Reviews by MathBrush

This game is a fine game, one of the most complex and deep I've seen during Ectocomp. I may be making this up but I swear I heard the author say she was planning on entering this in IFcomp but decided to enter it into Ectocomp to allow for more polish time. This might not be true, but it would make sense, as this game has the kind of structure and polish that high-ranking IFComp parser games tend to have.

The idea is that you play as multiple player characters, each with their own chapter, but sharing a large map: a duke's castle, where the young duchess, only 15 years old, is struggling to please her older lord, and his anger has found its expression in unpleasant ways. The various chapters provide a solid narrative arc, from introduction to rising action to climax and denouement.

The story is based off a poem (whose name I'll omit, as the authors has), and has the feel of a richly researched game. Period-appropriate clothing, art, jewelry, architecture, horticulture, etc. are described in detail.

The game has a high ratio of words-to-action; new scenes will often have page-long introductions, and single actions will often set off large chunks of story. This is often paired with a short game, but this game is quite large, with a big map and many things to see and do. Instead, the game strikes balance by providing significant guidance for most events, a style that is more of a guided tour than a puzzlebox. (I've adopted similar a similar playstyle in some of my own games, including a Sherlock Holmes adaptation; it fits adaptations well, as it keeps players on the main narrative path).

This is an earthy game in a grim world, though happiness exists for some. Players encounter domestic abuse, rape, sexual abuse, degradation, intimidation, underage marriage, and psychological manipulation. Most characters are on the bottom tiers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, concerned about physical safety, food, and sexual desires, while a couple reach for love or even esteem, but none are situated well enough to reach for self-actualization.

The map is a large castle, hard to navigate at first but slowly becoming more familiar. By the end I could make my way well-enough, but I found out after finishing that there is a map available for download. I don't feel it was completely necessary, as the oppressively large castle and getting lost adds to the sense of fear or awe in the game. And getting lost is the main source of in-game hints, outside of talking to people.

Speaking of conversation, it's a topic-based system that works pretty well, especially since you're primed on how to speak early on. I think adding 'A' as a synonym for 'T' would be useful, because ASK/TELL is a fairly common IF trope and it's usual to implement both (just now, going back in the game, I see that T stands for TALK [Noun], not TELL [noun], which makes sense. It might be worth making A/ASK/TELL synonyms for TALK/T).

It's interesting to see the connections between this game and the authors' other games. The use of poetry, either author-written or as inspiration for the whole game is a strong pattern (at least 6 other poems have inspired games by this author, including 4 in a single game). The darker historical setting is also common in these games, although the exact time period varies. This game is unusual in that there are less puzzles and more roleplaying as a renaissance character.

Overall, a strong game and one that I think everyone should check out.

This game is the first released by fos1, a long-term supporter of IF through helping to organize ParserComp and other IF writing competitions and moderating IFDB.

It starts off with a gentle, fun recreate-real-life experience; there is a house that seems modeled off a real-life house, and you're asked by your wife to carve a pumpkin with your son Greg. The house contains things where you'd expect them (in drawers and cupboards), but it thankfully avoids a lot of clutter by not implementing a ton of red-herrings.

After working on your tasks, though, things change drastically and you find yourself in the Pumpkin World (as the description says, Be careful in the dark side of Pumpkin World!). Pumpkin World has more puzzles and some interesting characters.

Overall, I ended up making my way back. I had to use the walkthrough for the final command.

I think this is a promising first start. Some things I think could be improved, given more time. Probably the biggest thing I would do is add some flavor to parser errors and default responses, since that's what people see the most when playing. I find it helpful when writing games to type RESPONSES ALL during a game; it gives you a list of every default response in the game. You can then rewrite them yourself (like, The standard report waiting rule response (A) is "Okay, Dr. Law. I'll wait."), which I think is a neat effect.

Because of that, I think the game could be more polished; while the descriptions are minimalistic, they are heartfelt and positive; the puzzles were fairly well-clued; the overall emotion was cheerful; and I think my one playthrough was enough.

This Inform games looks very polished and refined, unusual during Ectocomp, which often features quickly-written games.

Also unusually for Inform, most of the machinery of parser games is omitted in favor of essentially binary choices.

You are Bone Villa (a riff on Bob Villa), working with the Property Boo-thers (a riff on the Property Brothers), and it's your job to select the perfect haunted house. You walk through ten rooms, in each of which the two brothers, Hoary and Terry, present competing alternatives to the design. At the end, your choices are summed up as one of 33 different possibilities.

