Reviews by MathBrush

I received a review copy of this game.

This is a visceral and fun werewolf game where you, a medical resident, become turned into a werewolf by a teen girl werewolf looking for family.

The game has restrictions on gender; you can use she/her or they/them pronouns, and you can choose to be cis or trans, but not male (either cis or trans). This allows the story to explore themes related to the treatment and marginalization of queer women, including by straight/cis women (represented here by an evil vampire overlord).

There is a focus on found family, and many choices are between conforming to society or being wild and free. The first 4 or 5 chapters are dedicated to setting stats while the latter chapters only test stats, which was explicitly announced (I liked that feature). I did have trouble figuring out which choices affected which stats in the early chapters.

Despite its shorter length (50K words) I was really pleased with how many consequential choices there were in the game. Each chapter had a few choices that felt like they could really influence the future (trying a bit of a replay, some did [like skipping whole scenes] while others had cool flavor then went back to normal).

The only thing that threw me off was the ending section. First we find what feels like an insert from a different piece of fiction by the author (an Isekai-d OP character without a lot of connection to the rest of the world and who is 'cooler' than the protagonist). The very very end was also kind of confusing; there was one page about (Spoiler - click to show)another version of us from a mirror, which I couldn't tell if it was literally our AU self or if there was another werewolf who was like us.

Overall, though, if you want to play as a woman eviscerating sheep or if you like werewolf media then this game is for you.

This Twine game from 2018 takes place on a research facility in Norway. You are a special agent of the Penumbra organization, a tech firm with some connection to unusual or even paranormal technology.

You arrive at a research station to find out that a group of five people was decimated by an explosion involving a radioactive military cache. But everyone at the station is acting suspicious.

The game has a solid storyline and uses choices to depict the player’s changing amount of agency.

I liked the story. The only thing keeping me from 5 stars is that most of its components have been slightly better in several occasions: the setup, the choice style, the css design. But it was satisfying to play and ones read more by this author.

I was provided a review copy of this game.

This game doesn't follow established Choice of Games patterns or standards at all, and for good reason. It was part of a government program to use games to educate others. Its author, Rebecca Slitt, is an author known for the great Psy-High games and numerous Choice of Games-related activities.

But the government asked for a lot of specific qualities in the game: make it short, have less branching, have there be right and wrong answers for things.

There are a series of blog posts discussing this process, and they're really interesting to read. Rebecca Slitt is not Chinese, but worked closely with a team of Chinese individuals who were involved in other non-game components of the project.

The game itself is about a kid in a family of demon fighters. Most of your choices and stats revolve around how you approach family values like balance or respect for elders. There are moments where the game pauses and allows you to self-reflect through text boxes.

I had some trouble figuring out what choices would affect which stats, as a lot of the stats overlapped. As an educational tool, I think announcing the stat changes would be helpful.

I think the education worked. At first, the family seemed really strict, so I rebelled as much as possible. But over time I noticed that they were fair in the 'family first' mentality as they put me first as well, and that when I treated adults with respect, they rewarded me. My character's crush also seemed to like traditional people more. It was an interesting but effective strategy.

As a small side note, I was confused because we lived with Grandpa but the other family didn't treat him like a relative. It turns out that I had skipped a part where we had a roommate named Grandpa as a nickname.

Overall, I think it achieves many of its goals; as a government-funded education tool, I'd give it 4.5 stars. As a game for fun, I'd give it 3.

I was given a review copy of this game.

This is one of the lower-rated Hosted Games, but I liked a lot of aspects of it. It uses an open sourced TTRPG ruleset called Blades in the Dark, which assigns a difficulty to every action and has randomized rolls to meet that difficulty. You can fail with a complication, fail, succeed with complication or succeed. Complications raise meters for bad things like dying or losing your current objective. You can pay for better results by acting out flashbacks or by saying you had the right tool all along (which takes up inventory space).

I was a little bummed that this story was presented as a vignette, with 9 short chapters that build up to a big event but don't show the aftermath. I think with different framing it could feel like a complete game; giving it the tutorial setting makes it feel less engaging.

I do like the backstory, a gothic arcane city with a school filled with magical beings, ghosts and monsters. We play as 3 characters with two additional friends. The characters make choices to navigate a tower and retrieve a signet ring for their club, preventing them from getting expelled.

The mechanics had some highlights (I liked the 'Devil's Bargain's a lot) but I often felt like they interrupted the story too often. This is contrast to the last Choicescript game I played (Falrika the Alchemist) which had all story and almost no choices/mechanics. To me, I feel like there is a bit of a war between narrative momentum and mechanical enjoyment. They can work together (when a big choice has been built up the entire game until you finally make the choice, like in Slammed during the final fight), but I felt like in this game they were treading on each other, the big narrative story beats interrupted by choices at inopportune moments.

But I had fun. Each page was fun. I would definitely read more by this author.

I played this during a punyinform competition.

It's an interesting game, with two different endings and a dreamlike atmosphere (well, it's more than just dreamlike, it is a dream). You are a little kid stuck in a pit and you're trying to find your stuffed animal.

As you explore, you find a lot of symbolism around foxes and implications of strange changes to either reality or your dream.

It's not very long, but its descriptiveness, use of senses, and unusual interaction mechanics were fun for me.

