Reviews by MathBrush

It's always hard to rate games in foreign languages, because how much of your complaints are due to game design and how much due to your own ineptness in the language in question?

I felt dumb playing this game. In it, you are a person on a mission, wearing a red scarf, having just come out of a train station. You have a mission you need to complete!

One thing that would have helped a lot would be reading the game's extensive instructions on Itch, which include the command 'think about' (here 'penser a _____'). This is required for many puzzles in the game. I don't think the command is listed in-game; trying AIDE or INFO didn't work.

The game itself is actually pretty polished. The train station is relatively small. Time progresses every turn, and trains come in and out, with different endings happening based on different timings.

I was just replaying the game to see if I got things wrong, and I wonder if I just deeply misunderstood things or if there is a typo. In the walkthrough, it tells you to (Spoiler - click to show)Look at the Bench in the first room. But there's no bench in the room description. Other rooms do have a bench in the room description. Is there some kind of hint that tells you 'there should be a bench here too?'

Overall, I thought the puzzles and execution, once understood through the walkthrough, were cool, but I had great difficulty. If a francophone player wants to comment and explain what I missed I'd be happy to adjust my rating!

I was pleased when going through the competition to see a familiar name I knew and which I associated with quality games, and this game was in fact well put-together.

It's brief and designed for beginners, and as such uses sparse text (which would be great for ESL players or youths). The story is interesting: you are from space and coming down to earth to investigate lifeforms. You explore a diner that seems futuristic from our perspective (but still near-future; it has automated systems for refrigeration and cooking, which probably already exists).

The tutorial was very helpful, giving details not only on the game itself but the genre as a whole. Puzzles were simple but non-trivial, and I enjoyed the environmental storytelling.

In this Javascript parser game, you play as a blind professor with a guide that shows you around, describing things for you.

This is a great way to establish a parser voice. Furthermore, the setup (you, an archaeology professor, discover a hidden secret area in a museum) is pretty cool.

I did have several troubles, though. The parser seems to be disconnected from the main thread of parser history, and commands like "NORTH" or "N" don't work ("GO NORTH" does, though). Sometimes it didn't accept my commands; to get VERBLIST to work, I'd have to type it twice in a row. Text was often repeated in places it shouldn't be, like discovering an object over and over or coming into a room from another direction. Sometimes you had to hit spacebar to continue and sometimes not, making it easier to stumble over typing.

A lot of these issues can be corrected by testing, but it lists 3 testers and that it had a couple of months of testing, so it might just be a difference of opinion on what polish in a game looks like or maybe the author just hasn't seen the capabilities of most modern parsers. A lot of this is coded from scratch though so that's pretty impressive.

This game is the first parser game by Lamp Post Projects, whose other works that I played have been watercolor-illustrated fantasy choice-based games, often with mystery elements.

This game is in the same setting, I believe. You play as a gnome working at a museum for a kingdom that recently received a crate of artifacts from a neighboring kingdom who had stolen some of your works. The artifacts are broken and/or disassembled.

Your job is to take a list of artifacts, find the pieces corresponding to them, assemble them, label them, and display them. The puzzles are not overly difficult and generally very on-the-nose, but there were a couple of nice twists and the overall interaction mechanism used the core parser game cycle of X-TAKE-DROP/USE very well.

The game is well-implemented, and I rarely if ever had to fight the parser.

Story-wise, the lore felt consistent and relevant to the game and was parceled out in manageable chunks. The kingdoms and characters felt realistic, and I could identify with the protagonist through suspension of disbelief.

Andrew Schultz, renowned wordplay game writer, has recently been adding images to his games which I think has been a great improvement.

This game is spoonerism-based, like many of the author's other games. You wander from place to place, finding important objects and transposing the beginning sounds of the words, unlocking new places to go to or having an effect on the environment.

The plot is more episodic than narrative, focused on helping people out or bringing items together.

This one felt well-organized and the art seemed more detailed than before. It had two puzzles that I struggled with, which broke the easier pattern of 'here are these obvious words' with 'guess these additional words'. But it was harder in a good way; I wonder if I could have gotten them right without help.

