Reviews by MathBrush

The Count and the Communist

The original French version of this game was one of my favorite games of 2025 when it originally released. Alas, mine is the only review on IFDB. Hopefully the English version will meet a broader audience.

The design is daring. Every page has ASCII art, either of people, a map, or something else. These drawings adapt to different circumstances, changing clothing and items carried.

More daring is the command input structure. Like Superluminal Vagrant Twin or Skybreak!, it's a menu-based parser system. It also has many parts that require typing a period followed by enter to get to the next page, which slows down things a bit. In French, it was perfect, as my slow reading speed benefitted from a slow input system. In English, I found it annoying, until by the end (5 or so hours later) I was quickly double tapping the keys.

Everything is accessed through menus, including saving and looking around. Again, some shortcuts were very annoying at first. EXAMINING and USING items that are carried requires an entirely different menu than objects in the area around you. Yet the game is long enough that, by the end, these menus can be mastered.

The game is very long, taking place over about a week. You are a communist spy supporting the Red faction after the Russian revolution, and you are sent to a count's household in France to support him as a laundress. The game tackles themes of communism, misogyny and homophobia in the early 1900s.

As a spy, your main job is to gather information. At first you are strictly limited to a small set of rooms, and you quickly learn your duties as a laundress. SAVING often is good as UNDO doesn't work here (due to the complex structure producing the images).

Over time, you gain access to many more areas. This game is huge; the wordcount is higher than Never Gives Up Her Dead, though much of it is from the ascii images. But over and over more areas and events unlock in the game, including complicated devices (some requiring pdfs of old French war manuals) and code transcribing.

The attached hints are absolutely useful, especially later on. It is possible to beat the game without doing everything; I didn't bother doing the last 3 optional puzzles as I had played the game all night for 2 nights and was reaching midnight and wished to finish.

The characters are well-developed, including the beautiful spy Marceline who leads you and the complex housekeeper whose young dreams of fame and success have been subverted by the cold Count.

The communism propaganda is huge here; our character spends every night trying to teach herself communist theory. Tons of conversations and lessons on communism are had. It is essentially like playing a religious crusades game with heavily Christian themes, except the all-consuming religion driving one to violence has been replaced with communism.

Overall, I think this is a fantastic game. It is clunky, sure. Some puzzles are not fair without hints, true. It is probably too long and too hard for IFComp. Fine. But I think it's a fantastic game, and my time playing it was worth it.

This game is described as being by 'Rybread', and ABOUT text starts with: "Rybread returns. Funemployment has let me tackle Inform 7 or at least try."

That suggests to me that this is Rybread Celsius, who was a well-known author many years ago and contributed to the IF theory reader. The previous Rybread Celsius games that I played were often buggy but had a creativity and a surreal quality that was enjoyable, like in Acid Whiplash.

Writing for Sub-Q magazine, Anya DeNiro wrote:

When I first became involved in the interactive fiction community online, back in 2001, my head was blown open by the possibilities afforded by parser-based games. I dutifully tracked down a copy of Lost Treasures of Infocom to find my footing with the "canon" that most others were building from. But there was someone else who seemed to be working on the fringes of the community, who some people considered an Ed Wood-type figure making monumentally bad game after game. Many considered him the worst writer of interactive fiction on the contemporary scene. Still others, fewer in number, considered him one of the experimental geniuses of interactive fiction. His name is Ryan Stevens, but he wrote under the name Rybread Celsius.

This game is both similar and dissimilar to those older games. It contains a giant carpet you can search/enter for candy, like his game Candy. Room directions often don't match what's actually available. There are numerous bugs; for instance, there's a coin in a well that you can't pick up unless you are in the well. So if you drop it anywhere else or put it on a supporter, you can never pick it up again (unless you can put the supporter in the wall). There is a dead adventurer that you cannot refer to by that name. I got around this by using 'it' immediately after entering a room, but found later on it responds to 'corpse'.

Dissimilar is the tone. His earlier games were somehow more frightening and unsettling to me, almost as if designed to subtly corrupt the human soul. This game feels more gentle and fun, almost whimsical, and is inspired by counterfeit monkey.

