Reviews by MathBrush

Black Thumb

This is a brief parser game that reminded me in positive ways of Baby Tree or Out, parser games that are short and symbolic and which may be a bit buggy (although this game is more optimistic than Baby Tree and Out was better coded). It also reminds me of Map with its direct metaphors (an empty house with a big growing plant in it).

Your parents are gone and your house is empty and lonely, so you stay in your room with your succulent and your dust-covered desk. I almost wonder if we're a ghost or dead or something.

Anyway, your instructions to care for the succulent quickly become unhinged, and we enact great symbolic events.

There is friction here because the parser is underimplemented and trying to figure out the author's intended solution is often puzzling, especially for the final action. But this story 'clicked' in my mind.

Logic Land

This is a game played on an Atari emulator. I had a little fussiness with keypresses; sometimes I overshot the action I wanted (you hold arrow keys or press arrow keys and push space).

It's a game like the famous Chinese Room by Joey Jones and Melvin Rangasamy, full of logical paradoxes brought into 'real life'. You try to TAKE in most rooms, gaining random items, then you find the right item to USE in other rooms, like using OCCAM'S RAZOR on a COMPLICATED THING.

It's almost entirely surface-level philosophy, mostly riffing on the names and/or definitions of things without looking deeper, but it's charming and I enjoyed the setup to the very end. With the very limited constraints, there was less room for bugs, and I don't think I encountered any.

Live and Get Pie

This was amusing. It's a short parser game where every line rhymes (i.e. the middle of the line rhymes with the end).

I wasn't sure what to do at first, but I liked the rhyme scheme (I like rhyming poetry more than non-rhyming poetry) and I found the implementation responded fairly well to a few things I chose.

When I realized what the actual commands to win were, I smiled, I thought it was great. Reminded me of Hard Puzzle by Ade McTavish, games 1-3 (the solution isn't the same or obtained the same way, but if you've beaten all 3 you'll see what I mean).

Everyone's Invited

This is a downloadable window executable that ends up having some different branching choices selectable by keyboard.

My first impression was, 'Wow, the art's really cool'. It felt like a real dreamcore/weirdcore style of art and music, very weird, glitchy, unsettling.

The story is about going to a party (after a brief surreal opening) where everyone is a kind-of person, a glitch in the universe, not really real. You wander around trying to find any shred of personality or reality. There are several endings, 2 of which are documented in the walkthrough (with a third described more generally).

It reminded me of p-zombies, which Magnus Archives covered in its 'Zombies' episode. The idea is that we can't tell if other people have inward existence or 'qualia' or whatever or if they're just really good imitations of humans. I don't know if that was the idea behind this game, but it fit well.

This game is a short downloadable window executable with music and sound and timed text, many things I typically dislike, but I liked this.

Gambler's Quest

I think the last move of the game sums it up very well:

> e

Thank you for playing my game! That is all that I have so far. I might finish this at a later date if this gets enough attention, but this small demo gave me enough to work on and I'm happy with it. I hope you enjoyed playing it.You can't go that way.

This game gives you a few small quests including clothing and finding a sword, with one unhinged thing in it, just like its sister game, the Copper Tavern, which had an AK-47 (in this game, its your quest to kill the king.)

As its unfinished, I can't speak to the plot or design or puzzles. There were some bugs in this intro.

This is a game that is intensely minimalist to a point I'd say it's buggy. Most actions just give you a question mark as a response, which isn't too bad, but in the starting scene in the airplane, and directional movement just tells you that the door is closed, you are told you're seated but can't get up, sunlight is coming in through a window but you can't close it, etc.

Dan Fabulich posted a walkthrough of it, which I used for the very first special action and the very last. After the main intro, you get a variety of scenarios which are disjointed and seem to perhaps be memories.

I like the cool random concepts, but a lot of the fun of parser games is exploring the boundaries of the world and seeing different interactions and having them be intentional, whether they're limited intentionally or expansive intentionally. And a lot of the interactions I had with this game didn't feel like they had intentional responses.

The music was cool! I wonder if it was hand-edited into the javascript by the author.

Thirst for Blood

This game is a short parser game. Its author has had several parser games before, and while this one is fairly small, I was impressed with its detailed level of implementation.

You play as a tiny mosquito trying to eat a human's blood. You have to find more than one path to exposed flesh in order to win and escape.

You can also get 4 points by investigating the room. I enjoyed the little twist, and thought it was well done.

Overall, this game has a small scope but implemented its scope very well. I can't really imagine a better version of a game where you buzz around a room and drink blood while looking at stuff without intense puzzles.

Archive 13

Well, I can definitely say that this is the best untranslated Russian game I've played in IFComp (it's the only one; we've had several dual-language games before though).

But I actually do think the story's cool. It's a branching Twine game with a surreal atmosphere, almost like a Magnus Archive statement or an SCP Class of 76 thing, and you work at an archive full of police records and such while your memories changes (or the world around you).

Google's automatic translate didn't load, but then I reloaded the page; once you do that, it loads and you can play it in English in Chrome.

It has some interesting endings, but one of the endings just ends on a blank page, which I thought could have been a hint, since the game suggests looking into blank spaces, but opening it up in Twinery shows nothing. Overall, it remains a short, mostly-linear game (diverging into 3 branches) with an interesting premise and in a non-standard IFComp language. I'm glad it was entered.

Enkii

Upon completion of this game, it states that it won't accept any rewards from IFComp. In accordance with its wishes, I'll extend that to also mean I won't write a full review.

In fact, if you plan on playing this game, I strongly suggest you play a different game. The walkthrough of this game agrees with me.

Under Loch

This game had a pleasant presentation, with a nice background color. It has a secret you need to beat it, so feel free to check out the well-guided walkthrough, which doesn't give much away.

Once I got the game started, it became an interesting back and forth. You play as two characters, one who is visiting the UK on a pleasant excursion to a loch and another who is trapped in a hotel room near the loch. Together, the two of you coordinate a search to help her get out while getting some life details.

The conversations feel nice and genuine, which, since the game is mostly linear, is its best selling feature, outside of the initial puzzle of getting started.

I genuinely am quite confused by the ending. If it's meant to be supernatural or sci-fi, that would make sense. If it's meant to be a 'the reader will likely be confused like the protagonists, but should be able to figure it out', I'm afraid I didn't figure it out. I'd love to hear from others.

Given that the names of testers were anonymized, meaning that they're likely recognizable people, and that the author uses a pseudonym, and that it uses interesting technology features and pleasant styling, I'm going to guess this is by Allyson Gray.