Reviews by MathBrush

I was looking through games in my wishlist with no ratings and this popped up.

This twine game from 2021 has two available routes. In one, you play as a male spy, and in the other as a female spy, both in nearby interrogation rooms.

In both paths, you can look around the cell or pick the lock and try to escape.

The game uses a lot of well-chosen illustrations, some from pixabay and others that look hand-made.

The game feels slightly unfinished; I found some exposed code errors and entered debug mode on accident at one or two points. And sometimes I had conflicting text on the screen that felt like I was seeing two paths at once. So I feel like if the author wanted to ever expand on the game or polish it a bit more, it could be more solid, but I had fun.

This was a salient game for the current job environment. It presents a fake version of an AI-run personality test (no real AI is used) where you are presented with different images and scenarios and your answer determine your employability.

This is a real thing that's been going on; I've seen a lot of screenshots of job applicants that are taking tests featuring a 3d cartoon guy or girl in various scenarios with inane questions like 'do you relate to this picture' or something.

I failed the test, which is reasonable as I doubled down on being willing to sacrifice the CEO's life to save the plebeians, even though I otherwise had expressed undying loyalty to the burger empire.

Pretty funny. The choices always felt fresh but the results turned a little stale by the time I finished this burger. Still, I can't deny it was a good meal.

This is a downloadable Unity game. In it, you stand before a firing squad, about to be killed during (I believe) the Mexican Revolution due to being on the opposite side from the soldiers.

There are two components of the game. One is a text component, where you move on to the next message with a right arrow, and options appear in a menu of 3 at a time. The other is 'opening your eyes', revealing a 3d-generated world you can view from a single fixed point, looking at the firing squad, the whole world in stark white lines on black.

You are to be executed, but are given a 10 minute reprieve to consider your last words. Thoughts fly through your mind, and you can pick which ones to remember. At the end, you can choose 3 to say (although my top choice didn't work, for some reason).

The frenzied re-evaluation of an entire life was relatable, and the writing had pathos. The ending was chilling.

This game does use timed text at the start and a timer for the middle portion. Unfortunately, I mostly chose to get into IF because of the ease of pausing and doing other things. My childcare duties called me away from the computer multiple times, so I came back to see the execution had started without knowing if I could have seen more interesting text in the middle and no rewind. What I did see was worthwhile, though. This game led me to look up more about the revolution on Wikipedia.

This game is a brief, mostly-linear story (with occasional parallel branches) about being Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories and having your mind shunted into different animals, each of which gets attacked in turn.

I love Sherlock Holmes stories, and have often considered Arthur Conan Doyle's writing as the most gripping and interesting to me (but only in Sherlock Holmes; his other stories aren't as interesting to me). Unfortunately, this has almost none of the interesting elements of Sherlock Holmes stories. Dr Watson is here a coroner, for some reason, and does the investigating himself. He discovers the criminal immediately (who for some reason has left the murder weapon in plain view while inviting a doctor to investigate the death and is shocked to get called out). The murderer also has no problem believing animals have sentience or malice and violently murders them and attacks children while a detective is in the house. Sherlock himself doesn't do any kind of fancy deducing of any kind. This is exactly the kind of story AI tends to generate; this story itself might not be AI, but if it is human-made, it doesn't rise above the level of what AI is capable of.

Each page has multiple ai-illustrated images, which, like the story, serve to show exactly what is described without anything greater. The text says parrot, so we see a parrot. The text says cat, so we see a cat. There isn't any deeper theme or connection or symbolism, and the details of the pictures have no relevance to the story text.

This game is a parser game where you end up parked at the end of a lonely road, ready to check into a room. Unfortunately, the airbnb (I think?) host you are working with has sent you poorly-translated instructions. You have to find your way in.

I found two endings, but peeking at the walkthrough shows there are some more including at least one area with a bar that I didn't visit.

I found the house area to be descriptive, with the squeaking gate and the approaching thunderstorm. Like real life, I was mildly panicked about what to do with my draining phone battery.

I liked the puzzles involved. I did have some difficulty fighting with the parser in one part. Specifically, after (Spoiler - click to show)putting the dial on the lockbox, X DIAL and TURN DIAL and TURN DIAL TO 1 didn't work but TURN DIAL TO 123 got me to the menu.

The author states that the text was grammar-corrected with chatgpt. It did feel like fluent English. While I oppose most uses of AI in games, it's mostly for aesthetic rather than ideological purposes; most AI text is boring, all AI stories I've read have incoherent plot, most AI images don't match the story and bloat file sizes, and, for one ideological purpose, if we use AI we can't grow as writers. But the text here is written by the author, just spruced up, and I like the scenario he came up with. Grammar is a fairly mechanical thing, so I don't mind its mechanical improvement here.

Even if you don't use walkthroughs, I recommend checking out the walkthrough once you're done to see the surreal and vibrant art.

This author has been making solid parser games for decades now. This game is an adaptation of a Kafka work, one I had not read before, and is one of the more successful prose adaptations I've seen. Adaptations are very hard to get right in a parser game, since you have to match your text to the original author's and allowing things 'out of sequence' requires inventing new storylines or tightly curtailing the player's freedom. This game takes the latter approach but it makes sense in-world, as you are a stranger and not permitted to enter wherever you like or do whatever you want. And the text matches altogether very well, I think.

