Reviews by MathBrush

This is the last game I'm playing/reviewing in Ectocomp, and is the most-rated one in the comp so far. Having played it, it's easy to see why.

You play as an employee in a firm that seems to specialize in educational software. For some reason, you constantly get emails intended for people that aren't you.

The game was trickier than I expected, and I wasn't paying attention at first, so I didn't know who to forward emails to for a while (which is part of the gameplay). This enhanced the experience, as it got several people mildly annoyed at me and made me feel like we were all playing the same game in multiplayer.

Then, things begin to change. The workload gets harder in ways that shouldn't be possible, and a greater burden has to be shouldered. The ending is ambiguous, which I liked.

Unlike most petite mort games (which tend to be quick sketches of games due to the time constraints), it seemed to completely polished and fully fleshed-out, which makes sense as it seems to be scoped well (with a system that doesn't require much branching, if any, but still rewards interaction by having you guess who to forward an email to).

A great game to end the competition on!

This is a polished-looking Ink game with a great story arc, solid writing and interesting characters. It has frequent strong profanity that seems natural to the characters.

You play as someone who is currently presenting as a man during a date. Your best friend Tom is coaching you, Cyrano de Bergerac style, on how best to romance your date. As things go on, facts come out. Gender identity is a central component of the story.

There are a variety of ways it can end, some shorter than others. It took me a few replays to see how the author cleverly handled the scope of the game without letting it get out of hand (by funneling several types of choices to the same results).

The horror here is the horror of self-hatred (in my interpretation). Pretty much every path leads to some kind of self-loathing. The other narrative thread I identified is toxic friendship.

I think that most people on the forum will find something rewarding in playing this game.

This was a compact but complex puzzle game, impressive for being written in 4 hours.

You are a ghost, only able to interact with the world once each year. The house you are in is being used for a vacation by guests. Your goal is to interact with them to guide them to the truth.

Unfortunately, you are very weak, and time is short. I found myself struggling (in character) to do almost anything, like opening windows and doors. But after replaying several times and exploring, I discovered the pattern needed to win.

Dialog and presentation were good and the puzzles were engaging and not too hard or too easy. Great work.

This game is a speed-IF parser game. Like many parser authors have done before, this author has chosen to write a 'my apartment' game, spending a lot of time on a familiar setting. Appliances are the most common item to be implemented, each with at least something to do. It's hard to implement a whole apartment in 4 hours, but the scope has been narrowed to just two rooms.

Other than that, there's not much to talk about.

Besides, of course, the corpse on the couch. But that's another story for another day.

I’ve always liked self-referential media, like the opera Capriccio about writing opera. That extends to interactive fiction; Creatures Such as We is in my top 10 favorite IF of all time, and it’s full of discussions about game writing.

This short ectocomp game is about writing a short ectocomp game. I had to laugh at the end when I read that it was ‘based on a true story’. The author goes through a very similar process to me when needing to write: procrastinating, researching, hanging out online, and then having inspiration strike.

It’s fun to see ‘the process’ from someone else’s viewpoint, like reading someone’s written remembrances of your deceased grandfather and realizing that they knew the same person as you but in a different way.

This also made me think of how the process must work as this author (with her co-author) has 2 of the top 100 most-rated games of the 2020s and 3 of the highest-rated games of the 2020s on IFDB, so there’s a good chance anyone who’s been around the last five years has experienced and enjoyed the team’s work.

This was a choice-based mostly linear game that was longer than most of the Petite Mort games. It builds up background and has one choice at the end. I didn’t encounter any bugs and the style/polish looked good.

The story is about a girl in your college class with eyes like black pools. She unsettles you, and seems to be aware of that fact. Soon, you end up meeting with her, and learning more about her.

To avoid spoiling the game’s twists, I’ll put the rest of my impressions in spoilers:

Overall, pretty thought-provoking. I even sketched a doodle of the main NPC. The prose was the highlight.

This is the last of the Slovakian student games, I believe, and a good one to end on, with a larger structure than many of the others.

You are a player in a cruel game run by a wizard, and you have to pass through three mini-games. You have a couple of options each time, some of which lead to death, but you can always retry each world.

There are some typos and I feel like the narrative plot arc could be structured better (with more rising action and a little bit longer denouement) but otherwise this seems pretty good.

This is a tiny game, written by a Slovakian student. It describes itself well, as it's one room in a Twine game where all exits lead either to the same room or an identical place. The only choice is when to stop.

It's a funny idea, but the title kind of gives away the big twist, and the game itself is small, so I would have hoped for something a bit more. That doesn't mean it's bad, though; it feels similar to games like Uninteractive Fiction 1 and 2, made by a skilled author who wanted to convey a specific message/feeling etc. through a tiny or unfulfilling work. Experimentation like this is a great sign (to me) in a young author.

This is the shortest of Andrew Schultz’s trilogy of Petite Mort games based on pairs of two-word pairs that sound alike.

This one has characters that follow you around and bonus points, which are nice, and the art remains frun and fresh, but there are less puzzles overall (which isn’t always bad, since I like these smaller games, but I think the 12-13 point games hit the sweet spot more), and I found a couple of minor typos.

I still, after playing all three games, think the pixel art really contributes a lot. They help ground the abstract gameplay really well, and show the effect the player has on changing the environment. For me, they provide nostalgia for 80’s and 90’s edutainment games, some of which had similar pixel art.

This is a short atmospheric game with great styling choices. You are in a house and you have some difficulty remembering how you got to where you are. You can turn around or keep going but everything you do has some problem.

The ending was, for me, unexpected, and I actually got two different endings when I replayed, which was also unexpected. I liked the creepy feeling that the beginning of the game had the most.

I don't know of any other games by this author but I would play them if they released more.