Reviews by MathBrush

The 9:00 AM Train

This is the third tzbits game I've played, and it's more fleshed out and well-implemented than the others.

This is a Dialog game with a nice grey background styling in the online version. It's a fairly serious game, but the story doesn't get unveiled until later on. It includes some branching dialogue and some timed scenes.

The idea is that you need to get onto the 9:00 am train out of the area, and you haven't picked up your ticket yet. Trying to grab it, you find the service counters empty.

As another reviewer pointed out, the game is very constrained. While most actions you can try are implemented, they are implemented to express helplessness or frustration. Some games have tried that before and only ended up frustrating the player as well. This game keeps things moving though, making it fairly easy to keep going.

There's an option to add German or Italian into the game. I added German for practice, since I'm teaching it for the first time this semester. It was added in some key moments, but the game also used rot13 to express some soldier dialogue that is meant to be unintelligible.

I think the story here is much more effective than tzbits' earlier games, with some understated moments and some overt explanations. I wonder if it could be pushed even further; while I can't put my finger on it, some parts felt like there could have been more story or emotion or description, especially early on, more individual characterization. But I only say that because I like what is already there.

The Last Voyage of the Warsaw Queen

I felt this game was an improvement over the last two Charles Ball games I played, and I had a good time. The world map was big and complex, and there were a lot of moving NPCs and multiple solutions and active scenes, but the hint system and provided map got me through.

In a way, it reminded me of what MT W's games could have been. That author would often have very complex games with multiple independent NPCs in interesting settings (including a riverboat accessed by time travel), but it was often underimplemented and hard to play without a guide. I often thought that, with more polish, they could be more successful, and I feel I'm seeing vindication of that here with this style of polished, complex game. Interestingly, this game also features the Necromonicon, which shows up in several MT W games. It's like an AU where all those games ended up fully fleshed out.

You play as a visitor to a steamboat-themed hotel who is sent back to the past by a medallion. You enter a steamboat, the Warsaw Queen, where you ancestor is up to no good. Everyone is a phantom, and moonlight makes them disappear. You are there for a long time and tons of events happen, especially gambling card games, and you can go in and out of 12 cabins and a big map of rooms on the ship. It is the night before the ship historically crashed and burst into flames, killing everyone. Can you stop it?

There were some flaws. The provided map doesn't cover all floors. In a rare instance of lack of polish, I was able to take the ship's wheel in the pilothouse. Some story parts don't make sense; why does our great grandfather keep going into the cabin and writing more in his journal, then leaving? And why when it says he comes out to join the game, does he disappear back into his room to write more? Maybe I missed a scripted event. The rules for when you can interact with each other are also inconsistent, but the story notices this and gives justification or points it out. It's easy to get lost in what you're doing.

Highlights include the alligator and plots by others to get the alligator, the descriptions of the medallion and evil symbols, the intricate period details (including the wallpaper reference). I also liked the hint system, which gave good nudges forward and provided puzzle solutions I wouldn't have conceived of (though they made sense in hindsight).

Tableaux Vivants

I enjoyed this game. I first encounter Lamp Post Projects through their watercolor-illustrated fantasy games about what I saw as 1600s-1700s fancy European society in a fantasy world. These were long choice-based games that focused on kind and gentle friendships/romances and explorations of magic, music, and horticulture.

The author later made the parser game The Gnomish Treasury, which also focused on a combination of fantasy and culture, in this case museum artifact preservation.

This game features magic and culture again. We are an amnesiac character writing a letter to ourself in what we discover to be a magical cottage filled with transformed items and references to cultural touchstones such as famous wallpapers, books, objets d'art, etc. (okay, I don't think there are any actual objets d'art in the game on looking up what that actually means but it seems like the kind of thing that would be in the game).

This game had gentle puzzles, though I did struggle on the first and one of the last puzzles. This isn't a bad thing; a completely trivial set of puzzles can be as unenjoyable as an overly hard set of puzzles. I didn't know how to achieve my first goal/leave the room, but eventually something 'clicked' and I got it. Solving the horse problem, though, stumped me; the book research mechanic was so open ended that I never considered researching that, even with the hints. I used the walkthrough. It made sense as a solution afterwards.

I liked the writing, enjoyed the reminder of Christina Rossetti, liked the generally self-indulgent nature of the game. It reminded me of two other authors. I first thought that Lamp Post Projects and Amanda Walker are like two facets of the same gem, or like Mario and Wario, with similar settings and themes but with one focusing on the beautiful in life and the other focusing on the ugly (not in a bad way). If they ever collaborated on a game, it would be pretty funny to see the results, maybe like how Gojo's Red and Blue collided as opposites to produce Hollow Purple (sorry for intruding a lowly anime reference into this refined company).