The first playthrough was pretty fun, seeing the different possibilities and coming up with strategies in my mind. It was longer than I thought, since 5 rooms with 2 binary choices each would have been enough for 32 possibilities, with the 33rd being special. So it wasn't just a binary tree, which was interesting. It said I should try to find more possibilities at the end, so I replayed.

Replaying shortens some descriptions but is the same material, same choices. Eventually the game can give you hints, but it wasn't until I had played several times that I realized there was an 'ideal' house. That was confusing to me, because both descriptions just seem contrasting styles; at first it seems like they're going for an 'over-the-top vs restrained' thing in the choices but that turned out not to be the case. I was puzzled on how you could have a best house when there was little chance to distinguish between them.

Eventually, you can summon help, which helps you find out that (moderate spoilers) (Spoiler - click to show)different choices correspond to different 'colors'. But even with that hint I was a bit bewildered.

I think 10 choices is a lot for a game that is intended to be replayed quickly and has no other new content between rounds besides finding out your score and placement. I think more clues as to the system could have helped as well.

I played about 5-6 times through, then decompiled to see what a perfect game would be like. I saw in there that this game is actually (Spoiler - click to show)based on an earlier 10-choice game by the author, reskinned to be haunted.

Overall, I think experimentation like this is what drives IF forward, but as an overall game experience I felt an imbalance between the rewards for success and the effort required to achieve it.

This game has really high production values. It's even got a custom loading icon! There are nice custom-styled fonts and colors and background images, and the text is rich and subtle. It includes cyrillic letters in cursive (I think) which say 'Welcome, sister' or something like that.

The story is about Rusalkas, water spirits that are created when someone betrays a woman and she drowns afterwards. There is a prelude, telling the story of a rusalka, and then a longer story with more choices about a young girl and the boy in the village she broke up with.

I was very impressed with much of this game, but I had some trouble, too. The text is complex, and I had difficulty following along between figuring out what's implied, jumping between multiple narratives without clear indications, and following the allusive language. And, for all the setup, the game feels incomplete; we only see the story of one rusalka, when the game seems set up to tell more.

In any case, this game could serve as good inspiration for people wanting to see how they could style Twine, it looks great, similar to Grim Baccaris's work.

This game has you play as a well-prepared Louisiana resident hunkering down during a category 5 hurricane. Fortunately, you have an attic stocked with tons of equipment. Unfortunately, all sorts of supernatural creatures are messing around with you.

This game has nice presentation with Chapbook and music/sound effects. The color and font choices worked well for me. It's pretty brief, but has some nice non-linearity and several endings.

The thing I liked best about the game was the specific local flavor. Several of the monsters are referred to with French names or have characteristics unique to the area.

The only drawbacks to me were that each path was fairly short and a lot of the items didn't really do much that I could see.

Andrew Schultz has made many wordplay and chess games which are a lot of fun. There is a series of games now (I think the first was Very Vile Fairy File), where you have to find rhyming pairs of words. This game is the 4th in the series, which is called the "Prime Pro-Rhyme Row".

For me, the quality of these wordplay games specifically (not all games) depends on a couple of things.
1. Is it fair?
2. Is it challenging?
3. Is it coherent?

My favorites in this category are probably Shuffling Around and Threediopolis. In this series of rhyming words, I like Low-Key Learny Jokey Journey in the current IFComp. They do a good job of tying everything together and offering several paths forward.

This one does #2 well but feels a bit weaker with #s 1 and 3. There are less options for progress, both in terms of the map and in terms of words. At least one required solution used a word I hadn't heard marked as 'archaic' by online dictionaries, and a few combos used a feature the game had actively hinted against previously (specifically (Spoiler - click to show) 1-word answers, where the game says that usually those won't be needed).

There are things to help you, like the machine that says if your rhymes are close, and the Jumping Jerk, which tells you the answer once you've tried enough. I used it 5 times in this game. And, of course, there is always the walkthrough.

The other thing I think I miss from the other games is a bigger tying-together of the story.

Overall, I enjoyed this game, but I would only recommend it to people who liked the other rhyming pair games and want to get more of that experience.

This is a prototype Twine game entered in the Ectocomp 2022 Grand Guignol competition. It is kinetic fiction, which means it currently has almost no choices besides going to the next page, where the main choice is pacing. The current stated plan is to expand it to include more choices in the future.

