Reviews by MathBrush

This game was made in 4 hours, but has about a dozen beta testers, and it makes sense, as it is very polished.

This is a game where you explore a dark mansion with a lightsource and a helpful notebook. You are trying to find a ghost, and have to navigate around, dealing with blocked passages and places your light can't get through.

The atmosphere is generally creepy, especially since someone died there in the past. The descriptions of the dark areas are especially evocative.

Overall, it's a clever game and has some heartwarming parts.

I think it could still do with a little more polish, even with the cadre of testers. That's to be expected for most speed-IF, but it would make sense for the author to add on to it, since I could see people liking it in the future. The commands I think would be useful to have responses to include(Spoiler - click to show)POINT POINTER or STACK BOOKS, or X ROD.

I liked this one quite a bit. I used hints 2 or 3 times.

This is a Twine game with a neat little map in the corner showing all the rooms in a kind of maze. You navigate around with a score described as 'Survival Chance' which goes up or down depending on what you do.

It's a lot like gamebooks in gameplay style, except without randomized combat. You have different encounters with people and need to pick up various keys and tokens and other items in one area to progress in another.

Story-wise, you have to go to the help desk, but you get trapped, because it's haunted. All your coworkers are skeletons or werewolves or other wild things, and the humor is pretty goofy.

The game could use a little more polish; there were a few typos here and there, and I never really connected emotionally. But overall it was a pretty strong game and amusing while I played it. The author did add several features that improve gameplay, like the map and back button.

This is a fun little whack-a-mole game written in Choicescript for Ectocomp in the Grand Guignol division.

In this game, you have a four-room house, with the baby in one corner and supplies and windows in all the others.

Your options are to forage for supplies, or rest, or, if zombies are approaching a window, to attack with shotgun or axe.

I passed one horde and leveled up, but didn't pass the next horde. It didn't seem like there'd be a lot more variety, so I didn't replay. Overall, an interesting concept.

+Polish
-Descriptiveness
+Interactivity
-Emotional impact
-Would play again

This is a relatively brief twine game with three endings, two bad and one good.

The idea is that global warming exposed a layer of mycelium all over Antarctica that is sentient. Scientists made super-soldiers out of it by using genetics to create human-shaped versions of the very strong mushroom material. But these mushrooms tend to cannibalize each other, so to stave off their desires, humans volunteer to be companions that the mushrooms can drink the blood of every now and then.

You volunteer to be this companion, and have to fill out some intake forms and get acquainted with the area before meeting your future companion.

The game does a good job of expressing the alienness and horror of the creatures, but I'm not sure it presents as strong of a picture of the protagonist, whose motives and actions didn't always seem connected to each other or to my desires. Overall, the styling was nice and I enjoyed the ending I reached.

This is a game with a fun little idea for the speed-IF portion of Ectocomp. It's hard to write a parser game at all in 4 hours, let alone a time loop, so this one is pretty impressive.

I thought at first it was set in the world of Gravity Falls, since there's a guy with the name Old Man McGuffin that sounds like the gravity falls scientist guy, but the names aren't entirely similar (McGuffin vs McGucket). Either way, the game has the old scientist offload a weird time-loop device on you as a 'trick' during trick-or-treating.

The game has a pretty big map for a small game, but a lot of it is red herrings. Once you find the areas that are 'real', you can piece together what to do.

This game wasn't polished or fully descriptive (which is usual for speed-IF, including my own), but was fun and the puzzles were neat.

This is an impressive game for one made in 4 hours.

It features a kind of cult or religion that has 22 members, one for each of the major arcana. You are death. One of the highlights for the game is the custom art of each member (one of which features the non-sexual nudity mentioned in the content warnings). My favorite was the high priestess, with a symbolic-looking pose.

There is also music, background images, etc. The gameplay style is Visual Novel style, with several pages of text interspersed by few but impactful choices. I only saw a few choices, and it was hard to know the outcome, but I know there are multiple endings (I got ending 2).

The story is that your cult is horrified by Halloween, when the devil's servants are allowed to walk around unless placated by candy, so you go to a house whose owners have died and decayed in order to try to hear God's voice on the radio.