The other author I was reminded of was Andrew Plotkin; this game shares a similar structure with Dreamhold, which was about a magician recovering scraps of themself and learning exactly what kind of person they were, for good or for bad.

Good game, felt unique (despite my connections to other games), would recommend to others.

Devils of Terminology

This is a visual novel that has some cool character and sword art.

It has 6 chapters and an epilogue. While the main story always happen, some choices affect the storyline, especially in a train scene near the end where the wrong choice can loop you back to the beginning of the chapter.

The game, as someone else said, is dreamlike in the sense that it jumps around and isn't super logical. Judging from the code, it was written in Korean, but the translation (if it was translated instead of being english-first) is well-done.

You play as a character known only as Detective. You words are swords that stab others, and made your parents leave you, so you stayed in your house alone for years and had birthday cake every day while hanging out with Ruina, who is, like you, a Devil of Terminology, except she looks like a literal devil and you are a person. Ruina is, of course, symbolic, like your cutting words, except not because other people talk to Ruina and your words actually become a sword you can kill people with. You meet a normal guy who gives you info on a mysterious train, but he's actually related to your father and fades from view after a message, but he's also your boss but he's actually governed by an automaton of an old men who writes stuff, but that's actually a real old man, and you're actually...well, I don't want to spoil the end.

You spend your time chilling with Ruina and investigating mysteries, including red threads of fate that appear to everyone in the world and weapons spawning from people's bodies.

In its symbolism and use of Dante allegories it reminded me of Cannery Vale, one of my favorite games. However, I felt like it lacked cohesion and found difficulty in communicating its message or themes to the player. Its possible its intentional, or that this is a standard way of writing in some communities. With my current sentiments and level of understanding, I struggled to find enjoyment in the game, though I thought the ending was cool and explained a lot.

SCAVS

First, to get it out of the way: this game has the kind of flowery but generic, emotional but not the right emotional text that I have seen a lot more in the last year or two popping up:

(these are all from different parts of the game)

Jyn: And then, it starved in the very home that had let it thrive. Now there's just this: the ghost of a butterfly's wing, reaching out… I guess everything turns to dust here.

The land has begun to change. It's less volcanic, more sandstone and granite. Beautiful streaks of something here, almost crystalline, flecked with glints of purple… quartz maybe? Cracks run down the side. This place is being torn apart in slow-motion. Rapid freeze-thaw cycles have worn and eroded it away. The floor is covered with stones as if the mountain is just crumbling from old age. I guess none of that matters much – it's not Helium-3. But it's still interesting, right?

Jyn: Oh this feels eerie, and… kinda lonely. Giant mechanical monsters, all left to die. Great steel armatures looming out at strange angles. Like a giant construct just keeled over. Everything abandoned, twisted, corroded, and left creaking in the wind. Feels like… like the planet won. Everything dies eventually, doesn't matter how much Helium-3 there is around. This is what's left of us when everything's taken away.

Jyn: My mind… slides away because it knows where that leads. Pain drowns happiness – it's like a deep, black ocean and happiness can't swim.

There's nothing wrong with the writing, but after a while I came to realize that none of it really meant anything, so I could skim through without reading closely. Edit: the author has confirmed that the text is 100% human-written.

Beyond that, there's a lot of fun about this game. There is a cool opening intro with a spinning planet, and a dynamic notification system and map. Some parts of the system didn't quite make sense; for instance, we get alerts that there are new data logs, but clicking on the alerts doesn't send us to the logs, which would have been easy to do. The messages box only appears when new messages come in, so once you dismiss it you can't read new messages, but when it reappears it still has all the old ones. Edit: the author has confirmed that the info button provided access to messages at all times.

The game helps you a lot, with a map that upgrades over time and a list of points of interest.

The story is about you, an operator, commanding two different scavengers to pick up helium from the planet. You are told not to form an emotional attachment to them and are warned for doing so, but they frequently try to talk to you. This is played entirely straight, so there's definitely a 'good path' and a 'bad path'.

As you play and as you disobey orders, the backstories of the people involved slowly are unravelled until you reach a dramatic conclusion. There is a big twist. I don't know if it completely made sense, but I may need to replay.

I most enjoyed unlocking and exploring different areas of the map and creating new connections. That felt fun. The game also did a good job differentiating in the map exploration of the two main characters.

