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A short and sweet story about an unwanted transformation. The writing is evocative, but it felt too much like an outline rather than a story for my tastes. I would have liked to see the dialogue and character actions expanded.

An intriguing and thought-provoking game that plays the theme like a theme. What does it mean to be human when your choices are slowly taken away from you? What if the war is already lost? I loved the ship’s hub-and-spoke design and how each iteration brings you a little closer to understanding what’s actually going on!

“Empty Stage” has extremely evocative graphics, but I didn’t really feel challenged by the puzzle of turning off the lights.

A charming story about a small child going to bed that made me reminisce about my own childhood staying with my grandparents.

It’s very impressive to have full voice acting in a jam that lasts only a week! Unfortunately, I could not really get into the writing. What didn’t help was that while the choices revolved around three resources, these values weren’t updated on the screen.

A coming-of-age story with awesome world-building. What is outside the dome? Where did your father run off to? The writing is compelling and mysterious, and I think only a light editing pass is needed to turn it into a traditional short story.

I called the moon and saw a beautiful trail of white points dancing over a black sky.

“A pact with the devil” brings a lovely ambiance with some very impactful choices. The writing is excellent; it conveys its themes and messages by guiding the player through some terrible choices. The music and sound effects made it feel like a radio play at times, which I felt was interesting. Finally, I thought the header images on each chapter were a nice touch.

The clue in “Dalby is Dead” is in the title. Dalby is dead, and they’re coming for you next, so you’d better get rid of any incriminating evidence. I love that you start the game by first defining your relationship to Dalby, and you can choose to be incriminating or not.

What’s ingenious about this game is how it uses a Big Switch to toggle between obvious and hidden information. How your understanding of a scene can totally flip on its head when you press it. What a wonderful little puzzle box!

Overall, I’m struck by the wonderfully haunting atmosphere of the 3D environment combined with the narrative. I’m not quite sure what to make of “Dreamgarden,” as it’s all purposefully esoteric. However, it was clear to me that a lot of thought and care went into the procedural poetry that sprouted from your garden. In particular, I thought the way you combine the dreams you grow into poetry was lovely.

Unfortunately, I did not really enjoy the writing. There are many run-on sentences like: “You plant it for her, and when it blooms, you offer her the dream, because it’s kind of cute how she waves her hands once again backs away.” I also did not like how dialogue between characters does not stand out from other text.

Finally, a purely technical complaint. As more text comes in, it’s displayed at the very bottom of the screen. It would have been nice to have a bit of a whitespace buffer there.

“Editor-In-Chief” is a mystery told through headlines. Who are these people? What do they value? What is the purpose of the festival? None of it matters, EIC, because you have a puzzle clue to select!

The editorials, in particular, were frighteningly realistic. Although the points system was a bit inscrutable, it doesn’t matter; just pick the headline that will frighten the reading public out of their wits.

Finally, I’m blown away by the technical expertise on display here. The purposefully stuttering animations utilize the full range of Unicode to create a throwback style reminiscent of a half-misremembered tool from the past century. And the tooltips! My God, they have tooltips within tooltips in here!!

A bewildering dreamlike sequence of cowboys out in the Old West. I’m honestly not quite sure what to make of this.

The idea of a time loop puzzle box is usually that there’s a big mystery to unravel, or a big event needs to be prevented. Narratively, the characters are often stuck in their arcs until they can find a way to break through. “It Was Fate” breaks with that tradition by… having the characters go to sleep slightly disappointed. Suffice to say that I wasn’t very compelled by the central mystery. There’s nothing there for me to sink my teeth into.

What doesn’t help is that the writing reads like an outline instead of a finished story. For example, the line “Milton is fascinated by the curator’s references to the “Sublime”.” It’s a nice thought, but is there any way to show this? Does he talk to someone at the exhibition, or does a plaque catch his eye? As a result, the writing is so forgettable that I ended up mainly focusing on the choices, which, unfortunately, is another problem.

Whether due to technical limitations or simply creative choices, there’s no indication of which paths you’ve already seen. After the first two loops, I would have liked to see a big red banner saying “this loop is screwed” when you make a wrong choice.

All that said, I think the character portraits are a nice touch that helped to ground the story.

While I enjoyed the slick and snappy writing of “Within Constellations”, I think it’s actually too snappy in places. A good example is at the beginning, where a panel buzzes briefly and a door opens slowly in the same sentence. In particular, I think “slowly opens” is a missed opportunity to literally slow down somewhat. How does the slow opening door make our character feel? Are they frustrated? Scared? Disappointed?

Similarly, an escape pod is launched with all the fanfare of a button press. The player is told they’re running out of time, but never actually shown it. We’re searching for our crew, but they’re nameless and faceless entities. As far as I can tell, there’s only one named character in the entire story!

The writer also suffers from a widespread malady among pulp sci-fi writers, present company included: They underestimate the vastness of space. The fastest man-made object to date is NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which has reached a maximum speed of 690,000 km/h. If you shot the probe directly at the sun from Earth, it would take nine days to get there.

On a technical level, I was blown away by the slick animations, the well-chosen fonts, and the expertly timed delays on some of the lines.

I really enjoyed the writing in Pick Your Gender. Short, snappy, and to the point. The line “Disguises are meant to be removed” unironically goes really hard. As a cisgendered man, I felt boxed in by all the forced choices, which I do believe is the author’s intent. Giving the player five options, all of which are terrible, is an excellent way to communicate how difficult it must be to navigate a world not designed for you.

I’m sad that my trans and nonbinary friends are in a perpetual loop of having to explain their gender. That’s not a knock on this game, which I think is lovely, but I wish we would give them the breathing room to tell other stories.