Reviews by MathBrush

The Neverending Story is one of my favorite books; I got a red-and-green text hardback german version in my youth and used it as part of my tools to learn German.

The movie, while good, isn't as great as the book, which has wonderful themes about self-identity, growth, love and the meaning of life.

This game slaughters both the book and the movie and leaves nothing of their themes.

This is a text adventure for the Spectrum (it comes in 3 parts in the version I played). I played it on the fuse emulator.

You wander around a map as Atreyu. You can carry five inventory items which are represented visually on the screen. There are two main kinds of items: standard adventure items that have nothing to do with the story, and items from the story that have no clear use in the game. Puzzles consist of grabbing most things you can find (there is a 5-item inventory limit and about half of items are red herrings) and then using each item in one spot. The game has a background timer (needed for one or two puzzles) so if you take time to think it has automatic input every few seconds.

The game contains no item descriptions, character descriptions, or player-initiated conversation. You run into characters and it just says 'look, it's Rockbiter' and you get a small pixel portrait of their face. Very occasionally the characters will do something. Falkor was the worst; you can summon Falkor and it just says 'Falkor is here", then you 'take Falkor' and you have him.

I love richly described games with emotional themes and interesting interactivity. This had none of that. One of the best books I've read, with no themes at all in its adaptation. No messages of love or courage or anything. Of course this is due to constraints, but Adventure has more compelling descriptions and emotions than this (like the Bear and the Volcano, or the creepy mirror) and better interactivity/clever puzzles like the eggs.

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 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!

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.

This game is by Adrao, whom I know from Hero or Villain. I associate this author with complex mechanics-focused games that let you try out interesting systems.

This game was both more ambitious but less polished, even unfinished, then the last one I played.

For one, it is the sequel to two unrelated games, one a fantasy game, and one a game set in modern Tokyo. You can import a character from either one of these games. The differences between the two are slight; you end up in an underground cavern with a skeleton protecting you, and you explore your base while dealing with otherworldly creatures. In the Tokyo version, I made a surface cult and there was an alien/elemental attack on Japan, while in the fantasy I didn't see a surface cult option.

There also is a way to make a new character for both, but the stories feel a bit incomplete. The Tokyo one is short but leads into the cave pretty well, while the Fantasy one just jumps from being a weak spellcaster to a very strong one.

The incompleteness isn't just inferred; there are notes throughout the work saying that the game is incomplete, mostly saying that the author might expand one storyline later. The most notable part is the epilogue, which is blank, saying the author might add one at some point to link into another game.

Gameplay itself was hard to get into the rhythm of but improved over time. I played on easy mode, having learned from past games that this author likes to provide real challenge. At first, rats ate all my stuff, so I made ghouls to stop the rats. I had a big army mining and making weapons, when a dwarf came and overwhelmed me. It turns out I needed unassigned monsters to fight random visitors. There is an attack power level based on you, your spells, and your unassigned minions. If it's higher than the enemy you win, otherwise game over.

So I started over and focused on making tons of guys. My health and will were continously depleted because my cult was making ghouls, but that gave me a big army and I found spells to replenish myself. I thought I had a strict time limit, so moved fast (the game kept saying I needed to make a portal whenever there was a lunar occurrence of some kind and I missed 3 or so before I finally made one). But it turned out I had enough time to research 2 mega-spells (Death Knight and Banish) before the end happened.

I made my army big. Too big. By the end I was riding my dracolich, summoning demon allies, fighting alongside 2000 rat zombies with my army of skeletons and zombies led by a fully armed and armored Death Knight against alien invaders. My attack power, due to my careful planning, was over 600. The alien overlord had 30.

So, I won! Using the ring of time and harvesting elementals for my ascension.

Near the end I had ran out of most story-based options and was just in a cycle of learning what I could until I ran out of useful options there, so I just cranked out studying for my big spells.

If someone wants a simulator for manipulating a necromantic army as a lich, this game works well. I just wonder why it was released with gaps in the story?

This game takes the structure of the first Open Sorcery and fits into a Christmas theme.

Like the first game, you are a sentient fire spirit that is also part computer program. It follows the 'canon' ending of the first game where you save everyone. In this game you find spirits by identifying their 'matter' and 'motive'. There are a lot more nice spirits in this game (although I did find out that I murdered a potential nice pet in the first game. Oops!)

The biggest new addition is that each dream is its own playable game with a variety of puzzles. They can be pretty hard, but you get multiple attempts. An optimal playthrough of the game is very hard, requiring a guide or lots of attempts. A fun but okay playthrough is pretty easy.

