Reviews by MathBrush

My enjoyment of this French game went up and down as I played. My very first thought was, 'Wait, Gavroche games? Didn't they win last year with a demo game that was unfinished? Why are they making another demo instead of finishing that game???? Will they never finish a game?"

But this game is, just like last year, very fun after all. If it just ends up having several demos each year, that's not so bad after all.

This game features you as a recently activated robot who has been repurposed to steal from a museum! Your human co-conspirators are designated by card suits and communicate with you via radio, with one being especially foul-mouthed.

Once you get further in, you discover a cast of robot characters that have some humor and some pathos. I got my arm ripped off in a robot arm-wrestling competition, and that was pretty neat. Visually, it's great-looking, like many Moiki games are.

Overall, I planned on a solid 3/5 due to the unfinished, but the exhibit vignettes changed my mind to 4/5.

This game reminded me of why I have liked the French Comp over the years: the innovation.

You have in this story a book that can flipped forwards and backwards. It has about 8 or 9 pages total (at first). At first, I thought there was a bug, as the book seemed intended to have jewels on the front but they were missing, but as you read, you discover that's not the case.

An ancient civilization conquered all galaxies but couldn't prevent the end of the universe as it was consumed by black holes. Instead, it found a way to encode its entire history and culture into three crystals (the ones missing from the cover of the book), each held by a different guardian.

The book's history fluctuates, kind of like (but very different from) SCP-140 from the SCP Wiki. Different chunks of texts will flicker, and clicking on them changes the story. Change it enough, and you get a visual logiv puzzle you can solve by clicking.

I had a lot of fun with this. There are definitely some areas weaker than others (like Rovarsson mentioned, the story is fairly basic; another thing is the puzzles themselves are simple), but the overall interactivity is nice and the story is engaging, so for me the game as a whole was more than the sum of its parts.

This is a heavily-altered Twine game that has images with mouse-over animations, text that changes in dramatic ways, and other fancy effects. I had to turn on the scrollbar to get it to work on my mouseless laptop, but otherwise it worked well.

The game was written in English and then translated to French, but I played it in French first, an amusing intentional roadblock in understanding between two Anglophones. I then replayed twice in English.

The game is brief, but rich. You have been seeing a psychiatrist and are having lapses in memory, have been hearing voices, etc. At first, the doctor is eager to help you, exploring your past, but things get darker...

Overall, it's a surreal game whose strongest features are it's neat visual effects, its replayability, and its sinister atmosphere.

This is kind of a happy accident; this game is one I played before in Spanish from Ectocomp, but it happened to match the 2023 French Comp themes of treason and archives, so it was translated and entered into that as well.

This is a compelling story, which involves a soldier that is obsessed with collecting the letters of other soldiers, usually after they die. He wants to write his own letter, the best letter ever, and will stop at nothing for his goals.

There are 3 acts, each one fairly brief with actions that are generally clued in the instructions or text. I found it easier in French than in Spanish, to be honest.

Overall, the obsession here is very compelling.

This is just the very first act of a large story. It sets up the main action and then promises the next story (as shown by the Episode 1 in the title).

It is a choice based game, designed in portrait mode rather than landscape, with either a 'next' option on each screen or a few choices. There are several nice character portraits done.

You are a new archivist at a library in a magical world. People and creatures from all over come and you, an apprentice archivist, must decide whether they should be admitted or not.

So it's kind of a bureaucracy simulator, but has more action in the end. In the middle it has more normal life things like dealing with allergies or finding a cute person.

Promising, but incomplete.

This game has some pretty awesome worldbuilding. It's a French hypertext game with three main stories and a few incomplete ones.

It has very lovely art and some background music. The idea is that there is this ancient, ruined world filled with gigantic walls and large trees. There are no living creatures except for insects. It reminds me a bit of Nausicaa of the Winds, especially the trees that suck up poisonous metals and excrete them.

Overall, the worldbuilding was fun. You see this world of wild druids and ancient technology through the eyes of a young girl. There are horse-like insects, monstrous ones, insect gods, and insect food.

It's very big even as is. The one thing that I found a bit odd (besides it being released unfinished) is that the structure is kind of like a text maze. There is one main storyline you can usually just click through, with occasional side paths that can be very long before coming back to the original.

Overall, I love this world and art and think it's fun.

This Italian game hasn't had any reviews since it came out 13 years ago, and someone suggested it, so I checked it out.

