Reviews by MathBrush

When you think of genres with standout authors, "mouse train" may not be one that immediately comes to mind, but perhaps that's a sign that you should try more solipsistgames.

The Neo-Twiny Jam is a long-running game jam that looks for games using 500 words or less. Sometimes that helps encourage new or busy authors by giving an easier target. Other times, it encourages creativity and fun, seeing how much game you can fit into those constraints. (both can be true of course)

This game takes the 2nd path. It's brief, and has a simple premise: a mouse takes a long train ride, and other creatures join the train, whom you can try to talk to or not.

There is some tension from people's reactions, which feel pretty realistic to me. And there are a couple of different endings.

What I like is the truly lovely art for the game, especially of the creepy critters. The game itself is only a couple of minutes long, so I definitely encourage people to check it out!

Me starting to play this game: Ah, this is cute.
Me after playing this game: This is definitely not cute.

This is one of the deadliest games I've played in recent times. You play as a small mouse in a field in the evening (it made me think of the 'wee, slicket, cowering beastie' poem).

You can try to find food, water and shelter in multiple directions. Unfortunately, predators lurk in sky and air and the mindless machines of mankind can murder you, too.

This gives the game a gauntlet-like structure where most choices kill you and you need to replay to find the right path. I think there may be multiple paths to survival.

Overall, I found the conflict interesting. Replaying without much way to strategize was a bit frustrating, but it was short enough that it wasn't too bad.

This game essentially takes a video of someone walking to school for 23 minutes and slows it down to one frame at a time, with each tap of the mouse or keyboard advancing the image and the accompanying text.

The poem felt very realistic. The person it depicts seems like he's going through a crisis in their life and are very negative; he uses strong profanity to describe many things in his life, and talks about his hatred for school and his complicated relationship with his father.

The way that text from passersby that you can overhear pops up is really cool, and I felt like overall we got a great glimpse into this person's mind. I saw others complain about the interaction mechanism and at first I thought, 'no, this is just fine!' but then I saw that after dozens of clicks I had only gotten to the first 10 minutes of the 23 minute interaction I got worn out.

Reading this does make me wonder about students at school. I'm a teacher at a private school (and formerly taught college) and I thrive around crowds (I talked to a psychologist about it once, I grew up in a crowded house and like being on the edges of sociable groups) so being around the kids and interacting with them revitalizes me and summer vacation (like I have now) is way more boring. I've heard that public school is less rewarding due to large class sizes and the lack of private school's filtering mechanisms (like just dropping students who are dangerous or problematic). This game made me wonder what public school teaching would be like.

Overall, cool concept. I agree with others that a pared-down version would be better received (just to avoid the massive clicks). Or (this is a tongue-in-cheek suggestion) making it like clicker games where every 10 clicks you can buy an auto-clicker and then upgrade.

I helped a bit in the creation of this game and am mentioned in the credits, so this is not an objective review.

I gave a higher score than I had anticipated doing when rating this game, considering I had played it before. That's because I've been moderately burnt out on IF for a few months or a year, but somehow playing this unfolded the old magic and made me think, 'oh yeah, this is why I like IF'. So anything that can do that to my brain ought to be rated highly, I think.

This game is tiny, and very polished, like a .01 carat diamond in an elaborate setting. You basically are in a room and look at 4 things and the game ends. But, other responses for attempted actions are handled well, and there's a nice custom actions bar, and a very complex credits section that almost has more structure and words than the rest of the game.

The content is a malicious narrator talking in 2nd person, like the narrator in Eat Me. The implication is that the character has passed on and a narcissistic parent has remained, making everything about them and revealing some of the possible burdens the person had in life.

I like stuff like this because it feels real and personal, as opposed to being manufactured for mass appeal (which most of my own work is).

This is a very short twine game that serves as the first act of a larger game.

You can play as two characters. There is a rich businessman involved in a memory transfer exchange, putting his mind on a hard drive. You can play both as the businessman and as the doctor.