With the walkthrough, decompiling, and an eternal wellspring of hope, I got to 13 points. One point can only be obtained by taking a certain action on turn 127, so missing that locks you out, but I swear the turn counter jumps around from time to time. I never solved the grue puzzle, found the clock room, or the false coin.

Overall, I found it fun. While it's not polished, there's always something to do, and it's nice to see a long-retired author come out again to surprise the world. I liked the use of glulx's text styling, and the counterfeit monkey-inspired machine puzzle was cool.

Dinosaur Island Escape

This is another shorter Hosted Game that breaks the traditional mold. It has a lot in common with text adventures; instead of a forward-moving plot arc, it has a world model with keys, door, and items, just like parser games.

Unfortunately, I love parser games and just got through replaying the 50 or so best parser games of all time, and this doesn't quite measure up as either a text adventure or a CoG game, perhaps due to a lack of familiarity with what's possible in that puzzle space. But, I did still have fun! (until my untimely demise).

You crashland onto an island that is essentially Jurassic Park, which the game calls out several times (using character names or a city with the name 'Jurassic City' but a lot of letters are missing). You then explore the island from a central hub, with interesting things in all cardinal and ordinal directions. Essentially, there are locked buildings, keys, and pieces of rescue equipment in all areas, as well as dinosaur encounters. Grabbing a key unlocks other keys, etc. The game ends once you complete one piece of rescue equipment.

Then there is a part 2 with another character along with you with similar themes. I got close to beating this but died when I tried running past a t-rex with an athleticism of 5 (which was enough for all other athleticism checks). There were no savepoints or retries and I didn't feel like replaying the entire game 2 more times to get back to that point, so it sadly ended there.

Overall, the writing is generally utilitarian, and the code has some errors or inefficiencies like posting the 'you've come here already' text right after visiting a place for the first time, or repeating messages that should only happen once, or keeping the underscore in stat names.

All that said, the game is still fun. For $3.99, I'd say it's worth it; I could see me or my younger family members playing this in the airport. The dinosaurs are cute and interesting. I see this author has 3 more games; I am looking forward to them because of the non-traditional setup.

This game was very interesting. I am actually really impressed out how it handles complex geopolitical issues. (I’m going to over-exaggerate somewhat but this is the impression I got):

It’s hard to confront topics like racism, the Israeli-Palestine conflict, colonialism, and other issues in games. People can get upset, it can come off as manipulative or stolen valor, it can be appropriation, it can be done wrong.

This game doesn’t worry about that at all. It’s like, “What if we put Hitler and Martin Luther King Jr in a room and give you a machine gun and you can just blow away anyone you want to? Or, form a polycule? What if it shows the Chinese as Triad gangsters that smuggle goods and also as murderous oppressors of the Tibetans, but also the most murderous individual Chinese oppressor had a serial killer alternate personality that you thought was super hot and you wanted to kiss? What if you plundered Jewish antiquities in Palestine to avenge a dead Jewish woman while making out with a hot Arab man who is part of a swingers couple?” Well, the first one was a metaphor but the other two are real. I don’t know if this is excellent representation or horrible representation, but it gets the job done.

The game centers around the recovery of 6 artifacts in the 1930s, with you as the swashbuckling archaeologist who recovers them along with reams of potential paramours. Each one features its own mini-games like ancient riddles, dangerous traps, a small-town murder mystery, tower defense minigame, etc. Every chapter is action-packed.

I thought the writing was good and the plot was good, and the characters interesting. For some reason, though, I found it a lot of work to get through. At no point did I think it was bad or low quality, it just felt like each chapter was really meaty, more like a million word game than a 400K word game. I think having just 6 chapters total + epilogue might be part of it, as well as a lot of branching that comes back together quickly (like conversations where you have to lawnmower through most items before moving on).

I’m interested in the second game. I wonder where things will go next. I think my kill count in this game is one of the highest I’ve ever had; I have no idea how I wasn’t arrested in America after gunning down ten or more people during a standard police investigation.

This is a genuinely very funny game. I laughed at a lot of parts.

I was just thinking before this how one thing I really value in a text adventure is adding some storytelling to it. I was thinking, “like a big plot arc or humor”.