Overall, this felt like a very polished game based on well-worn tropes with a sprinkle of imaginative creative direction over the top. I wouldn't mind seeing more games like this or that had some of the fancier features of this game.

Doppelgangers

Man, this was kind of a bummer.

I've been pretty militantly anti-AI text adventures for a long time. I just think they're not that good, and lead to poorly made games. I do think some games I have enjoyed in this competition and ones earlier in this year contain text or plots that are AI-generated and human curated, and I believe some games I found mediocre have almost fully AI-written text. The writing has improved somewhat. But I still find most AI-designed games to be fairly poor.

At the same time, I have started using AI more in other areas of my life. I do like its ability to scan images and produce text from them, for instance a png of a manga panel and translating it into japanese, or asking it how to do a math problem not to trust its answer, but to see what method it reaches for and see if it's one I'm familiar with.

So I decided to give the LLM in this game a chance (you can choose to activate it or not to satisfy comp rules). I activated it. You have to sign in with an email. I don't trust AI sites with my email info so I made a burner gmail and used a rarely-used browser to log in.

Unfortunately, the LLM contributed essentially nothing, from what I saw of Mike Russo's playthrough.

The idea of this game is that you're wandering an asylum, while you have dementia, and you have to interact with others. You can talk to others to persuade them to do things. Occasionally, the game gives you persuasion checks. In non-AI mode, you always fail.

In AI mode, I guess you always fail. I tried many variations, including cajoling, threatening, reasoning, pointing out i was in a fictitious world. I couldn't find any way at all to pass the checks.

I did beat the game by being evil and killing everyone. But the LLM essentially contributed nothing; I don't see any reason to play with it on. Even with it on, it didn't print any AI-generated text, which was nice; instead, it chose between pre-written options based on the AI's decision.

The base game was janky; I dropped all in my room and got electroshock therapy; when I returned later, I couldn't see any items, but could TAKE ALL. Basic actions like taking your clothes are described in clunky ways. Many commands starting with TALK TO give the result of the game has the game say you can only go N, S, E, or W. There's a random maze at the end without much to redeem it.

I think the game could have benefitted a lot from seeing what other games can do in this space. Even if we kept the generic, stereotyped asylum setting, we had text games like Lunatix - The Insanity Circle from almost 30 years which had a rich custom parser, compelling characters and a fun plot.

The best redeeming feature of Doppelgangers is its interesting take on conversation and NPC independence, especially things like talking about other patients and things and the way that NPCs find bodies you don't hide well or take contraband into account. A game that combined these features with the polish and storyline of more mainstream IF games (if there is a mainstream for IF parser games) would be very solid.

By the way, I have been harsher in this review, and that's because I assume much of the coding and/or planning was AI generated, so is not due to the author's own inability, and can be more fairly pointed out.

Edit: I found out you can see the game code in the download, which is fascinating and fun to read, but is also clearly ai-influenced or written, unless the author puts emojis in the comments for fun. I do wonder if there is a bug with the LLM part, since I saw the prompt that gets sent to them and even following the prompt very closely I couldn't succeed in persuasion after logging in and using LLM mode.

It does hurt the game having such open-ended input with very little responsiveness to mistakes besides 'you failed'. You can't tell if you're failing because you need to alter your approach, or if the llm is broken, or if you need to capitalize letters, etc. That's one reason I don't really like LLMs in games in general, the hard boundaries of the world are often the most helpful, and tearing those down doesn't really enhance gameplay.

Ironically, while playing this mystery game about putting clues together, I had two moments of clarity where I thought 'ha, this reminds me of ____' and then put two and two together.

The first (which should have been obvious) was that I thought, 'man, this interface really reminds me of Paintball Wizard', which lead me to look up and realize that Doug Egan made Paintball Wizard.

The second moment was that I was enjoying the clue linking thing and thought, 'Ha! I used that for my game Color the Truth, and Erstwhile used it to. I'm glad to see someone else had the same idea.' Then after I beat the game, I saw in the credits that the author was originally planning on using the Color the Truth system before settling on Twine. I think the game is better for the Twine version; the menus and quick navigation significantly improved my experience.

This game is a goofy cartoonish comic hero mystery game with distinct characters and solid dialog. You play as a brain on a skateboard with no real way of interacting with the world. The leader of your superhero band, Captain Prodigious, has died, and you have to figure out who killed him.

Gameplay has 3 main systems. The first is talking to people, which gives clues. You can say those clues to every suspect, and can combine them to get better clues. The second is gaining more physical capabilities, such as pushing, taking, and getting keycards. The third is using those capabilities to obtain physical evidence.

