Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

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!

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.