Well, this game has a lot of humor. You play as a squirrel named Slappy, and the love of your life has been kidnapped! You have to head into town to save her, only you’ve lost your car keys.

I think the moment I realized this was going to be a great game was when I bemusedly tried painting the bus stop sign. I thought it was really funny that it worked. That’s when I realized that, instead of having regular puzzle solutions, everything in the game was going to be about using the items and objects in the funniest way.

The cliff and safe gags were especially funny to me. Finding the feather, I knew what to do it with it right away, and tried it on everyone, to funny results. Over and over I found a problem and later got something and thought, “Oh, I know where to use that!” which is, to me, great puzzle design. The ambient storytelling is great too, like the signs in the Carnival. Lots of care and detail are put into some of the default messages too.

I had a few hiccups with typing things in and one weird response, but no bugs to speak of. This is definitely my favorite improvmonster game so far, and I’ve added it to my IFDB list of fun comedy games.

This unique game uses the Choicescript engine for an entirely different kind of game.

There is only one chapter. You play as a grad student interested in time travel. The science here is 'soft' science, with hints of hard science but mostly just 'cool science', which I had a lot of fun with. You basically take the idea of Schroedinger's cat and make a time travel machine based on it that allows you to remember the future.

From that point on, you have access to memories of different times in your life between 18 or 19 and 50. Once you've learned about your future, you have the chance to go back and change things.

This is definitely a 'monkey's paw' scenario for the most part (but not entirely). Fixing one problem can cause two others. Some whole branches can get pruned when you realize a person or goal is just not worth it. One particular scenario involving a farm house and a redhead took about a third or more of my playtime.

I liked the ending I had (named after the game itself), and peeked at the code for some other endings. I like time travel games a lot and the final results here were fun. The only drawback I can see is that there wouldn't be a lot of variation if I wanted to go back and replay; it feels like a somewhat ironically linear non-linear path to get to any of the endings. But there is still a ton of variation. I see the author has a lot of different games; I look forward to trying them!

To adapt a copy pasta that's been around for a while:

looking for a new hosted game
ask people if its plot, simulation or OCs smirking
they don't understand
pull out illustrated diagram explaining what is plot and simulation and what is OC's smirking
they laugh and say, "it's a good game"
play game
it's OCs smirking

All 3 categories have good and bad games; there are some games with great plot or complex simulations that aren't fun to play, and some OCs smirking games that are fun.

Here's what I mean by OCs smirking: the game seems centered on getting to know the personalities of several characters. Any events or plot develpoments not involving these characters requires extensive scenes debriefing with these characters. Most major choices revolve around which characters to spend time with. For some reason, a lot of these games use the word 'smirk' or similar words (like grin) in inappropriate situations where no one in their right mind would ever smirk. This has led me to wonder if the 'OCs smirking' games stem from a common source or culture (maybe AO3?).

Games I would put in this category (including some of the bestselling of all time!) include Wayhaven, Soul Stone War, The Golden Rose, Creatures Such as We (one of my favorite games), and, now, Magikiras. I'm interested in upcoming games in my playlist that are OC smirking games, so if you have any favorites I should check out, I'll add them to my queue.

This game has some cool stuff. You are a pilot of a magical suit in a new continent raised by magic users. You can choose to be a magic user or not; I don't think there's any downside. Using magic seemed to be the best option whenever I tried it.

Characters include your partner (who has a significant plot line), a psychic, your father The Major, a quirky scientist named Edgar, and several other characters (I believe you can choose between sets of side characters; I chose to work with a tough guy named Luis and a cute shy girl Karin who was coded to like someone else).

The mech suits have surprisingly little relevance. Fight scenes are common, but are written as if you weren't wearing a suit (for instance, shadow fiends are pulling on you and you are screaming, but it just made me think of that part of Big Hero 6 where Fred is being stretched until he realizes he's in a suit and nothing is hurting him).

I reached an ending that was open ended after a plot twist, and the author said that the story would just stop there and never be continued. Others have reported getting to the second to last chapter and being told that their choices made winning impossible and they needed to start the whole game over.

