Reviews by MathBrush

I enjoyed this brief respite while playing Spring Thing games.

You play as a mutant pig farmer dealing with bikers. Life is kind of unfair, because if you don't feed your pigs, shovel their poop, and deal with bikers, you're gonna lose your pigs! And there's not enough time to do all of that...

Fortunately you have other options as well. And trying some of them out can give you different fun endings in a short amount of time.

I reached a point where I could pick between two different endings, and I picked a deathmatch, which was pretty amusing.

I liked the game, finding it polished and descriptive, but I didn't feel like replaying it in the end.

I was involved a bit with the creation of this game; it's part of Seed Comp, where people put game ideas out there and others make full games of it.

So I made the seed for this game, and I'm very glad things worked out the way they did. I had heard of the Red Door, Yellow Door game online before and even jokingly tried it with my son once but he got creeped out so we stopped right away.

My issue was I didn't know what kind of surreal dream imagery to put in; that's not my forte.

So I'm glad Charm Cochran picked this up, because it ended up as exactly the kind of game I had wanted to play when I came up with the idea: disturbing, creepy, and unpredictable.

The basic idea is that you're at a slumber party and your sister is put into a trance and instructed to visualize two doors, and then you and your friends tell her what actions to take in the dream world.

You soon find parallels between the dream world and your own, but also bizarre features like giant buildings or creatures. The part with Claire's different voices I found especially thrilling.

Literally the only drawback I see is that there are a couple of things that could be polished up. Most of the game is amazingly responsive, with a lot of dumb things I thought of trying having a custom response with an in-game voice, an effect difficult to achieve. But there were a few things like uncapitalized room names or objects that were difficult to pick out from surrounding scenery (like the (Spoiler - click to show)cabinets in the kitchen). I had a smooth experience because I relied on intfiction hint threads, though.

However, those few unpolished moments actually played up the dreamlike atmosphere to me, so I'm not even certain they need to be resolved. Dreams are often like that, enchanting, full of exploration, but with frustrations and occasional non-sequiturs.

My only regret is I don't have other game ideas I could see Charm Cochran's spin on, because this was great.

This games has a parser written from scratch in Twine.

Making your own parser is a fraught thing, and many people have tried and failed over the years. The last-place entries of IFcomp are sprinkled with poor parser of years past. The biggest issue is that there is a bewildering amount of tradition in parser games that varies from group to group, all of whom may get upset if your style doesn't match theirs (like GET vs TAKE, X vs EXAMINE vs LOOK [object], G for again, Z for wait, abbreviations for cardinal directions, hitting 'up' for copying an earlier command). A few people have managed to make very robust custom parser: Robin Johnson, Nils Fagerburg, and Linus Åkesson.

This one is better than many I've seen, especially since it doesn't require downloading a Windows Executable and it has fairly quick response times. However, there are a few oddities that got in my way a bit: compass directions are part of play, but the text does not indicate possible compass directions to go in. Some basic actions are not repeatable, although no reason is given for it (generally things that give you one-time info). On the positive side, keyword highlighting is in use, similar to many Aaron Reed games, where you can interact with objects by typing their names. On the neutral side, much of the game occurs by typing Continue.

On the story side, this is reminiscent of books like The Giver or Divergent, where you are in a futuristic society and your role in life is chosen in a big ceremony.

I liked the overall story, and found it fun. I ended with a pretty big surprise in my playthrough, which was good. Some of the individual word choices stuck out as strange to me; one guy was referred to as 'the being' and 'the male' a lot, which made him sound kind of alien, and there were a few other choices that were a bit odd.

For me, I tend to choose interactive fiction that has features of escapism, and feel like I'm taking a break from reality when I play the game. That's one reason games like Violet threw me off at first, since, despite their quality, they reminded me of my real-life PhD pressures.

This game is quite the opposite of escapist. It poses (from my perspective) a single question: if you knew you were going to die, what would you do to be remembered?

Bez talks in honest and self-reflective detail about his experiences with pseudo-dementia, which led to concern that they would soon perish. Now, though, e's in a better place, so now we can look back and see how things were going, and how the game A Single Oroubouros Scale was developed.

Like a few of Bez's other pieces, this is structured not as a game but as a narrative essay, which different chapters broken up by hyperlinks. For me, the hyperlinks brought a definite sense of interactivity to the piece, because it was like finding clues in a mystery game, except instead of solving a crime you're trying to understand a human being.

I thought I had finished the whole project, and felt it was missing just a bit more that could help communicate the author's intent, but when I came to review the game, I found a poem (by the poet that his recent game Hidden Gems, Hidden Secrets centered on) which beautifully complemented the overall experience.

I enjoyed this dark game. You play as a young child bartered away to be the spouse of a pale and fitful girl, scion of a rich family.

The text is dark, but themes of light and the color white prevail through the game, with the light presented as being more evil and twisted than soothing darkness.

There are numerous endings to the game, and a variety of conversations where you can choose between topics.

I enjoyed the game's depiction of helplessness in the face of unspeakable horror, as well as its blending of dream and waking.

Surreal gothic horror is on of my favorite genres (such as the game Heart of the House or the book The Haunting of Hill House), so I think I enjoyed this more than most people would. So while I'm giving it a five star rating, I could see other people having different opinions.