I was a little torn on this game. I love Christmas and it was fun seeing a sincere appreciation of it, especially through a new lens. On the other hand, part of my love for Open Sorcery is for the sense of growth and development and newness, and progression, and this game had less of that. It's like the difference between Season 1 of a show and season 4 or 5 where they're really established.

I did love the gnomes in this, very fun. And the emphasis on us learning how to give gifts. For its small price, I'd definitely say it's worth it; while it's not as fun to me as the original, it is still more fun that most games.

This is another Hosted Game that goes completely off the beaten track with its own mindset. So, another caveat here that while it's not what I was seeking when I started playing Hosted Games, I believe it achieves its goals well of providing a progressive strategic gambling experience.

You enter a casino with 5 floors, and are given some tokens. Each floor becomes progressively more strategic.

Floor 1 is purely random, with games like roulette or lotteries. Higher floors include things from Blackjack to poker all the way to a variant of Risk.

I get easily addicted to things (and so do my family) so I generally do my best not to enjoy gambling, so I was at odds with the game's desire to be entertaining to me. Instead, I tried to maximize my success.

The game is like a reverse casino, because you have an inherent luck trait that gives you an edge over the house. Once I realized that, it was easy to get past the first few floors. The reason casinos work so well is that the law of large numbers says that the longer people play, the closer their winning average is to the theoretical average. And every casino game is designed so that the house, on average, wins. That's why high rollers get so many perks; the longer they stay in the casino, the more likely they are to lose it all.

In this game, you have the edge. So, for instance, I can just go to roulette and pick any bet and blindly play over and over again until it gets high enough, then increase the bet and repeat. The standard deviation isn't 0, so you can run out of money, but there's a bank with infinite loan amounts with no interest, just repaying.

Blackjack was easier since I learned how to deal it for a fake school casino event. Poker became a little harder; it's 7 card poker (2 in your hand, 5 on the table) and you can pick the best hand of 5 cards, so flushes almost always won.

Commander, on 4th floor, is the one that really got me. I wanted to rush through since I had been playing an hour longer than I had planned to, and it has a system where you have to guarantee you know whether a certain hand will win or lose, as well as winning 3 out of 5 hands each round. I eventually realized a way to guarantee I'd know.

Each floor has minimal story, with an option or two to get a little text. I did like the building up of the story over time, and the shape of the plot arc is solid.

There are essentially no advantages to the text format here; seeing the cards would have helped a lot. I realize that the graphical gambling game market is already heavily saturated, but if you take an overly common game format and remove helpful features, it doesn't bring extreme joy. IF often thrives when it does what graphics can't or allows much more content than the artists of a graphical game could be paid to create (and that is achieved here in the narrative portions, just not the rest).

The progression worked well for me, although like I said commander was pretty hard for me. I don't think that the author could have done better with the goal in mind (to make a text-only progressive gambling casino with a focus on games and a de-emphasis on narrative).

This is the series I didn't know I needed. I never was a big 'military' guy outside of a book I read as a kid called "Arms and Armor" that had pictures of English, well, arms and armor throughout history; I used to use it to look up what weapons in D&D manuals and David Eddings books looked like (like Lochaber Axes).

But I always thought things like rank and chain of command were interesting. One of my closer coworkers is a marine veteran and talks about things in the military a lot, and my ex-wife's grandfather was a lieutenant colonel when he died, which I found out is what most officers retire at.

This game really helped explain everything a lot. Now I know that doesn't sound like a resounding endorsement, but one thing I like about really peak media is how it teaches you something about the world or makes you think that it's teaching you about something (a non-real example would be like Mistborn's system; a more realistic example would be Moby Dick, which I enjoy quite a bit). This game made me feel like I really was an officer, climbing up the ranks.

It is a continuation of the last game in the series. You engage in a series of serious battles, and can gain temporary authority even up to lieutenant colonel. There are two main branches, and competent women make a significant appearance (unfortunately, my character, while interested in the spy woman, failed to make a good impression on her, to the point that she hated me).

I was dismayed to import my character from the first game only to be essentially told "Your character will fail. Make a new one." I appreciated the warning though. And it's not wrong; I had made an uncharismatic, boneheaded soldier who mastered individual warfare.

Once again I died at the end; once again I didn't mind due to the save and the realistic circumstances (many battles are lost due to random chance or poor decisions).

I'm looking forward to the next game. I heard the fourth game is on ice, and read the authors's Jan 2025 post about it, which puts a lot of things into more clear context. I definitely wish him the best!

The art for this series has been fun so far as well.