Reviews by MathBrush
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A richly described series of love letters set in the 1800s, with a mystery, March 12, 2024Whew! This game strained my poor Anglophone brain, as it is written in a fancy style of French and a cursive font. There is a very large amount of text as well, so I had to use all my forces to persevere!
But the story itself was interesting enough to carry on. It consists of letters written between two women, although I believe every letter is from the point of view of Isabella, a woman who became a doctor in Paris before being ejected and forced to return to the village of her home. Her lover, Olympia, is left behind. Isabella must face the disapproval and suspicions of the villagers, as well as Olympia's jealousies when the pale, anemic, and beautiful Alice moves in next door.
Gameplay is a bit curious; as at least one other person noted on the forums, it bears some resemblance to The First Draft of the Revolution, where you select different cycling variations before confirming and moving on.
However, there are very large chunks of text between choices (large for me, maybe not for native speaker). These large gaps, and my suspicion that the choices didn't change much of the game, led me to assign a mental score of 4.
However, I had early on, in a separate window, clicked through quickly to see how long the game would be, and received an ending with a clear choice (to (Spoiler - click to show)destroy your letters or not). I was surprised when, in my real playthrough, I never encountered that passage. I used saves and found 2 endings in my own playthrough, and they were quite interesting. So when it became clear that this was actually fairly complex, I upgraded to five stars.
Beta version of a very large potential fantasy gamebook-style game, March 10, 2024This story is based on classic gamebooks and fantasy tropes. You play as a dwarf in a village of dwarves, and can choose which class to play, which affects your stats. I chose to be a miner with high perception.
This game is already quite large, requiring a couple hours of play, and it's largely unfinished, with only two of three cities available (and, beyond that, there would likely be even more in a full game). There are a lot of randomized checks and things.
The art is, I believe, AI art, as zooming in on some scenes revealed oddities like three legs. However, it is unobtrusive and aesthetically worked overall (not discussing here the ethics of AI). Edit: Nightcafe is listed in credits for artwork.
The one currently finished city has a ton of different districts. There is a map, but instead of being used for navigation, it just serves as a visual cue while you actually select from a list of districts adjacent to your current one.
As you walk around, mini-stories fire off, providing you with new encounters like whether to chase down a missing guardsman or not.
Two things I would have preferred to be different: the map takes a while to load, making movement slow. I would have preferred the map to be optimized to load more quickly. Second, every time I entered the front gate a thief stole my purse and fighting it would just kill me, even if I loaded and tried again. It was really frustrating not having any chance to keep my money on me. And I found it difficult to find ways to heal; I thought maybe resting at my quarters could work, but couldn't find any. I eventually healed as the story progressed.
Overall, I thought the mushroom-brain thing was an interesting storyline, and the political aspects gave the game some complexity.
A powerful story of coming back for a funeral, and of post-Franco Spain, March 9, 2024This game is set in Spain but written in French. It's a powerful story; it made me glad that I still play interactive fiction, because I wouldn't have experienced this excellent story otherwise.
You play as a young man (I believe) who arrives at the funeral of his grandfather. However, you have decidedly unkind memories of your grandfather, who was part of Franco's army and committed numerous atrocities.
The story unfolds as you run into your family, deal with their awkward situations, talk to your partner, attend the funeral, or maybe not do a lot of these things; after all, there are several paths.
The only thing missing, I felt, could have been a little more personalization in the graphical presentation, or perhaps some more involved interactions. But the story is very well done, one of my favorite of the year so far.
Classic Cherrywell with a strong dose of spirits, March 7, 2024This game is the kind of thing Steph Cherrywell is known for: smooth humor, a large, easily navigable map, genre tropes pursued to their logical end, plenty of polish, and vivid characters.
I found this game's puzzles more logical than some other Cherrywell games, though I had trouble with one particular artist. Looking back, I ignored many, many, hints.
You play as a flapper (with all the 20's lingo) who's desperate for a drink. But it's all been soaked up by ghosts, so you have to hunt them down one by one!
I really enjoyed this game, and I think that it has a great chance of wining this year's comp.
An unfinished but ambitious visual novel, March 7, 2024This visual novel in French has you play as a character named Erika Wolfenstein. From what I gather (my French is imperfect), you have been sent by a spacefaring organization to visit a planet abandoned by the gods to retrieve a divine artifact. Along the way, you encounter vampires, etc.
I had about 2 or 3 choices in this excerpt from the unfinished game, and a lot of story. There were a few different backgrounds, and one main character sprite.
Overall, the unfinishedness made it difficult to know how to feel. A lot of plot options are set up but never finished (some even say "I will tell you later" but can't because the story ends). It's possible it could be finished into a great game, but what we have now is only the possibility without the proof. I would have liked more choices early on, even if they didn't matter, but I know that visual novel conventions differ from those of Twine or Choicescript. Alternatively, if it became a kinetic novel, it might be nice to explore some of the plot points more deeply instead of hopping from thing to thing quickly. In any case, the character seems interesting and the worldbuilding could turn out good.
A micro game containing six micro-micro games about loss, February 29, 2024This game was designed to fit into 90 kb, a tiny amount of space even for an interactive fiction game.
It has 6 small games with similar themes in it, each from different time periods or genres of interactive fiction.
I'll put the description of the games in spoilers, as I describe some things you might prefer to find on your own. I'll put the description of the final game in separate spoilers, as it's slightly different and more of a spoiler.
This is a complex game, and while I felt and experienced many things, I had the sense that I hadn't grasped everything, so this review may neglect some core themes or content.
(Spoiler - click to show)First: A choose your own adventure book, which goes a bit beyond pure branching by letting you perform actions through addition of numbers. You are exploring a mostly empty desert, and you must overcome your fears and think cleverly to find your true goal.