There are a ton of plot details. A psychic soldier sees a vision of you finding a magical artifact. So she's transferred to your unit. But your boss doesn't tell her about the magical artifact. What's the reasoning here? Why transfer her at all if you're keeping her in the dark?

Dialogue is often stilted as well. You boss talks to your group, which is mostly young people and one older person, and the boss says:

"That's right, kids, except Balogh, who's not a kid."

Another example (this one's not bad, it just shows what I'm talking about with games using smirk in weird ways):

"We just have to wait for Altug and the others to arrive before we get things done for the rest of the day. After that, you wanna get a drink with the rest of the team?" he asks, trying to make it sound light.

You open your mouth to answer, but you turn your head to the door at the same time; it swings open just before you can answer, and you smirk to yourself just as Altug enters the briefing room.

This is a lot of complaining (I have more I haven't written, like stats being handed out pretty stingily and a reliance on code puzzles like Pride and Prejudice and Murder).

So what are the good points? Well, the game atmosphere is fun. I may be flippant towards "OCs smirking games" but they're great social simulators and help you build friendships with and internal models of the characters. I did like several characters in the game, and there is more plot in the game than in many others. I felt like my decisions actually mattered and, because I happened to chose a good spread of stats at the beginning, I only had to restart chapters a few times and felt like I was really challenged.

I've played many games far worse than Magikiras. I might even play it again. But it just solidified in my minds some patterns I've seen in games. Now that I've seen more of this genre, I can approach it with a more open mind and not complain every time I run into it. (Official Choice of Games don't really do this as much, as significant plot events are more important and are required as part of the outline submission process. The closest one I can think of is Escape from Death, and maybe Luminous Underground?)

Edit: I got some pushback on this from the Choice of Games forums: https://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/mathbrush-reviewing-hosted-games-latest-magikiras/175455/138?u=brian_rushton

Pride and Prejudice and Murder

I instantly thought of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies when I saw this, so much so that when I started reading I was surprised that there were no zombies at all, until I remembered. Then I locked in.

I'll be honest, I didn't like this when I started, but I came out at the end liking it a bit better. Let me explain why.

Writing-wise, the game leans a little too heavily on familiarity with the book Pride and Prejudice. What I mean is, especially in early scenes, character interactions are often more like "Here's Catherine de Bourgh! We all know what she's like ha ha. Anyway here's Darcy. Classic Darcy." Someone with no knowledge of the books would be hard pressed to identify strong character traits of the different people involved or to develop a liking or detest for them. The original pride and prejudice used wordplay and dialogue to establish unique personalities, and this game just struggles to match the quality of one of the world's greatest books.

This is compounded by the structure of the chapters, which have huge info dump pages with very few choices. These describe every character, which is what takes a while.

But, as the game goes on, things improved in my opinion. I've often seen it with authors that the later chapters get a lot better than the first due simply to practice. That's why in my non-Choice script games, I usually write the beginning last, when I'm at my full strength. With Choicescript games go you generally either send things to an editor linearly or release them publicly linearly, so it's hard to do that.

Anyway, as the authors begin the actual mystery, pretty much all the 'original', non-Pride and Prejudice content is pretty good. I liked the description of the mystery and the setup. The last chapter was a lot of fun for me. It's like the opposite of that old saying. The old saying is "It was original and fun, but the original part wasn't fun and the fun part wasn't original." This game is the opposite of that to me: "The original part is fun, but the unoriginal parts were boring."The choice structure came down to picking between several viewpoint characters and solving on occasional riddle or clue, as well as choosing the final mystery. I've done some classification of mystery games before (I'll quote from upthread):1-Have a standard puzzle game that happens to be about murder mystery, with solving the puzzles leading to solving the mystery. This is like Ballyhoo.2-Modelling evidence and clues in-game, which have to be combined to form a solution. This is how Erstwhile works, and most of my mysteries.3-Collecting evidence through puzzles and conversation and then having a quiz at the end (where you have to accuse the right person). This is how Toby’s Nose works.4-Collecting physical evidence and showing it to someone, being able to make an arrest when you have enough evidence.