Some clues cannot be used in normal conversation, but are saved up for a big 'in the parlor' type meeting where you finally explain things to everyone. There, you pair up clues again.

I was worried that I'd be put off by the goofiness of the game (which continues throughout), but it's good-natured fun and it has serious undertones that were meaningful, like the desire for young adults to be treated with respect and the difficulties that married couples have in spending time with each other, or the way that disabled people can be neglected.

Like many of these clue-matching games, the midgame was the hardest, when you have the most unmatched clues and knowing what to do next is hard. I used one hint at the time. Other than that, the game did a great job of managing the quadratic clue-matching space by hinting at things like 'oh, this conversation topic was almost enough, you need more to convince this person' or 'you should try this with someone else'.

The game felt substantial. It felt more approachable to me than Paintball Wizard was. It does have a few rough edges; I think I remember someone mentioning that waiting for people to leave a room or be together was hard, but someone else pointed out that you can wait in the foyer, and I used that and it was great (until it disappeared near the very end before the summative thing, but by then I didn't need it anymore). Actually, that's the only real rough edge I had.

I'm really interested to see how this places. I love mysteries, and the good features in this game mean I wouldn't be surprised to see this in the top 5. However, I don't know how people will react to the interface and the goofy superhero genre, so I could see it placing somewhere else in the top 20. But I personally hope it gets higher than paintball wizard did! (which was 13th). I've played a lot of fun games this comp already, though, so I guess it's not overall placement that matters, but quality of game, and I think this game is really high quality.

Tales of Nivea: GRIP

I had a long emotional journey playing this game.

I at first worried it would be a boring AI game, given its well-made UI and its use of M-dashes, but as I played I found it had a fairly solid plot arc and escalation and continuity, and that characters were well-defined and interesting.

It's a game designed to make you question 'just following orders'. You live in a society with scarcity issues where people can be born with magical powers of different elemental types and strengths. Your job is to process ones flagged as dangerous or interesting to either send them to military conscription, permanent home arrest, or death.

There are criteria for each three, though I forgot them early on (it may be worth writing them down). Two are clear, but conscription was harder for me to know.

The game tracks your choices. I found it compelling to try to decide between them.

Less compelling was the rather opaque interface. I thought I had been a complying toady the whole time only to discover I received the 'rebellious' ending. Looking at the code, apparently every time you question the children at all, you gain 'doubt' points. So getting more content from the game hurts you without it alerting you to that fact. Other aspects are confusing at times; I kept getting notices at the end of cases that I hadn't compared two facts. I thought that was because I had selected the wrong messages to transcribe in my notebook, but apparently I was meant to click on that message and that would resolve it (I don't know if clicking on that message increases any counter).

Sometimes I felt the game was a bit too strong with the emotions, but other times it did a great job of selling powerful moments through understated text, which I liked. I think the author is talented at writing.

It reminded me of jury duty I had this year. The defendant was a young adult man. We found out that he was on trial for child molesting. A lot of us were thinking about how many years to give him (he had pleaded guilty and it could not be overturned, this was just a sentencing trial). Many of us at first seemed disposed to give him what felt like a large amount, like 20 or more years. As the trial progressed, it turned out he had abused numerous children, even infants, and had been on trial before and found guilty, and had gone to therapy but skipped out on most of the meetings, and then had signed up as a church youth counselor. He testified (against counsel) and said that he would likely do it again and it was something he did to relax when tense.

Even then, the jurors were split. I advocated that he be in jail long enough that even with parole he wouldn't get out while his victims were still children. One man said he'd only do life. Several people refused to do life or anything over 60 years, since it meant this guy's entire life would be gone by the time he went out.

We had restrictions. We were instructed to follow the law. We could assign a fine. Asked who the fine would be paid by and to, we were told that 'the law is before you, follow it' and were not given further instructions.

So, it was exactly the scenarios in these files. You have people, often repeat offenders, who are a hazard to the community. Do you deal with them as the law requires? Even if you feel the law is unjust?

Anyway, the memories of the trial came up during the game (I know this is heavy, but I'm making the connection of my own free will, so I hope the author doesn't feel obliged to step in and say 'that was awful!' or 'I'm sorry it made you remember that' because I think one of fiction's best uses is presenting our minds with unusual scenarios that help us process our thoughts, memories and emotions).

I do think some of the mechanics could be made more clear, and sometimes I felt the story expected me to remember more of earlier incidents than I did. Overall though I found this a thoughtful, well-constructed and worthwhile game.

