Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

In this Choicescript game (which I played for free by watching ads), you play as Vivien, a recently-out queer woman who has fallen in love with a witch.

And, unfortunately, died.

Fortunately, your witchfriend has a solution for that. But it causes a lot of problems.

This game feels like an inentional metaphor for loss of both people and relationships, and for slow grief.

Many of the choices are binary, but there are some more involved options and even a set of riddles which I did not quite solve on my first playthrough.

There are some endings that require clicking the same screen 50 times, but I found a more normal one. I thought that the writing had personality and I was engaged with the story. At times I felt lost due to the non-linear narration.

At 4900 words, this is the shortest game you can purchase from Choice of Games, and is listed under its Hosted Games label.

It’s a gauntlet-style game with two chapters and no save. At any point, most options will kill you and make you restart the game. I replayed around six to seven times.

You wake up next to a dead body in your bed and need to figure out what happened. I was able to reach an ending where I was alive and powerful but never really discovered the truth.

The writing is terse and characters, plot and themes are underdeveloped. However, it’s not horrible, and can be played for free after an ad. It’s managed to get a 3.9/5 rating on the app (around 20th from the bottom) and hundreds of ratings.

This is the third-least rated game on the Hosted Games app. While some games have tens of thousands of ratings, this one has had 9 ratings in 5 years.

It’s a puzzle game. There are six or seven chapters, and each chapter has a “correct” path and multiple dying paths. Making it through one chapter means that you don’t have to replay it if you die.

The game is surreal, with a forest full of shadows and ghosts and demons.

The writing had some good descriptions but seemed more intent on atmosphere than communicating helpful descriptions. We are constantly becoming disoriented and confused, the trees are always full of shadows, there are strange sounds and growls; all good elements, but it can become kind of repetitive. There are also a lot of typos. I myself have a lot of typos in my own writing, but I try to use spellcheck and get friends to read the game to look for mistakes, and I think that would be helpful here.

It eventually ties into some (Spoiler - click to show)Mayan mythology, which was an interesting twist.

The puzzles include mazes, repeating actions, finding keys, etc. It is difficult to predict the effects of your actions. The main verb in most choices is “Percept”, which I looked up and is a noun (different than precept), but in the game it seems to be used like “perceive”.

Overall, it has a lot of rough edges, but I didn’t regret my playtime and I feel like the author must have learned a lot by writing it.

This is a well-written and illustrated game with a post-apocalyptic setting. In it, the world has been afflicted with (very early spoiler) (Spoiler - click to show)a disease that kills those who sleep. You meet your work another survivor, along with your two children.

The game then cycles through a few days. You can talk to the others , try to keep yourself awake, or try to keep others awake.

I like the idea a lot. The controls were a little strange. I had trouble noticing when time had passed so would do things like “keep myself awake” then “do nothing” and ended up dying because of it. So I feel like it could communicate its system a little better. But I definitely like the style and would play more by this author.

This is a short game that has a special gimmick. Revealing the gimmick removes most of the enjoyment of the game. I recommend playing it; just now I played it twice in 10 minutes so it's not too much time.

Story-wise, you are a contract killer who has performed an assassination, and your goal is to get home. You meet three different people or groups of people on the way, with some choices on how to deal with them.

(Spoiler - click to show)This game is played in reverse. Each action is kind of localized in time, and then you go to an earlier time in the day. The way this is represented is that each spot has two ghostly figures, and by recreating the ghostly figures, you cause them to disappear. In reality, what you did was make them happen, but since time is going backwards, it looks like you make them unhappen.

I always thought there was a unique path in this game, but you can pick between multiple futures at each location.

The gimmick here really is impressive. I'd love to see someone else try it. Long gone are the days where people could reasonably assume to have a unique idea for every parser game, so it would be fun to see this concept polished up a bit.

This is one of three brief games written a long time ago but now translated and updated by a team of authors for Parsercomp 2025.

The game design and text are simple, reflective of an era where conserving disk space was important. Most rooms have at most one interactable object, although some of these can be quite complex (like a rope).

You arrive at a deserted town, carrying nothing but a revolver and a rifle. The town is a scene of great destruction, with burnt buildings and corpses all over. Due to the sparsity of the text, this is presented in a cool, standoffish way, although the main character treats the dead with great dignity.

With each location only having an item or two and about 20 rooms and perhaps 5 major puzzles, this is easily completed and fairly satisfying for its length. I did get stuck because I failed to note an important line in the middle of a room's description.

This game was part of Ryan Veeder's early explorations with unusual uses of Inform, which later branched out into things like twine/parser hybrids, collections of parser games that communicate with each other, dramatic graphical displays, etc.

