Reviews by MathBrush
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A compact fantasy game written in a custom engine, April 27, 2024This game was entered in the IF Grand Prix 2024, in German. In it, you play as someone determined to stop a sorceror from hatching a dragon egg and dooming the nearby community.
Gameplay revolves around looking around, exploring, and then using different items you find to open up new areas.
It's written in a custom engine which looks visually appealing but which I struggled with. A lot of objects weren't implemented that were mentioned in the text, and many synonyms I've become accustomed to from other German games didn't work here, so I had about 25 commands at the beginning that weren't understood. I finally got one to work by accident. Exploring around, some commands were hinted in the text and just didn't work; an example (not from the game) would be like 'it looks like you can pull it!' but 'pull' doesn't work.
Not being a native speaker compounded this problem, but I've seen on the German forums that others had the same problems. I ended up using the walkthrough helpfully provided, pausing here and there to explore some.
Other than that, the game is a good fantasy game. Some of the puzzle solutions were a bit confusing but the game is small enough that just trying everything should be fine.
A new IF engine takes a ton of work. This one is very promising but could use some more synonyms. For instance, in Inform I can type 'Oben' and 'Hoch' and both make me go up, or just 'schau' for looking around (maybe these are unusual commands and I've trained myself wrong by misplaying other German titles, a native speaker would have to correct me). I see now when writing that there was a Help page on the front page of the game, but I didn't see that when I first played, and typing Hilfe didn't bring anything up in game. The help page would have helped some, though, but it doesn't mention the up and down directions, which I struggled with.
A classic Western with a traveller helping solve a mystery, April 23, 2024This was a well-made Inform game in German with custom CSS. It uses the Hybrid Choices extension for Dialog.
You play as a traveller who comes to a small town looking for your love. In the meantime, though, you find a mystery, as a young man goes missing.
Gameplay revolves mostly around dialogue and exploration, with one puzzle involving several metal implements that I found confusing enough for me (a non-native speaker) to need to look at the walkthrough, but once I saw the commands it made sense.
Between conversations, there is often a lot of fetch-quests, where one person asks you to go find something and bring it back. I felt like it was a lot of fun most of the time, but one specific part felt a little repetitive, as there are three things in a row where you get an item, use it, realize you need another, get it, use it, etc.
Overall, I liked the writing and thought the flashbacks were neat. A very strong game. Near the end there were two weird things; the use of the word (Spoiler - click to show)drugs to refer to illegal things, when it was more (Spoiler - click to show)a reference to pharmaceuticals at the time</spoil>, and a somewhat derogatory term for Asians spoken by an uncultured man.
'Western' is definitely an underutilized IF category so it was nice playing a very polished game in this genre.
An experience like brainstorming, written in Inklewriter, April 21, 2024I used an Internet Archive backup to play this game.
In it, you start with a one-sentence story, and then expand on it. After three or four rounds of expansion, you get a full-fledged story.
There is quite a variety; I found a cheating king who broke his wife's heart, an evil witch who sucked the life force from her husband, and a mysterious assassin who married the king and left her old life behind only to be forced to return to her old habits.
The structure seems to be completely branching, which makes sense as Inklewriter isn't an exceptionally powerful engine. There may be some state tracking, though I'm not sure.
Overall, the stories were each high quality, but this overall feels slight in terms of its interactive structure.
A game out of time--short, with little time but several options, April 21, 2024This is a choice-based game written using a parser. At the time it came out, 2008, choice-based games had a long history already but they had never been popular in the IFComp or r*if usenet communities. The reviews from that time indicate that people found its choice-based nature unappealing.
The game is based on a writing prompt, and that prompt is essential to understanding the game. You begin in a cafe with three people around you called B, C, and D, and an American couple, one with a lisp and one with a stutter.
The speech impediments are part of the prompt; it can be difficult to write impediments in a way that doesn't come of as either condescending or mocking, but I think this pulls it off well.
For a choice-based game, this is actually quite complex. Time progresses no matter what you do, but you can focus on talking to each of the three people with you, or Wait. Each person you're talking to has a variety of options on what you can ask them about. I found that the game could recognize even small parts of the prompt, so if a question started with 'ask whether...', then typing ASK WHETHER was enough to solve it.
