Reviews by MathBrush

This game is a lovely metaphor for many things in life. In this game, you die every single day, and it's very inconvenient. You have to find ways of arranging your life around this fact. No one else really seems to notice, or if they do notice, it gets downplayed. Giving into it completely can ruin your income and friendships, but overdoing it can kill you faster or make you feel hopeless.

This metaphor seems a lot like the 'spoons' metaphor, where someone who has low energy (such as from chronic illness or depression) uses spoons to measure how many activities they can partake in during a day.

So you could see this game as being about chemotherapy, depression, anxiety, fibromyalgia, endometriosis, losing your faith, etc.

I played through to two bad endings first. I wondered if the game would show that there really is no good solution, or if it offered the hope of their being a solution of some kind. If you want to know which type of ending it has, I guess you'll have to play it.

I definitely think there's a lot of value in its overall messages. I have mild to moderate depression and am a single dad, so there are some things I struggled with for years that now I take shortcuts on, like using paper plates to cut down on dishes. Overall, I think this game will resonate with many people and I expect it to place highly in the Petite Mort competition.

(I also liked the self-referential part of the game about making a game. Is this the long version or the short version, or is it mostly ficitional and not self-referential at all?)

This was a clever game. I was nervous at first at how much text per page there was, so I clicked random links without reading to see how long the game was. I was surprised to see it end after one choice and two linear links.

But I was wrong.

This is a gauntlet-style game, where you have to make the right choice to proceed, or the wrong choice and fail. There are three choices.

The overall concept is one from old folklore (the kind recently popularized by SCP-4000) [actually, that was 6 years ago. So not that recent]: faery creatures must be spoken to very carefully to avoid shenanigans.

In this case, you have made a deal with a supernatural being for money. And to receive it, you have to be exceptionally careful in what you say; the exact kind of care you need to take is revealed as you play.

Overall, this was lots of fun, with a cool ending transition.

Making a conversation-based parser game in 4 hours is dicey, but can be rewarding. I made Halloween Dance in 4 hours, an ectocomp conversation game. It wasn't really very good, but I adapted its system into later games.

This game is even harder than Halloween Dance was, because I was doing an topics inventory-based conversation system. This game is more like a chatbot, where it picks up on words you type.

So it makes sense that, despite its remarkable achievements, the game still has some rough boundaries. It also doesn't have an ending; that, combined with unimplemented topics, makes it hard to tell if you've hit a roadblock because you can't guess what to type or if there's nothing left at all.

The story as far as I can find it is that something has been watching you and wants you to die and has mingled love and hate for you. I wasn't able to find any further distinguishing characteristics, besides it not being a ghost. The line-by-line writing was good; characterization-wise, it was rather one-noted.

So for me, as a game, this seems average. As a tech accomplishment, it seems above average. It's like how lifting a 20 lb weight isn't too impressive, but doing a one-handed backspring with a 20 lb weight is impressive. Writing a keyword-based conversation game in 4 hours is impressive.

This was a pleasant, compact Adventuron game. It had a feature I'm not used to seeing, where right-clicking on yellow words brought up possible actions. I don't think it was all possible actions, because in both cases I tried it it only brought up 'Examine', but I thought it was cool!

The idea is that you've accidentally released the ghosts of your ancestors and you have to capture them back into the box you got them from.

There are two main ghosts to catch, each with a couple of puzzles. These puzzles were well-thought out; it looks like this Petite Mort game went for polishing a smaller-scope game rather than pushing out a bigger untested game. I think that was a smart choice! This setup would easily allow expansion if the author ever desired to do so, and I would look forward to that. Still, it's pretty good as-is.

I liked the way this game was structured a lot. It has two major branch points, and at the end it lets you revisit them right away.

The game is about 9 archetypal people who land on an island in search of an archaeological treasure. Each is referred to by their profession, with you being The Linguist (like the game Clue, I guess).

In classic creepy story fashion, a curse appears that kills one and lures in others unless they can truly trust each other.

So the rest of the game is about talking with your crewmates and deciding who to trust.

I got one choice wrong the first time but replay was easy. I found the storytelling easy to read and clear in plot structure, and the countdown-days format sidesteps one of the biggest problems in choice-based IF: setting expectations for play-time. Quite of a few of the most popular Twine games are split into days with recurring patterns.

Overall, I did struggle a bit with understanding what clues were important in the choices, but this is honestly quite good for a 4-hour game and bug-free as far as I saw.

This is a short Choicescript game. I wondered if there were two endings, but I could only find one.

It's a family drama/mystery/surreal/slice of life game (?). You play as a dad whose child starts calling you the wrong name. They say it a lot, and the mom starts agreeing. Things begin to get a bit strange...

I liked this game. There is some ambiguity to it that let it apply to many things. It reminded me of relationships where people are hiding a dramatic secret, and of changing identities, and of the strange alienation that can come when you first become a parent and your entire life changes. Very fun.

This was a short pleasant story presented in Twine. It portrays, in reverse order, several Halloween celebrations of a teenage girl.

There's no overt message, but a lot of feeling and overall cohesion in atmosphere. A kind of mix of melancholy and unexpressible feelings, both good and bad, with an overall positive feeling (the way that I experienced it). Kind of game me the same feelings as *Little Women* or Disney's *Pinocchio*, like a coming of age story that is worthwhile but traumatic (I know those two evoke very different feelings but in me they both made me feel 'growing up is scary but solemnly good').

There aren't any choices in this. Choices often enhance my experience, which is why I lean to interactive fiction more than static fiction. As a story, though, this works, and the link-clicking does help with pacing.

This game was a wild ride. I don't recognize the engine used at all; you can cycle through choices by clicking, but then scrolling down counts as a choice. It is visually dramatic and fun, although occasionally I scrolled too far and missed a choice.

The setting is dramatic and the narrator voice fits it. You play in a world where the long peace between animals and man has fallen, and every living creature is out to destroy humanity. You have to escape dangerous krakens, rampaging birds, and murderous apes.

The game is zany and wild, but somehow still coherent, and it ends just before the concept could become tedious. Overall, very well done, and stunning that this was achieved in 4 hours.

This was a mournful, reflective, and gross game by KADW. And not gross in a bad way, gross in a cleansing way, like popping a zit or rinsing a filter until it’s clean.

You play as a wanderer in space who feels listless, uncaring of the outside world and desiring to be completely alone and shut the rest of the world out.

The prose is beautiful. One part made me think ‘I bet the author researched this and thought it was cool’; at least I thought it was cool (talking about approaching the sun):

"No. No one would see anything. At the distance where objects start to burn from approaching a star, they are already close enough to be indistinguishable to faraway observers."

The gross parts happen later, but it’s not so much a bad thing as a transformation, and it ties into the overall themes. There are two endings.

This game reminded me a bit of a fiction story about cordiceps fungi infecting humans, which I heard on the Creepy podcast as the story “madness, mutilation, death”. Very intriguing stuff!

This is a haunting twine game set in an apartment building. Every day, you can wake up and wander around the building, surprisingly being allowed in all your neighbor’s rooms. There, you can try to help them out with their problems. But, for all of you, life is kind of ‘meh’.

This is the kind of game that transforms the more you play it, which I found effective. I liked the game’s use of color and its gradually increasing use of mythological references.

I’m still not sure if I figured out the theme of the game in terms of the artwork we see at the beginning. The number 3 comes up a lot in the game, but given the prominence of that number in mythology, I’m not sure which 3 it was referencing, and would be interested in hearing others’ theories on it.

A brief but time-worthy game.