did feel it straggled on too long by about ten turns.

Of course if I had played with someone else I wouldn't have spoiled the fun of finding out about the other person, which is a bummer. Overall, I'm giving this 3 stars, but it really could be anywhere from a 2 to a 4.

This is a choice-based entry where you play as the recently deceased ghost Victor who visits his friend Guillaume.

It's the day of Victor's funeral, and all his friends come over. You, as Victor, can only be seen by Guillaume, but can influence others. Your goal: to help your Guillaume win the heart of long-time friend Marie.

In the meantime, you discover a lot about your friends: one has come out recently, one has a new boyfriend from Senegal, some siblings are squabbling, one person gets a little too drunk, etc.

It's a little bit like Delightful Wallpaper (the second half), where you influence others subtly, and a bit like Blue Chairs, with its substance-using, young-people-talking parties.

It's a very long game, maybe too long, but the story it paints is beautiful. It does require (like another reviewer said) a lot of clicking, so I got in the habit of just clicking really fast until it stopped and going back to read over the text.

I really liked this world. It reminded me of the work of Katherine Morayati, of being in 'the scene'. This had more 'youth slang' than any of the other games; I learned a lot. It also has tons of cultural references; my search history has a lot of stuff like Science Po, Francoise Hollande, Knife Party, etc. now.

I like this culture because I was never a part of it. I've never drank, never tried marijuana. I had a lot of siblings and cousins and never hung out with other kids after school, so the idea of a big friend group you spend all your time with is something I saw my siblings do but never tried as a kid. As an adult, now I have a lot of nice friends, but there's not that same element of risk and danger that impressionable young people have when it comes to things like drugs or alcohol or unsafe sex.

Anyway, the story I found was well-crafted and overall it resonated with me. Interactivity felt great; out of all games in this comp, I felt like both choices were okay each time, that both would produce a meaningful story and that I could choose what I really wanted.

This game was pretty fun and fairly long, though it is unfinished.

In it, you play as the child of a king. Your father has been assassinated and you must flee the city. Once you do so, you join a boat and, if successful, start a city.

I enjoy city-building games like Civ VI and multi-stage games like Spore, so I found this game more fun as I went on. Early on, though, it felt a bit unfair at times, almost like random events happening.

There are some nice mechanics, like a prophetess guiding you with several messages for the future and a collection of what essentially are riddles or knowledge tests about Greek gods.

I liked my ending, with the city growing good. I felt like a lot of times the choice was between 'do something honorable and good that will make everyone like you or do something obviously bad', which made it feel like there was often a 'right choice' to click. But I also feel the game became more complex the longer it went on.

This was a big French Comp game, but worth playing.

This game uses Unity and has some visual component, similar to a visual novel (or the game Reigns, which I haven't tried).

You are the second-in-command to a captain on a trans-Atlantic voyage. The Captain, a bit nervous, asks you to handle most of the passengers.

Events are randomly-selected vignettes with different characters (which I'm told is similar to Reigns). Each one gives three options, which are selected by a ship's wheel rather than clicking directly on them.

Each character has their own agenda: a priest who wants to evangelize, a high-ranking and veteran officer who wants the crew to relax and party; a rich socialite who wants to be treated well; and a communist organizer.

Overall, the system is interesting and fun, but the interactivity felt disconnected and opaque. It was hard to find common threads through the interactions and it was difficult to know how your choices would affect the two main stats.

But the images were nice and the writing was very descriptive.

This is a brief but replayable game.

You have found the ancient Temple of Destiny. Inside is a prophecy in the form of a poem. Interestingly, the stone it is carved on is movable, and you can alter individual words and phrases.

This allows you to construct the prophecy you most desire!

Unfortunately, you cannot go back to previous choices; what's done cannot be undone (without replaying). This makes it a bit hard to strategize without writing everything down, as you can't just cycle through.

Like others, I found the Good Ending and the Bad ending but not the Worse or Better ending. I also found the 'give up early' ending.

Pretty fun concept!

In this game, you wake up in darkness on a space station on Mars. The oxygen is getting low, and you have to repair the spaceship!

This is written in the Donjon engine, one I've seen come up several times in French games and which always works well overall.

There is a small map here, and only a few items, allowing the game to be completed relatively quickly with few surprises (except for some fun easter eggs).

Overall, the game is pretty sparse. The majority of each room description is taken up by listing exits. An AI is mentioned but doesn't seem to do much (it is almost implied that the player is the AI but then we put on overalls so it wouldn't make much sense. Unless the reader is the AI?) And there is a little bit of lack of verbs or clues.

I gave two stars to a game by the same author last year and I feel a bit bad giving two stars again, but I think that for me personally (since my rating is just subjective and is only my opinion), if the author did some more testing where they had players try commands and implemented anything they tried, the game would be a lot smoother. But maybe I'm wrong.

Actually, I am very glad there was a walkthrough provided and it made things very smooth after I had explored for a while and got stuck, so I think I will add a star for the good walkthrough and the funny spores.

This French comp game has a form of interaction I've never seen before and which I quite like.

It is a mad-lib game, in the sense that the primary interaction is filling in blanks that are then used in the rest of your story. The blanks include things like your name but also more important things like what special object you have.

This doesn't make for very good interaction itself. But what happens is after your choices are locked in, the game lets you pick between several 'implications' of your choices, and that's where the true agency lies. For instance, you can create a kind of menace in the dungeon that causes some negative thing to happen to you (I made an enormous burger that makes you fat). Once you select that, the game asks if the Enromous Burger can be defeated in combat or talked to (I chose combat). I ended up losing the game in the end (my girlfriend from the guild of assassins was killed by the burger so I was stuck later). With different choices, there would be an entirely different story.

The main storyline though is that you are part of a monastery where the prioress wants you to lie to the future queen to protect the monastery treasures. You decide to disobey by finding the legendary ____ of Saint ______ to help you.

Overall, it was fun. Because I made the choices, I didn't get as emotionally invested, but everything else was great.

This is a visual novel that has some really great animation and overall visuals. The text was in nice little chunks that made it easy to read even though many characters had weird speech things (like one who talked while holding a golf club in their mouth!)

It's not super long, either. You play as a robot-looking character who has done a really great job at their last three internships, but who now is ready for the hardest one of all.

You're invited to a hotel where a dog-like manager tells you there is a conference of traitors going on, but one of them is a traitor-traitor: that is, they're secretly not a traitor at all! You have to figure out who did it and confront them.

There is only one suspect and one interview, so the game is much briefer than you might expect it to be, but it's hard enough that I played through a few times without solving it. It's okay, though, because it's just a fun, goofy game with memorable characters. Definitely worth checking out!