I remember trying this in the past and thinking it didn't go much beyond the prompt, so I was surprised this time that there was a major twist in the story. I had to reread to make sure I was understanding right. I'm surprised the other reviews don't mention that.
I genuinely liked this game; I liked the twist, the parser added a little 'crunchiness' to the choice interactivity, and it was well-written. The only thing that seemed 'off' was that choosing to just 'WAIT' ends up with an interaction that doesn't seem to fit the story as written.
A complex Twine game about exploring an enormous library, April 20, 2024This game was in a poll for games that need more reviews.
In this game, you play as a lowly librarian who has been tasked by a mysterious stranger with finding the Babylon Book, which contains all stories that can ever be written.
This is meant to be the first in a three-part series. The bulk of the game takes place in a bizarre student cafeteria where history, magic, and collegiate life mingle.
The game uses a lot of styling, and has cycling links, background images, music, and a lot of text boxes where you can type what you want. I'm not sure how often the game checks what's in the type boxes; I had one puzzle where for sure it mattered, but others didn't.
The story is madcap and surreal, so it can be fun but also hard to follow at times. I wasn't quite sure how I ended up in the cafeteria, or why I couldn't leave it; and I encountered many things before I knew how to make use of them.
But, this is fairly compact, and it's not too hard to explore everything even though there's a lot. So I was able to figure out things in the end.
I definitely think I'd play the next few games. The one thing that I wish were a little different was the many times where I saw a cool feature (especially text boxes) and didn't know if it was 'cool feature just to have fun with that is only used for characterization' or 'essential puzzle component'.
A short linear Twine game about wormholes popping up, April 15, 2024This is an example of dynamic fiction, where you have no interactivity (although there is one instance of cycling text) and the entire purpose of the links is to pace the reading.
I’m not really against dynamic fiction. It’s useful in shorter stories to hide the total length of the story and keep you guessing where the end will come. It’s less useful in longer stories, as players get frustrated. Thankfully this is pretty short.
This game is about wormholes opening up and taking away things and people, with the reasons for it slowly revealed. I liked it, and I appreciated the sentiment it was trying to impart.
A music-enhanced goofy night in a cemetery investigating aliens, April 9, 2024There have been a couple of polls over the years for 'games that need more reviews' and this has been on all of them. I loaded it up once a few years ago, but it seemed somewhat overwhelming.
But I'm glad I've finished it now!
This is a goofy, intentionally silly game in the vein of Escape from the Crazy Place. You are a police officer dressed as a Go Go dancer. Your partner is Donald McRonald: clown, pyromaniac, and overall goofy character.
The game map is split into about 9 main locations with a couple of extra ones. Gameplay revolves around bringing items from one area into another and getting Ronald to cooperate with you.
The plot is that something mysterious fell out the sky and crashed into the graveyard, and now so many of the dead and buried are rising up out their graves!
There is background music, which I thought was well-chosen; it felt like the soundtrack to one of those movies within a movie you see when people reference fake black and white horror films, like the werewolf movie in the Thriller music video. It has a lot more character than much of the music I've seen in other IF games.
However, I also found a lot of bugginess. The jelly doughnut was a major problem; I found it in a grave. I took it. Then I took something else in the grave, and it said I took the doughnut. I later gave the doughtnut to Donald, and it said he ate it, but then I still had it in my inventory. Similarly, the hints just went blank when first entered the (Spoiler - click to show)spacecraft. There were also a lot of interactions which may have been bugs and may have not; like when I opened my purse, and (Spoiler - click to show)tried to get something out and died, so I tried giving it to Ronald and told him to open it, then when I had it again I could take stuff out and not die, even though the boa was in there. Similarly, with the main nemesis, (Spoiler - click to show)I first tried doing nothing, and died; then breaking the machine, and died; then going through the light, and died; then talking, and that just gave a normal response. So I tried attacking the dog herself and got mind controlled away. So things were kind of chaotic. There are also several typos, mainly missing quotes when a sentence has a dialogue tag in the middle.
The characters and writing are funny and high quality, and the music really helps the ambiance. I enjoyed a lot of the puzzles, too. I wonder if that's why there are so few reviews; the game is good enough that no one would give it a 'this sucks, don't try this' review, but tricky enough to finish that people who like it often aren't able to see the end. However, I should note that as of writing this in April 2024, this game has a lot of 4-5 star ratings, while I'm giving it a 3-star rating, so my experience may be atypical.