This game definitely brought back a lot of memories. I had a long relationship where I had a lot of work-life balance issues, and it eventually ended up falling apart, and this reminded me of that.

There are several endings, so there are likely different versions of this game depending on how you play, but in my playthrough, there were two main characters: a wealthy government official, and a young, poorer-class individual.

They love each other, but there are tensions. The poor one is concerned with fairness and trying to find beauty in day to day moments, while the richer one is trying to 'bring home the bacon' and do well at work.

An argument about one partner staying home late and missing an appointment because their boss corralled them at work reminded me of times that my boss in my first job wanted me to stay home late while my partner was caring for our newborn.

It's a tough situation. So I think there's a lot of emotion in this game. Your choices have a lot of freedom, too.

The only thing missing for me is length; I felt like the pacing in the first half was more drawn out and set up expectations for a longer game but that was rapidly concluded in the ending, leaving me wanting or expecting more.

This review is for the Twine version. The original review is down below.

The Twine version of Kuolema was perhaps the biggest rewrite out of any New Game Plus game of Spring Thing, as it was completely ported to a new system and had a complex system of passwords, etc.

Surprisingly, it plays very similar to the original. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to find what was different about it gameplay-wise. Visually, there are added animations and timers which are used sparingly to great effect (although occasionally I switched to another tab to read something while waiting for it to finish).

The main gameplay things that I didn't remember from the first time around were the hints when getting text entry wrong, and also maybe there were more options for the ending? But I enjoyed playing all the way through. There also is a new story version which reduces the puzzles that I didn't try, which was also likely a major part of the rewrite.


Original version:

This was a nice, mostly-grounded thriller on a ship. A lot of games like this with a dark, abandoned ship at night devolve into Lovcraftian horror (which I love), but it was nice to have a change of pace this time.

This game is written in google forms and relies entirely on passwords and, occasionally, branching for state tracking. This means that if you right everything down, you can come back to the game much later and speed through everything. It reminded me a bit of playing NES/SNES games like Mike Tyson's Punchout and Willow; we had a wooden beam near our living room we'd write down passwords on.

Overall, the speed and responsiveness was pretty good; the system doesn't work all that bad, except when I tried to open the walkthrough in another tab and everything got reset. Fortunately I had my notes, so it was very easy to catch back up. I ended up opening the walkthrough in another tab.

I'd say that writing and storytelling is very strong for my likes, with crisp and clear imagery and a slow-burn thriller plotline. Some parts didn't make too much sense, mostly serving as excuses to find more passwords, but there were a lot of dramatic moments.

The final parts really felt like an action movie. I lost momentum at one point trying to figure out how to activate the next portion of the narrative, but overall it worked well.

Love to see experimentation work out.

This is a fine Gruescript game, similar to Robin Johnson's own. Gruescript is a parser/choice hybrid, where all actions are done by clicking links, but there are items, rooms, etc, and your actions can change depending on what items you have.

In this game, you are a Lovecraftian god who has been summoned. You go to find a party going on at a mansion, but a strange one at that. People have been locked in the basement all day, but you can't check on them until you fix things elsewhere.

There are a lot of classic puzzles: NPCs that want things, avoiding unwanted attention, codes, secrets.

Even though my German is poor, I found it easy to read (except one time I didn't pay attention and missed an important clue!) and the puzzles had good momentum, not so hard I felt frustrated but not too easy. I used the hints a couple of times, and they were very helpful.

Overall, a fun game that is just the right length for a relaxing afternoon.

Apparently this game is a kind of in-joke parody of a German game from years ago about going south.

This game is about going north in the desert. It requires a great deal of repetitive commands (I found it useful to enter commands like n.n.n.n.n.n.n.n to get through faster).

The idea is you're marching through a very, very large desert to get to the north. The narrator occasionally throws in funny quips.

I got to a point I could go no further, and I decompiled the game to get a hint, but I couldn't figure out how to move on. Eventually, I tried (Spoiler - click to show)take all, noticed (Spoiler - click to show)a shovel in my inventory, and the rest was easy from there.

No bugs I could see, and an amusing concept, but not much else.

For a more serious but still funny take on the idea, you could check out The Northnorth Passage. But I didn't mind this game, it was amusing and very simple for me, a poor German speaker, to play.

This was a pretty entertaining German game. Due to my weak German skills, I relied heavily on the accompanying map for help, so someone who solves the puzzles on their own may have a different experience. I also appreciate the fact that HILFE lists every verb needed to complete the game.

You play as the captain of a fishing vessel where things aren't going so well. You haven't found any fish at all! And so your crew has nothing to do. Maybe that's why almost all the food is gone. And why your dishes are covered in weird slime. And why your first mate seems to be chanting praises to unspeakable gods...or just talking to himself. One or the other.

This game has horror elements but also is self-conscious and amusing about it. I enjoyed the scripted events, active NPCs and adapting environments, and I appreciate that it was more story-focused and not too long or complex, although there were definitely a couple of puzzles that took me a while to figure out. Fortunately, there's a nice mechanism when dying that takes you to a recent 'checkpoint'. Had a good time with this one!