I like much of Kafka's work, although on a recent vacation I stayed in an airbnb paid for by my school that had a huge library. I found a book by Kafka which was exciting, but all I read was a very long and kind of dull story written from the perspective of a dog. I got the impression that Kafka really, really enjoys thinking from a dog's perspective.

Anyway, this game has you play the role of a stranger entering a village, trying to find a place to stay. There follows a series of innocuous happenings that seem normal but which leave you feeling embarrassed or unwelcome. Parts of it are really evocative, like the couple you never see that sit in the dark at a table in dim light, barely talking, lit glinting off something on the man's chest.

The game is short and simple, but effective. This was a nice treat to play as I near the end of the games of the 2025 comp.

This is a meaningful game written about a Jewish person escaping persecution from the Eastern Europe/Russian part of the world (in the early 1900s, I think, maybe late 1800s).

Most of the game is very bare-bones. I'm not sure what system it is; it might just be custom javascript. You select a number and then push SUBMIT to move on.

Gameplay is almost entirely buying items at a low price, going to a nearby city, and selling them at a high price. Each city only has a few its next to, so you can either map it out as a graph, or (what I did) just memorize the cities with the worst prices and don't pick them. Near the end I got comfortable enough to travel 3 or 4 cities at a time to get a good price.

Behind its dour aesthetic, the game hides emotional moments written in terse text. Accidentally going beyond the 'pale' was terrifying, and my companion Ephraim didn't make it in the end.

The starkness of the game contributes to its overall feeling, emphasizing the numbness you could feel in that scenario. On the other hand, it feels at times like it fights against the player. Having just a map connecting the stations might be nice, or more indication of the story to come. I guess it all depends on what effects the author is most interested in having on the audience.

This is a surreal game set in the desert where you examine eight different objects and make various choices concerning them, which are then sealed in. At times the game mentions connections between two items; for me they were the last two I had chosen each time, but I don't know if that changes on different playthroughs.

It has lovely looking sand art that looked really hard to make but visually appealing.

When I say surreal I mean very surreal, like between The Wasteland and Finnegan's Wake surreal. Here's an excerpt:

What horizons can we reach with twining? The process is strict but has an end. She comes up with a new weave for her tale. It goes like this: sand. The weaving proceeds from absence to absence. This happens every Thursday. A kiosk is so very far from her. Oh, didn’t you know, she says? It is a strange affair.

It's writing that willfully impedes understanding for effect, with just enough connections between sentences to trick your brain into thinking it knows what's going on but an overall effect of something unfamiliar. It's like the text equivalent of a Dali painting.

This beautiful and hard-wrought story that defies categories and quantification is, unfortunately, entered in to the 'categorization and hard quantification of games by group vote' competition, and so is subjected to numerical evaluation. But I think that the ranking of this particular game won't really matter; what matters more imo is what people feel or experience while playing it.

I enjoyed this game. Its intentionally minimalistic, with simple styling, short sentences, and brief paragraphs. I thought for a bit there that might be some consistent poetic meter or a syllable thing like haiku, but I don’t think there was.

You explore an afterlife with melancholic and strange characters. They have desires ranging from finding release from the pain of the loss of their loved ones to a desire for orange fanta (relatable).

The game progresses in different stages, each unlocked by crossing some barrier, like a guard who must be bribed or a river that must be crossed. While barriers are the bread and butter of location-based interactive fiction, I felt like they were good symbolism for stages of the afterlife (like ‘crossing over’); not that I identified any clearly distinct and symbolic stages, just that crossing over repeatedly felt symbolic.

There are multiple endings, some shorter than others. I got one named ‘true ending’ but was able to get into the lighthouse after that, but I couldn’t find any ending after that ending.

Gameplay revolves around picking up items (with a limited inventory) and then using them in different spots. One location has numeric codes.

This game has good styling and coding. I think the author will do well in the future. I believe this game was written with a specific objective, and that the author did well on that objective.

That said, I think the objective is a misstep.

This game is about break-ups, and it coaches you through overcoming it. It may be helpful to someone currently going through a breakup, but I found it very poor at talking with me about a breakup that I had long ago and had worked through.

There is a real tonal mismatch. When I got my third achievement pop-up for, I think, being sad, I just paused and stared at the screen for a while. It feels so odd to me to have positive, upbeat, awarding achievements while coaching someone through a breakup. I just can't see, say, my mom, putting gold stars on my shirt as I cry to her about a breakup.

The game assumes that you are right now in the depths of despair. Sometimes it gave way too many options to express myself (and allowed me to go back and add more before giving generic advice that revealed it didn't really care about what I chose), and sometimes it gave ones that don't at all reflect my thought process (like 'That's beautiful' and 'that's sad' as the only two reactions).

I think Chatgpt memes have ruined me. While I don't particularly suspect AI use here (it's possible but unimportant to me if it was used), there are a lot of memes about how AI has inordinately upbeat, generic and positive reactions to inappropriate things, like it's own mistakes. "You deleted the codebase!" "Oopsy! Hee hee. You're right. But we won't give up, because you, you are special, and we will get through this together!" While the branches of this game were selected by a human, they felt to me also to have some inappropriateness in tone at times, like asking for specific details and then completely ignoring them while giving us an achievement for being a true warrior.

I do not feel like this game is awful or should be mocked. There is a great difference between someone doing a poor job at creating a game and someone doing a great job at making a game I simply didn't like. This game has evidence of good craftmanship, but my personal, subjective reaction is that it didn't work well as a mirror of my own feelings or as a coach through hard times.