An expansive and engaging magical puzzler with images, April 8, 2024I was talking to someone about Quest games, and searched for the top rated Quest games of all time. It brought this up as number 1, a game by two-time IFComp winner Steph Cherrywell! I had seen it before, but never got around to playing it.
I strongly recommend downloading Quest to play this. Online, it gets slower and slower and eventually halts altogether. Offline, it worked great.
In this game, you play as a magical student coming back to your academy after a break. This is a small-scale school; less Harry Potter, more like X-Men school sized.
You have a spellbook with you, but it's blank! You can encounter up to five different spells.
Gameplay revolves around rescuing your friends (and maybe some not friends) who've been struck by various magical curses. I remembered Jenny Yoshida from Brain Guzzler's from beyond, and then Mary Jane, before looking it up and realizing that the two games share much of the same cast (though they are set in different universes). Each student comes with a well-drawn profile picture.
The puzzles were tricky for me. All were well-clued, and generally revolved around finding uses for each item or spell you find. But a lot of error messages aren't helpful if you almost get the right answer but not quite. The hardest part for me was (Spoiler - click to show)carving the jack o lantern(Spoiler - click to show). I tried (Spoiler - click to show)CUT PUMPKIN, CUT PUMPKIN WITH KNIFE, CARVE PUMPKIN, etc. So struggling with the parser adds to the difficulty. I ended up consulting a walkthrough several times.
The writing and setting is very charming, making this game overall very fun to play, despite my struggles. I'm glad the author went on to make hit after hit.
A game about looking back and looking forward, April 6, 2024I generally like Bez’s work, as my view on creative writing is that it’s a way to share parts of our experiences and feelings with others, and Bez’s work is generally very effective at communicating how they feel.
This is a shorter game, drawing on some of the cozier seeds. It uses a warm color palette and a background sound of (I think) a fire crackling.
It has you sitting and thinking about all the bad things in your life, picking over the negative thoughts with a fine tooth comb. I remember playing it for the first time, feeling like it was going to be a downer game, but then I was pleasantly surprised to see things turned on their heads.
Overall, a good game and one that had a positive impact on me. I do think I slightly prefer Bez’s longer games, but that’s about it.
A game from many perspectives, set at a work party with drama, April 6, 2024This was an intricate and surprising game. It uses a seed for color palettes and another for ‘one click=one change in perspective’.
So the way it’s structured is that it has a setting and a list of dramatis personae. All of the people’s names are linked, and clicking on them gives you a view of the soiree from their perspective, as well as links to the three others.
So, I thought, ‘Ah, I get it. There are just four story passages, and you can pick what order to read them in.’ But, it was actually a lot more complex than that. Each link that you click takes you to another person’s perspective, like I thought, but it also advances the time. So there’s actually quite a bit of complexity in play here.
At first, I thought there were 8 or so people, until I realized that every person had a first name and a last name and that which one was used in the text depended on the familiarity of the person who was speaking. This introduced an almost puzzle element for me, as I had to go back and forth between the dramatis personae list and try to fit together the different perspectives into a unified whole. It made me feel like this was a lot of worldbuilding for one game, so I checked the ‘about’, and saw that this tied in with the author’s earlier game Structural Integrity.
Overall, the writing felt natural and the scenario was interesting enough that I played through 4 or 5 times (unlocking the ‘faster read’ mode). The basic concept is that you’re at a work party and two male/male couples that have beef with each other bump into each other with a combo of flirting and veiled insults.
I felt like the ending didn’t really end on a satisfying, conclusive note; it felt like there was either something missing left to be told or that room was being left for a sequel hook.
I also think that the extensive worldbuilding and the ‘one click = one viewpoint change’ concepts had tension with each other, because with such fleshed-out characters I would have liked to have more time with one character to learn names from their point of view and get a feel for them and their worldview before hopping over to the next character.
Finally, the styling looked nice, with well-chosen colors and backgrounds, and a fancy dramatis personae list. I thought early on ‘I wish I could just bring up the list of people more easily’, and then I realized there was a button that does exactly that, which was good design.
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