It's a cute concept although some parts are a little weird. You are headed to ZenSpa, a company that does interactive fiction. But you have to find your way inside, past the secretary, and up to the director himself.

The game highlights the difference between old school and new school IF, although maybe not the way you'd expect. Pamphlets inform you that kissing is all the rage now in IF games (which I don't think is a very strong trend?). Non-consensual kissing is a bit weird, but in most situations you try it in the game, you get firmly reprimanded and arrested. One situation, though...

Overall, the game was short but well put-together and well-clued.

This game is a demo for a new type of parser.

Basically, you type in the first letter or two of a noun on the screen, which brings up some possible words that can autocomplete, which you do by hitting tab; then you hit tab more to cycle through different actions or adjectives for that noun.

This is a clever idea. I did have some trouble navigating the game though. You're basically some kind of goblin entertaining an ogre king, so there were a ton of words that I didn't understand (looking them up, it was stuff like 'burping' or 'somersaulting') and there were some typos that I think were intentional like 'vous être'.

In structure, as far as I played, the game starts with you telling poems to the ogre king, then possibly fighting his executioner guy, then exploring your living quarters, then quoting proverbs, then fighting again.

Interaction was kind of wonky for me. Almost none of the actions have predictable effects; instead, it seems like the author's goal was to come up with funny or nonsensical results for most things. It was amusing, but it was hard to plan what happened. Combat was especially rough, with many actions healing the other opponent. On the itch page, others had complained about this, and the author suggested making sure that you mix up your attacks and not follow any pattern. I couldn't do this, and died during the second duel. There was also a clock that didn't seem to do much besides making you sleep for a while.

Overall the system looks pretty good, and the game is descriptive and amusing, but the actual game mechanics are pretty hard to figure out and could be explained more clearly.

I previously played the English version of this game in Parsercomp.

In it, you type in words like a regular parser game, but the majority of output is in images in a cartoon style. You are the 'guy' on a guys' restroom door, and the lady on the other door is stolen by a photorealistic hand. You have to rescue her!

I wondered if there would be any big differences in the French translation. I didn't find any. I looked and found a long post by the author after the comp had ended, which was very comprehensive. I learned that 1) the author had thought of many deep philosophical things, including Shakespeare, Brecht, Michael Ended, diegetics, etc., 2) the game was written in around 10 days, and, most importantly to this translation, 3) The author specifically refused input of several beta testers and several reviewers, deciding to stay true to an artistic vision rather than listen to the masses.

I generally find that 'being true to yourself' and 'making a well-respected and popular game' are two different goals for games. They don't necessarily contradict each other (Superluminal Vagrant Twin seems like it satisfies both goals!) but it's not usually to pick both and work on them. If you seek your own true vision, that means occasionally disappointing your fans, and if you seek to please fans, you may lose your own vision.

So this game still includes many of the things that made it difficult in the English version. The author states that almost no one has completed it without hints, but that hard games have both poetic value and it is better for players to play games without hints.

These are subjective positions for which there is no real answer. For my thought though, great games aren't great because they are hard, but because they make players feel smart or accomplished. I could make a game with a 10-digit multiplication problem and it would be hard without a hint or a calculator, but that wouldn't necessarily make it fun. Similarly, games like Dark Souls or Elden Ring could be made so hard that no one could complete them at all. So I think that difficulty itself does not create enjoyment.

Overall, this game is identical to the English one, outside of the French. It is polished, descriptive in its own fashion. I did find it amusing, and I have played it again. I gave the English one 3 stars, but I'm giving the French one 4 stars. Why? I think everything looks cooler in French, and playing in a non-native language adds a different level of complexity that I enjoy. I realize that doesn't benefit actual Francophone players, but ratings and reviews are always subjective.

This is a pretty short Inform 7 game in French.

You have been hired as an archivist at a grand library. Coming in, you are welcomed by the Master Archivist, who gives you a grand tour and asks you to demonstrate your capabilities.

The version I played was pretty short, with a lot of size implied (by stairs and locked doors and furniture) but with most of it not open to play (due to being locked or empty, etc.)

It had a cozy feel, like Stardew Valley or something similar. It was fun to look up the recipes and the memories it brought back of using a card catalog were the highlights for me.

Overall, this could be expanded to a larger concept or just serve as a training game for the author to hone their skills. It was written very quickly and not tested much, according to the author, but I like the writing style.