This is mostly like number 1, you don't do that much detecting, it's more gathering clues and the game explains the mystery. I also believe there are multiple 'real' murderers, which, if true, is always a bit of a bummer to me, as it implies that reader had no chance of solving the mystery on their own (since the murderer is not determined to the end).

So overall this is a game that started out weak for my tastes but continually improved until the end.

Tin Star

I had heard of this game long ago. It was famous for being the first million word game, I think, for Hosted Games.

It holds up great! Plays a bit differently than most Choice of Games, has a lot in common with Magincia series but with more story. Overall I'd say it's great, up there with my highest tier of Hosted Games.

You play as someone set to be hang who is instead made a marshal and sent off (with a tin star) to Nevada. I grew up in Utah and my grandfather's family was from Elko, so it was fun to see it mentioned here (they use to joke about going to prestigious Elko University). We used to drive from Utah to Nevada every couple of years as a kid and I remember them telling me it was the loneliest highway in the US, and that if you saw anyone whose car was broken down you should stop and help because there might not be anyone else for hours (this was before cellphones).

Gameplay has interludes where you train or buy things or build. Like other resource and upgrade-style games (Magincia, Adrao's games, Night Road), there are a ton of options, from social to combat to self-aggrandizement. I liked how many small little details there were here, like going to the general store and finding books about you, or all the training dialogue having details.

In between interludes are the chapters, where something bad happens and you have to resolve it. I chose to interfere in pretty much everything. The game is 1.2 million words and it didn't feel as long as, say, Golden Rose, so I assume there are significant branches I didn't see.

I made Carraway my deputy and wife. I dealt with raiders attacking settlements, disputes between friends and family, a mining town, an army, and a lot of Uptons.

Some Choicescript games are 'here is this very specific scenario with my OCs and you'll experience the events exactly as I want you to and you can react'. This game, by contrast, lets you build your own story.

The beginning let you choose to be a doctor or lawyer among other things, or both. It was really funny to me when we had to leave something behind (I chose law firm) and one option was 'a hospital for lawyers'.

I liked the representation of my ancestors, the pioneers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (here referred to as Mormons, as was common at the time). I've seen way worse depictions (the first Sherlock Holmes book was very anti-LDS). There's a bit dodgy part hinting at some temple ceremony stuff but that wasn't too bad (members are supposed to not talk about it as a sign of respect, but all the information is online). The LDS people in this game are just another group of folks, like the native american bands or the army. In fact, they were kind of worse in real life; before the railroad came, there was a big Reformation in Utah where they especially focused on how dirty and gross everyone was, with junk in their yard and people not taking baths. This game portrays them as clean and tidy, so I feel like they're being generous. Also, there are parts here where white raiders use Native Americans as decoys to make people think they did the attacks; that's historically accurate.

I appreciated the freedom to act as I wanted. There were many opportunities to take bribes or steal. This playthrough I was honorable but not very law-keeping, shooting a lot of people rather than talking things out. But even if I didn't take the bribes having the choice made it feel more real.

Great game, I had fun playing it and feel like I can learn a lot from it.

This Hosted game is very short and quick, and wasn't really designed for the same kind of things Hosted games usually are.

It was for one of the Jay is Games Casual Design competitions (I'd heard of these competitions before because they also ran one for one-room parser games, which ended up with fun games like Dual Transform, Fragile Shells and Hoosegow).

As a game made for a relatively quick competition where the rules are 'web-playable game about friends', I think it does a great job. You pilot a starcraft with friends Fred and Linda, and most of the game is dealing with their two opinions (I saw Fred as more of a goof-ball and Linda as more level-headed, but they're nuanced).

You have been give less than a week to track down and reboot a computer on a mining asteroid. You're lucky to get this job, because you just messed up something important on the asteroid Ceres.

For a small game the author has managed to throw in a lot of neat choices. You can pick what you and both of your friends train in; you have the choice of two extra crew mates or none, there are multiple new ships you can buy. There were so many options I was worried I'd pick a wrong one and die, but it all worked out; either it's rigged to always work out or it's a gauntlet and I lucked out.

When I say short, I mean Ch. 7 for me was two pages with no choice and Ch. 8 was one page with no choice. The characters have personality and there are funny jokes, but the plot it pretty thin.