Overall, the writing is well-done, descriptive and evocative, and the game is well-polished for being made in such a short time. My current preference is to have more agency in a story (or to be able to read more quickly for replays for endings), so I wish I had a bit more to do. The worldbuilding is done well, and I'm glad I played.

This is a complex, rich game written using a custom parser-choice hybrid system similar to Robin Johnson's Gruescript, in which you have traditional parser actions like NESW movement, taking, and dropping, but all through a choice interface.

You've been trapped in hell too long, and want to get out. Fortunately, you are capable of transferring your consciousness between others, able to possess all but the lowest beings (gross!) and the highest beings (that's what got you into trouble in the first place).

The map is laid out visually on the screen in a perfect grid, and has several affordances to allow you to travel around the map.

This is primarily a puzzle-fest. For those who like parser puzzles (including me!) the ones here are excellent, with timing puzzles, pattern recognition, and required leaps of intuition. I got through most of the game but needed a major hint for finding the last 4 or 5 squares of the map.

Some of the best parts of the game involve finding a way to defeat all 7 arch demons, each representing a different sin. This part was very clever.

There is some sexual content in the game but very non-explicit, more just hinted at or left to the imagination.

The only drawback I found was the sparseness of the text. Minimalism in games isn't a bad thing; there are many minimalist games I've played that can evoke great effect. And some areas of this game were very well-developed. But I feel like some more parts or people in the game could have used a little more shine, especially since I've seen lots of bits of excellent description from this author both in parts of this game and in past games; I may not even have noticed the sparseness in, for instance, the statue rooms, if I didn't know what he's capable of.

Still, I think the broad majority of parser fans will like this one, it's very clever and fun.

This is an interesting game; there is a large city that is literally part of hell, with tons of streets and cross streets.

Each area either just connects to others or has 2 buildings in it, with each building usually having a single person in it and a sparse description.

Wandering around, your goal is to leave the city. There is a vague air of menace, with hints of a threatening Candy Man and a creepy emptiness around and uncanny valley of NPC interaction.

You can progress pretty far by grabbing everything and combining them. I ran into some difficulty because I didn't realize that some of the random scenery in each room was useful. I've found in the past that it's generally pretty frustrating for players to have a large group of similar rooms and hiding important objects in a small number of them with no special indications; the worst case of this I've seen is the Horror of Rylvania, where there are baseboards in every room and in exactly one room you have to exam them to find a mousehole. This game is much more generous than that, but still it was hard to find the needles in the haystack.

Overall, the big city was cool. It had a similar feel to Winchester's Nightmare, which is also a giant hellscape city with sparse rooms. But this game has it's own character and style and is, I think, worth playing, especially using the source code, which accompanies it and which is organized very neatly.

This is a parser game written for the Petite Mort version of Ectocomp 2022, written in 4 hours or less.

The game is intentionally silly; a fairy begs you to help her against a bad fairy, but you have to eat a taco and taco medicine first and punch an undead gorilla.

It's short, with three main scenes. Punching is the main action, and always works, which reminds me of One Punch Man (although this would be multiple punch man). Examining yourself shows an image of a werewolf.

I teach creative writing to high schoolers, and I have a couple that likes to write stream-of-consciousness meme stories about Tyler Blevins and people in the school and random whacky fights, and this story reminds me of that style of writing.

It's quite descriptive, but unpolished. The interactivity surprisingly works well, since there's only one important verb. It was funny, but I wouldn't play again.

This is the the first Petite Mort game I've played this year (games writtern in 4 hours or less) and the fifth entry in Schultz's series of rhyming pair games. It has less of the glitter of the other games, but has some nice coherence.

You play as someone summoned to aid some ancient beings in a great battle. To help them, you need to gather allies. The map is small, basically a cross shape, with a central area and a room in each of the 4 cardinal directions.

The story here is much more coherent than most of the games in the wordplay series, and it's nice having concrete goals and an honestly cool backstory.

The rhyming pairs are a bit tricky, though, and due to speedy implementation there are a bunch of rhymes that didn't make it in, especially in the main room. I eventually turned to the walkthrough.

The game is not yet polished and because of that I had some trouble with interactivity, but was emotionally impactful and had some fun descriptions. I would play again after more polishing, it was pretty fun.