This game had a really interesting structure. There is a framing story (you’re a trick-or-treating kid competing against a bully) but after that it’s essentially 19 Halloween-themed short stories. You navigate around a map shaped like a calculus fence optimization problem and interact with people to get candy.

This includes a maze (which was thankfully very simple), a fetch quest or two, and even a miniature CYOA-game (which I think was acting like Mad Libs a bit, as there are tons of options for what character you can pick but it seems written in a way to easily adapt to different characters).

You can end the game at any time, and the ending doesn’t vary too much if you end soon or late (only the result of your contest changes), so if you decide to skip out after a few houses you can still get a good feel for the game.

This definitely had a 90’s or earlier vibe. Kids go trick-or-treating alone, people in the neighborhood seem to know each other, the only computing devices used are plugged-into-the-wall computers. The bully plotline is really reminiscent of 90s media (and IRL, in my experience) as well.

The candy descriptions definitely made me hungry, and the coding and creativity in house/host descriptions was impressive.

This was a downloadable game where you navigate by clicking on parts of an image, needing occasional searching.

It’s a translation of a Spanish game (I found a tiny fragment of untranslated spanish early on, for ‘leave to the corridor’). It regards a legend of a local kind of monster called the Vunche or Invunche, in connection with witches.

It has three main gameplay segments: an intro on a ship, a larger village exploration section, and a short finale.

I liked the mysteries and legends aspects, and the slow unveiling of the plot was intriguing. Gameplay was generally satisfying, just clicking to each area, going through the possibilities, then following up on any directions in the Notes tab.

There might be two endings; I picked up a special item in the ship early on but didn’t use it. Actually, while writing this I loaded up my save game and tried using it but to no avail. So I wonder if more options were planned at one point but not implemented; that would make sense, as there isn’t much freedom to stray off the game’s chosen path, and most of the characters feel like they could use another scene or two for a full story arc. But the game that is here is polished, well-written, and fun.

This is a long videotome game with custom characters and a variety of backgrounds. It is mostly linear but has some important choices and uses of options near the end.

The beginning was ambiguous enough that I had a lot of different potential scenarios in my mind. It started with characters named Thirsty and Kill who host a TV show called Love it or List it (connected to the name of this game itself) who are talking with someone named “Cont.”, and I thought it could possibly be like SCP 2030 “Laugh is Fun” (game show where people are murdered) or a more philosophical game or a continuation of a long-running series of visual novels that I didn’t know. It really did feel like the game assumed I knew who these people were or who they were referencing. It wasn’t until I had played for ten or fifteen minutes that a more clear picture emerged (especially when I realized this was connected to the GUTS series of games, a great collection of short IF with interesting interactivity and bizarre stories). And I’m just now realizing that Cont. must have stood for Contestant.

What it comes down to is that we have a lesbian couple named Franzine and Eiric who have reached a doldrum in their relationship where each thinks the other hates them. Eiric gets to make the decision to stick with Franzine or date someone else.

In the meantime, each of them spends time with one host. Franzine gets remodeled, constantly worrying that she’s unchangeable and can’t be fixed in the process of trying to get fixed to bring back Eiric.

Eiric goes on to meet three other people. The first one I went on had nude images, which I would usually stop playing for, but the art style renders it less erotic and more as a sign of vulnerability. The story at this point is rough and sad, showing the awful reality of cheating (in this case, with an asexual person). The other dates aren’t much better.

In the end, it’s a dismal picture for the couple. The ending I chose in hopes of change and a better future did not result in what I hoped for but is completely realistic for the story being told. It also jibed completely with my experience of the 30’s-40’s dating scene.

Overall, I became engrossed in the story and in imagining the feelings of the two protagonists. Despite my initial confusion and my haunting feeling that I’m lacking the background of the setting, I felt like this game had something to say about the human condition that was valuable to experience.

I was delighted by this game. It's in the author nilsf's custom javascript parser system (I believe), which has always been on par with the big 3 of Inform, TADS and Dialog.

It's a short two-room game. At first, I was entirely stymied on what to do. There were several cryptic messages and a way to die but that's all. I was about to post a hint request, but carefully replaying the game to describe the setup gave me the hint I needed to succeed.

The second room had a lot going on. I felt like there just wasn't enough info to proceed, but when I finally figured out what the vials were for, I was really impressed with the solution. Finally, figuring out the skulls was a real unusual thing that was not something I've seen very often at all in parser games.

So, this was great. There were a few typos (I think a wall was called 'souther') and I had trouble referring to one vial, but otherwise this worked great, and I'm impressed it was put together in such short time.

This was a great game! Both cute and genuinely creepy, with the two facets playing off of each other.

It’s a parser game where you play as a bug, and everyone else around you is a bug in a bug society with jobs, writing, culture, etc. While bug-based media has existed for decades, I pictured everything in the Hollow Knight art style as that’s the bug-based media I’ve seen the most of recently.

Unusually for a parser game, it has multiple paths to progress the story and a variety of achievements. However, it keeps the classic parser game play loop of exploration, grabbing items, and solving puzzles.

You’ve come back from a long trip and you’re just starving. Strangely, some of your fellow bugs are missing. Your goals are to sate your hunger and investigate the disappearances.

I had a lot of fun with this game, and it does get disturbingly creepy later on (more so because the horrors exist in real life).

This game overall reminded me a lot of Slouching Towards Bedlam, both because of the multiple paths and because of the overall plot.