Second: An adventure in the style of Scott Adams, set in the same desert (or is it the same?). You have found an oasis city, but you can't get in. Themes include unachievable goals and building your own happiness.
Third: A classic-style text adventure. This one is quite complex, as you are able to enter and explore a large city. The tone is darker here, as you are either constrained to slog for the machine or to be punished for your individuality. The items of key and shovel, which appeared in earlier iterations, take on new meanings in this world, emblems of money/greed and (fruitless) labor.
Fourth: A hyperlink game (but without hyperlinks, requiring you to type instead). You have become powerful and have many people to help you, but none of you can withstand a storm that is withering and destroying your city. Here and in the last game or so, you begin to get glimpses of the real world person behind the games. This story and the last also mention a beautiful male lover.
Fifth: A Quality Based Narrative game, like Dendry or Storynexus. You have stats, and your available stats determine what scenes you view next and what actions you have available. The story is one of a wanderer, as if the ancient emperor in the Ozymandias poem was stuck in the landscape of his ruin. The real world bleeds in explicitly in the end.
Sixth (stronger spoilers):(Spoiler - click to show)This isn't a world, it's just deleting a bunch of files, but you can't since some have unresolved issues. You choose the writing block by block, using text from earlier in the game, almost like Aaron's earlier game 18 Cadence. In the end, you get the option to delete or save the poem you have created.
There is a strong sense of loss in the game, of futility and helplessness, but also of the desire to create something beautiful that doesn't remove the loss but provides comfort. It's almost a Quixotic point of view, which also ties in with the use of mirrors and illusions.
I found it a beautiful game. Like I said, I don't think I grasped it all. I may need to replay. But I also admired its technical work.
Reconstruct the memories of a shattered mind in a short Twine game, February 27, 2024This game is a short Twine game with glitch-like animations and moody background music. It is designed to be replayed.
In it, you play as a computer program whose job is to interface with damaged humans and sort through their memories, deciding what should be saved. As the title says, Whatever isn't saved will be lost.
So the game is reaching for a poignant picture of humanity, and in a way it can be a projection for you, the reader. If you could only keep a few memories, would you pick the most painful ones, to learn from? The best ones, to treasure? How would you decide?
The words in the text (mostly the pronouns) glitch and shuffle themselves as you try to understand what's going on.
In one playthrough, there were only five or so memories to work through the whole time. In other playthroughs, I unlocked more somehow. Maybe I also did the first time and just didn't notice?
Overall, this is strongly written. The size of it felt a little weird, almost that it would make more sense to be slighter or more substantial but that it was caught in an awkward spot between the two. But the feelings of melancholy and nostalgia are powerful.
A sci-fi world hopping puzzle game, February 24, 2024This is a compact sci-fi game where you hop between dimensions in order to keep all universes from being destroyed.
The gameplay is classic Inform 7 style: wander a mostly empty building and pick up different objects on the way, unlock a safe, operate a machine, meet an NPC or two, etc.
The story is that you have been newly hired at a tech company when an explosion goes off. Going in to investigate, you soon learn that the company has quite a bit of unusual history...
The game makes references to the (Spoiler - click to show)Mandela effect, with famous examples like the (Spoiler - click to show)Berenstein vs Berenstain bears.
It's fairly polished, even including images and sound. There are occasional punctuation errors, like quotes being left off at the end of dialogue.
The overall gameplay is pretty satisfying. A few puzzles I thought were underclued, especially (Spoiler - click to show)opening the research door. That one I had to string dump the game for, discovering I needed to (Spoiler - click to show)use the magnet to open it.
The game has multiple levels of ending success. There are several ways you can lock yourself out of victory, but those are well-clued. Getting a perfect ending is a little underclued, though, and may require a few attempts.
Overall, I'd recommend this game to fans of classic-style parser puzzlers or to fans of time travel games.
A linear tale of memory wiping , January 27, 2024This is a visual novel with no choices that deals with a race of beings called Harvesters that take away people's memories.
You play as one such harvester, and you meet a young redheaded single mother who has given up her child for adoption and wants you to wipe her memories.
You end up meeting another person who is entangled in her story, and you learn his past.
That art and music worked well. The writing was interesting, but seemed off, not following the conventions of plot and morality that I'm used to. I think I started thinking how very odd it was when someone said "You didn't just banish me to the friend zone or I wouldn't have sued you". There isn't any suing in the game; it might be a translation issue but I'm not sure it makes sense in any language.
Similarly, the endgame is that (Spoiler - click to show)You wipe the memories of her and her lover and then tell her you'll become her lover, which is kind of weird ethically.
I don't think this particular game is AI generated but these issues are similar to ones I've had with AI stories like Character AI (which my son plays), where the overall thing looks good but if you poke at it a lot of stuff just doesn't make sense. My guess is that it just needs some more time and attention, as it was written for Ludum Dare which doesn't give the author much time, I think.
A brief murder mystery with computer-generated voice acting, January 27, 2024I played this game as part of the short games showcase.
This game is a murder mystery, but a condensed one. It has 4 locations, each with their own person of interest (although one is mobile).
Each one lets you ask a long list of questions. You can then gather from them what information you need. Upon leaving the manor, you can guess who the murderer is.
There isn't too much replay value, as the true murderer is pointed out to you upon the first guess. There is voice acting in a way I haven't seen much in IF; I think it uses various text-to-speech voices, including a stentorian butler voice.
Overall, the system feels smooth. I do think that a more drawn out game, with some choices you must carefully consider (like things you can say that cut off other options) might increase the overall value if a longer mystery were to be made.
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