The main interesting feature here is that the game saves automatically online and reloads your progress, and that the game differs depending on the day you play it. Two characters come and go based on the day of the week, and several actions require multiple days to complete.

Because of this, I frequently started the game before stopping due to forgetting to play again and intimidation. But I finally finished it!

The main idea of the game is that you're at a large pond, which represents most of the map. The pond itself is around 16 (Inform) rooms of water, and circling around it is a long series of rooms forming a circle. You get a fishing rod and a jacket, and the game lets you customize yourself quite a bit, down to a fear of bugs.

You are not given any defined goal. You are not even really able to fish. But as you explore, you begin to find both badges and a large variety of birds. In going out of your way to find badges or birds, you'll also discover a lot about the lives of the people who lived at and/or visited the pond.

The scope of the game is quite large. Even without the timed aspect, it took me around 10-11 hours to play and comment on the game in a forum thread, and so if only half of that was playing, it'd still be around 5 hours, and if only a third was playing, it'd still be 3-4 hours. This is substantial content.

The storytelling is mostly environmental storytelling. Many events are only alluded to. Careful notekeeping can be very helpful.

Overall, I genuinely enjoyed finishing this game off. It took me 6 years to get around to it (and I've had it open in a browser tab for one of those years), but it was worth it.

This game was originally made as a tabletop RPG and then converted into Twine years later.

It features a pretty great storyline about seven women who conceived children from a devil (or so rumours go), one of which is you. You have demonic power like using spectres and giving your blood to spirits for more power. Your goal is to find out the truth behind your birth and to determine your future.

The game is very complex, with multiple areas, each with their own encounters, and each encounter being a large puzzle.

There is art (handdrawn and then enhanced by AI, a process that makes it more coherent than pure AI), which helps the game quite a bit.

The big draw here, outside of the art and story, is the combat. And this is also why I'm giving a lower score than the other reviewers (but would be happy to revise upward if the author feels it's unfair).

You see, the way combat works is that you and your opponent(s) alternate turns. You have 2 actions (at first) and your opponent has a varying number of actions.

One action can be used to summon a spirit or spectre to help you. Doing so costs blood. Each spirit starts with one ability that costs a few 'control points' and one that costs all control points. It's helpful to save the 'all control' points one for last.

You can also spend you action using an item or attacking with a relic (a weapon).

The issue is that using your abilities gives yourself damage, and your enemy gives damage. That means you lose health very quickly. You have two rations in your inventory that can heal you, and occasionally you can rest, but essentially there is no way to just go out there and grind combat to level up. In 3 different attempted playthroughs on three different difficulties (completed only on easy) I wasn't able to level up myself (apparently there are classes?), barely levelled up one relic by paying for it, and never reached the level 2 abilities of the spirits. Every early enemy is very hard, each beatable alone but not 2 or 3 in a row.

Reading other reviews, it seems like everyone is in the same situation. Rovarsson beat it on hard with 5 fights by save scumming but mentions never having health. The other reviews on here also mention that as well.

Even on the easiest mode, there isn't really a way to heal, just skip fights.

Now, I'm sure there is some reasonable way to play through and hit up a lot of encounters and level up items. The author mentions some combos of attacks; there are spectres with abilities like 'boost next attack' and 'do triple damage' which could theoretically one-shot people. But all of that takes damage to summon the spirits.

I think this would work better as a TTRPG, as intended, because there the DM or player can 'fudge' things if it gets too intense. But for right now, as a computer game, I just don't see any way to play through and level up yourself or abilities. If the author provided a sample walkthrough for the first two chapters, like suggestions on who to fight first or how to get stronger, that would be interesting and helpful.

Garry Francis has a good system for taking a concept ('mystery in a high school', 'searching for the holy grail', 'fairy tails') and turning it into a tersely-worded parser game on a grid-like map with traditional fetch-quest and lock-and-key puzzles. His games are consistently well-coded and are generally well-received.

This game is one of the larger of his games, and it is very open-ended. I and a few others ended up exploring large portions of the map before discovering key items we needed very early on. The game recommends drawing a map, and so do I. It's also useful to look under things.

The map takes us across plains and hills, ponds and cabins, cemeteries and crypts. I once made a game with a horror area and, to instill that horror in players, used the scariest thing I could think of: diagonal directions. Here, the author has made the same decision, with numerous diagonal directions possible.

Once I found the necessary items (I found it useful to use HINT in multiple locations; it is location dependent, which I didn't realize), I found the finale gruesome, but satisfying. I do wish in some ways that the game were either more terse or less so; at times there are descriptions of reaction and emotion, and at others none, giving an odd disparity.