There's a lot of promise here; in fact, if the ending was left as-is, it could be seen as a complete 'lady or the tiger' type story where the ending is implied.

But it's labelled as incomplete, thus my lower rating. If this gets finished I'd love to play it, there's a lot of nice sensory details and the perspective switch completely changed my mind on what the right choices are.

This game is fast-paced, with different difficulty levels. You are running after a train and you have to choose between three cards (whose order can change): Left, Right, and one that varies.

You have to click out a pattern of Left, Right, Left, Right smoothly or risk losing time. The shifting cards can make it hard to get things right. Each move you make, a crumb of the story progresses, which I liked.

At one point, the cards flipped over completely to the other side, showing only the backs. I couldn't tell if I was intended to memorize a pattern, to randomly guess, to replay and learn the exact pattern, but I was able to beat the game with just random guesses.

It reminded me of the game QWOP a bit, controlling individual body parts to run.

This choice-based game puts you on a train where you are forced to participate in a series of challenges to earn points. These are randomly chosen from two groups: conversation (with dice rolls) and combat (with dice rolls). I could have sworn there were actually 3 kinds of challenge but replaying just now I only saw those two.

These are pretty much the same each time, so I pretty quickly found some strategies that worked and spammed them. I was nervous about the time limit. The first time I played I won after button mashing, and it felt pretty good. I had some trouble with sound resources loading, but it didn't really detract from gameplay.

Interesting concept but the sameness was a mild letdown.

This is a short, well-made Twine game in French with a few brief choices and at least 2 endings.

You play as someone who missed a train, so is driving on a trip and taking a passenger with them to split gas.

The game sets it up as a long journey, so I was surprised to see it was only a 1-hour trip! It reminded me of the saying, 'In America, 100 years is a long time. In Europe, 100 miles is a long distance'. And that's true; my commute every day is close to an hour both ways, and the same is true for many of my students, and that's just within my city (Dallas). Going to the next city to visit family can take 2 hours. To me a longer trip would be like our school's trips to nearby states that take 8 hours or so of driving.

Anyway, digression aside, there is tension in the game. Our passenger is strange, and his behavior uncertain. It reminds me of college, where two women who were friends of mine got a ride from my tall roommate who was mildly socially awkward. It was late at night and they were driving in a quiet area, and the roommate pulled out leather gloves from the glovebox and put them on. He had no idea that the girls were terrified that he was about to kill him; he just thought the gloves looked nice and were comfortable.

In any case, I enjoyed this story.

I played this game as it was one of the least-rated games in the Short Games showcase.

It's a visual novel about a girl who meets a witch who's broken her broom. The pictures are drawn with bold colors and depict colorful characters.

The story is pretty simple; you walk around town viewing halloween decorations and trying to find a new branch for the witch's broom, and you intermittently get binary choices on how to treat people. While the game was short and its branching simple, I enjoyed the decisions, had to think hard about them, and experienced real consequences.

I found this piece charming, and enjoyed playing it.

This was the least-played Petite Mort game on my list. I wonder if people might have been off-put by thinking the cover art is AI, but the credits link to the different components it was built out of (some pixabay resources), so it’s legit.

This is a pretty brief Choicescript game. Most popular choicescript games boast of their vast length, so it’s a difficult medium to do an Ectocomp game in. Here the author handles that by reducing branching in the early parts and replacing it with player reactions, leaving stronger branching for the end (unless I misread that; it’s just the impression I got).

The story is based on Irish folklore. Late at night, you find a strange feathered cap near the ocean, of the type that your family used to tell you was worn by fairies. Keeping it, you begin to find strange occurrences around your house. It kind of made me think of Tailypo, but more like ‘what if Tailypo was hot?’

Overall, it was fun. I didn’t find any bugs, and I’ve always loved Gaelic, so seeing it in the game was a bonus.