You play as an ornithologist who is also an alien assigned as the only alien in the area of earth you're in. Everyone stares at you, because you're literally from Pluto. You've managed to get some good work done and make friends, but your existence makes others uncomfortable and you just can't fit in with human traditions.

Especially gender, which your planet doesn't have a conception of. Most of the game consists of dealing with good and bad reactions to your conception of gender and self.

I said the game contains almost no choices; one that I appreciated a lot is the ability to skip the sex scene. I honestly wished this became a standard in choice games, as I was able to enjoy the genuinely sweet romantic buildup while avoiding content I'm not comfortable with.

I had a strong emotional reaction to this game for a couple of reasons. [Apologies for the long, unrelated personal story]. One is that I almost didn't play it because I was having stressful flashbacks. I used to be a math professor, but I always struggled. I had done all of my undergraduate and graduate work in the same math department where I had a lot of friends among the professors and staff. I had done well, and people had always supported me.

But once I left to be a 'real' professor, everything changed. My research faltered, and I encountered a lot of pushback from professors in my very narrow field. I was told that I had misunderstood major parts of the research topic or left out key parts of theorems, that my research didn't really have any applications, and the most hurtful, that my writing was just bad and/or sloppy. I started having papers get multiple rejections, and since that's the main 'currency' in the math world, I lost my chance at getting a permanent job, and ended up in limbo for a few years. And my refuge, the school I graduated from and where I liked everyone, had implied they would hire me when I came back, but ended up going with other people, only hiring me for a temp job, out of pity, I thought.

I eventually left academia (which is really looked down on in the field, like complete failure), and I've suppressed those thoughts. But I started fooling around with an old research problem today for fun, and I felt so many bitter, jealous, sad, and stressed thoughts remembering those times.

So I almost cried reading the story of Beckj, because even though the setting and reasons were so different, I recognized the feeling of everyone around you just feeling judgmental or looking down on you, and feeling like everyone just wishes you would be different than you are (I remember my postdoc advisor telling me I should never have become a father, because I took so much time off to be with my disabled ex-wife and newborn.). This story is a very specific story, but I think the author has done a great job of tapping into universal experience.

It also resonated with me because of the experiences I've seen with my trans friends, both Bez emself and also the numerous trans people I've met locally. I've seen how hurt they feel when people misgender them or feel uncomfortable using their chosen name (which is odd, as so many other people have nicknames completely unlike their birth names and no one cares), and the positive scenes between the MC and the love interest seemed completely authentic.

I do think adding the extra choices in could enhance the game, so I'm glad that's in the works.

This was a fun game to finish on while playing through Ectocomp games.

You are at a party that is winding down when your friend Mery suggests using Tarot cards to predict your future.

In the game, she deals 5 different piles, each of which contains 2 cards. When she gives you a brief interpretation, you are also allowed to pick one of the two, or to quit playing and walk away.

There are a lot of endings, including gruesome deaths, but there's at least one cute and positive ending about being creatively inspired.

There's some content warnings for sex, drugs, etc. but I only really saw deaths and the Tarot cards have some nudity. This game has a lot of endings for a game made in 4 hours, which is nice!

I liked this short spanish Ectocomp game entered in the '4 hours or less' part of the competition; it's brief, but longer than you'd think for a game made in 4 hours. It is in visual novel style, with some white-on-black lineart and relatively few, but impactful, choices.

In my playthrough, I had 5 days to live after I crash-landed on a planet, since oxygen was running out. The main theme was discovering nature on the planet, both good and bad, and deciding to interact with it positively or negatively.

I never felt super invested in the stakes, but I thought the game was charming and glad I played it, and since it doesn't take long I think people should check it out.

This game was complex and difficult to understand at first. It's a binksi game, similar to bitsy (the game system with minimal sprites, color schemes and animations), but mixed with Ink, the scripting language.

In this Spanish Ectocomp game, you wind up driving to a small village that still has people using donkeys and children play strange games with silhouettes and with a fountain in the town.

The game has several shifts in perspective that I didn't fully understand, which I can mostly attribute to my own poor understanding but also seems to be a mechanic designed to mirror the protagonist's own troubled mental state.

I definitely found the imagery in the game disturbing and frightening, but only from a psychological viewpoint; there is little to no gore and no jumpscares or anything. I think it is effective at being frightening. Like the author says in the description, it can be easy to miss things; I missed a lot of things on the first try and had to replay. Fun, short, and easy to play.