Whether due to Puny Inform or the author's own choices, the parser can be petulant, a feature I've seen a few times in this author's punyinform games. By mimicking an old school parser's features when new school features are available, it can give the feel of instructing a toddler who is not very motivated:

"Johnny, can you go east?"

"But there's a door in the way!"

"Johnny. It's okay. Open the door, and then go east."

or:

"Johnny, can you pick up that rock?"

"But my hands are full! Wait, let me see." He takes off his backpack and rummages around with the items in my hand. "Can this grapefruit fit in the backpack? No. Can my dinosaur toy fit in the backpack? No."

You are waiting patiently.

"Can my coin fit in the back pack? Yes!" He puts the backpack back on and struggles to his feet. Then he bends down to pick up the rock. "I did it! I picked up the rock."

or:

"Johnny, can you look up 'abracadabra'?"

Johnny looks at you very seriously, and says, "You have to say, 'can you look up 'abracadabra' IN something."

Me, looking at the only book in the room:"...can you look up abracadabra in that book right there?"

"Okay!"

or, finally:

"Johnny, can you write 'hello' on the paper?"

"I don't have anything to write with!"

"Oh, Johnny, where is your quill? Look for your quill."

"Here it is!"

"Where?"

"In my backpack!"

Me, increasingly frustrated: 'Can you take it out of your backpack, Johnny? I was hoping you would do that yourself."

"But my hands are full! Wait, I have an idea." He takes off his backpack and sets it on the ground. "Will this grapefruit fit in the backpack? No. Will this plushy fit in the backpack? No." Johnny looks up at you with very serious eyes. "Sorry, I can't pick up the quill. My hands are full."

Besides that, I thoroughly enjoyed the game, and expect that most people that play parser games on a regular basis will do so as well.

I sought out this game specifically by trying to find the worst-selling recent games published by Choice of Games. I'm working on making one right now, and I've had a really bad-selling one in the past, so I wanted to see what I could learn from playing it.

I used number of ratings as a metric for 'worst-selling'. On the Choice of Games app, it has the third-least ratings out of the 170 or so games listed.


Having played the whole thing, I can say that the storyline and setting are pretty solid, and the characters are great. But I have some theories as to why it may have struggled.

First of all, the game is called 'Escape From Death'. The cover art for the game is a cool-looking grim reaper. The first paragraph of the description is "Steal Death's power and break free of his corrupt realm! Hide your heartbeat from the dead as you harness soul magic, navigate political intrigue, determine the fate of the Afterlife—and perhaps even claim its throne yourself.".

I didn't read the full description before playing. So I imagined some kind of gritty urban fantasy game, maybe like Wayhaven, where you play cat and mouse with the grim reaper.

The truth is very different. This game actually has very little to do with death and the afterlife. With just minor changes to the text, this is a (good) standard 'strange lands' fantasy/western Isekai, with more in common with Alice in Wonderland, The Phantom Toolbooth, or Narnia than with any horror or thriller stories.


The grim reaper is actually a chill guy named Aaron that is part of a government and is appointed by a council. The position of Death is basically being President of the Afterlife. Souls that die come down and are transformed into Elite (who look human and treat memories from life as drugs) and Penitent (who are transformed into animals. There is unrest between the lower classes and the higher classes. The majority of the game is exploring the political factions and wheeling and dealing between them, exposing their corruption or helping their cause. There is very little mention of the living or the human world. Occasionally you get flashbacks to your life above, but they feel very disconnected from the game itself, and having been alive once in the above world doesn't come up. People even die down here, turning into vaguely sentient water or sand (something like that).

The author had been constructing this setting for a long time, and it shows in the game. The four side characters seem like old friends to the author, with very well-mapped-out personalities and interactions. At times, though, it would have been hard for me to know who counts as a main character without the stats screen.

Speaking of which, I think that's where the main difficulty with the game lies. I once wrote an essay after playing over a hundred Choice of Games games about patterns in good and bad ones, and I saw that something I call 'stat disease' is very common in lower-placing games. When I started playing this game and looked at the stat screen after 1 chapter, I instantly recognized 'stat disease'. Tons of sliders, almost all of which had barely budged since we started. All of my stats were in the mid-50s. Choices didn't clearly label which stat was involved and if it was being increased or tested. Some choices had overlap, etc.

So, for me, this game had strong characters and a cool setting, but it wasn't what I had imagined going in, and had trouble with the stats. I still had a good time, and the game had no bugs I could see, so I'm still giving it a high score. I wonder if the game I worked on will end up in a similar spot to this one, so I look at this not to criticize it, but to hopefully learn from its fate. This has the bones of a high-selling game. I just need to figure out what kept it from that destiny.