Ḫattušumna Laḫḫa

This is a translation game, like a real-life version of Heaven's Vault or like The Gostak with a dictionary. It contains three connected mini-games imagined as 'tablets', all written in Hittite, transliterated to roman letters.

The presentation uses a great deal of graphics and typography, and the end result looks good. The user interface is clean and helpful, with a clickable compass rose and dynamic dictionary on the right side that presents a list of conjugated verbs which can be clicked on to type where to go.

I've played many games in non-English languages. Google translate is of course key, but I often use the IF Postcard in the respective languages as a starting point. Here, those basic commands are provided. I could see games having an interactive version of the IF postcard in the sidebar in the future.

Playing this game felt very different than playing other foreign-language games. Typically, the German, French, Spanish and Italian games I try were intended for fluent speakers in their respective language. On one hand, this is much harder as the words are quite complex (some Spanish authors love to do dialect, for instance). On the other hand, the game engines are often designed to respond to 'lazy' inputs. Verbs and nouns are often not conjugated or accept multiple endings, and markers like cedillas and umlauts can be omitted or replaced with shortcuts.

These games are designed to teach the player and to to be simple. So, for instance, the first level has simple puzzles like darkness and a ladder; the second one is a fetch quest, and the third is learning about social norms. Yet some of these easy puzzles are actually quite complex for non-native speakers, the kind of thing I often dread when playing such games (if we need chopped cheese for a quest and find regular cheese, do we assume the character will chop it themself or do we need to do so? etc.)

But the game has several layers of english help. Error messages are written in English, and point out the problems in our sentence formation. (I did have one issue early on where the game said the scribe had an error in a word and I assumed that meant the actual game scribe and that I couldn't refer to the object, but I had just used the wrong case ending). There are english translations of each word you click on, and invisiclues in English. I used no clues in the first game, but as I was trying to finish late at night, I used more clues for the other.

The third game contains nothing but reading and a logic puzzle, which I found most interesting in trying to read the clues, rather than the actual puzzling part.

The game is fairly violent, but it's all at a remove, since we are separated from the text by imaginary time and real language barriers.

This game is much more enjoyable than most education games I've played and much more smooth and player-friendly than most translation games I played. Hittite seems like a fun language, with some familiar aspects and some strange ones (like the particle starting every sentence).

Finally, this game is not like the Anpa Ma game from last year where the player has to use dictionaries and struggle alone, and beating it is a major challenge. This is a gently guided tour, non-trivial, but something most players should be able to do.

Mad Warrior

I played this one around 9 or 10 times. I eventually tried editing the json file that Mr Patient mentioned in his ifdb review (when you save), which showed me that all the game code is in your appdata folder, and perusing the code was way more fun than playing the game.

Like Epistemophilia, this game seems written by someone disconnected from the mainstream of IF who simply pursued their passion without knowledge of things that would smooth player experience.

It's a dungeon crawl, breaking barrels and chests for potions and keys while equipping weapons and attack bats. It's kind of like Diablo but with less story and variety. There are 24 floors of the dungeon.

It's held back really hard by its clunky system. What's implemented is fairly smooth, it's just that it's infuriatingly tedious. Almost every room has items. When you pick up the item, you have to open your bag first. To leave the room, you have to close it. Sometimes, your bag is full. Did the author playtest the full game? Did they open and close the bag 256 times and think, "This is what players will love?" I'm sorry that I'm being rude, but playing your own game multiple times is a great test. If it's not fun for you to play, or you find yourself adding ways to skip things, then players won't really enjoy it either.

Editing the JSON let me see more. At lower levels, there are bosses, and defeating them heals you and gives you more inventory space.

Some enemies inflict status effects that can only be healed with specific items. In worst case scenarios you can use an escape rope to get to the top to buy a bandage or antidote or heal. Dying is more likely.

Combat is randomized. Some exits are weird. There's one room you go INTO on the 2nd floor, but going OUT puts you in a room you have to go OUT of again and puts you on the first floor with no way back.

Overall, I found things pretty over-tuned in the difficult direction and tedious. If the bag open/close thing were removed I'd instantly increase my rating for the game. I just can't get what the reasoning is. It can't be realism; it's really easy to have a bag semi open you can slip things in and out of. And realism would mean that to drink potions we'd have to OPEN POTION and DROP BOTTLE and in between we would OPEN MOUTH and SWALLOW. I really doubt it's for code reasons; if that were the case, we could just silently add routines to OPEN BAG before TAKEing anything and CLOSE BAG afterwards.

There are hints of a story, and the characters near the bottom are more interesting.