There were 2 or 3 minor inconsistencies; a map said it exited east when it meant west, and a picture said something was right when it meant left. But overall it was satisfying.

Like several other games in this archaeology-themed competition, this has a mash-up of different cultures, with a Sherpa guiding us into an Egypt-like crypt that includes Meso-American iconography.

It uses what seems to be a custom system used once before by this author (MAD Candy Interactive Fiction Studio). It has several good features (visually nice-looking, can save etc.) but could use some more strong features (like being able to easily repeat commands).

The game centers around the same puzzles 4 or so times in a row with slight variations each time. I was surprised that the difficulty didn't increase and that there wasn't as much variety. There was a hard puzzle for me, but that's because I didn't examine all scenery and had trouble with the parser.

I did have some struggle with the parser, especially with things like the piano keys (the F key, for instance, can't be called F or Key or F Key but has to be called F Bone).

Overall, I feel pretty neutral about the game. There's a consistent plot but not a strong plot arc; there's helpful parser features but some basic parser elements that are weak; there are interesting puzzles but most are rendered moot by using the same elements over and over. So, pretty much neutral.

I liked this game a lot more than the first two in the series. Those leaned heavily on anime tropes and picked some of ones I don't enjoy as much mixed in with the ones that do.

This entry keeps the best part of the series (good action scenes, strong themes and well-distinguished characters) and less of the bad parts. It also adds new mechanics.

The first third or so of the game finishes off Samurai of Hyuga 2 with a detective scenario. I love mystery/detective games so that colored my perception of the rest of the game in a positive light. It has an unusual pattern; I've made classifications of IF mystery games before and written about them in posts, but this is a little different. IF mystery games usually have one of the following ways to model deduction (this is copied from a different post of mine):
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 game is most similar to 3, except instead of one quiz, there are a couple of dozen mini-quizzes to see if you're paying attention.

Sometimes the logic of the author wasn't clear to me, so I used a guide on and off, both here and to keep my attunement high later.

I felt more engaged in the game because of this. The subject matter was very heavy, but the interactions were more enjoyable than other entries in the series.

The second half of the game involves you confronting the next Demon in the series, a powerful general of an army. At this point, I got a bit confused, as I was reading in bits and pieces over a week. I somehow got roped into training soldiers for a competition, my ninja companion went away, and one of the general's samurai killed three other samurai, and I don't know why (probably because I didn't accompany them when given the choice). So I was lost a bit.

But, I ended up losing my nerve as a ronin while also training a bunch of new people. The goal became to identify each person's nature, what they needed, and to strengthen up.

Again, I liked this section a lot. Again, my mind wasn't always in sync with the authors, so I used a guide sometimes (but I do that with a ton of parser games, so...). I liked the ending.

This episode really turned around the series for me. I said that I wouldn't have continued past Samurai of Hyuga 2 if I weren't reviewing all Hosted Games, and that's true, but since I did try it, I'm glad.

This game is a parser game written in QuestJS and entered in the 2026 Text Adventure Literacy Jam.

In it, you enter a strange villa with a number of rooms accessible one at a time, each with a diorama or statue representing a stage in human progress (from hunters and gatherers to mathematics). Gameplay mostly consists of finding something missing and assembling it, or finding a code and applying it elsewhere. Doing so unlocks the next room and part of one meta-puzzle.

Overall, the concept is an intriguing one and one that has been explored in a satisfying way in other games like The Edifice, though this game has a unique take.

That writing is not bad. I poked at the code at one point and there is a version in German as well, so I suspect it may have been translated at one point, but there's no sign of that really in the version I read.

Why the low score? To me, the parser was just a lot to wrestle with. I constantly felt like I was typing the wrong things. A lot of nouns were missing synonyms (especially a headboard that was prominently mentioned and part of a major puzzle). The author decided to eschew compass directions, so doors had to be typed out instead, but you can't ENTER DOOR or GO DOOR, you have to USE DOOR, except when you're in a room outside the main hall, you don't USE DOOR you USE HALL.

I eventually had to download the game and pop open the code to figure out how to get to the ending. Each individual puzzle has some nice creativity to it, it's just hard to figure out how to deal with the parser. This game would have benefited from more testing and feedback, but it's also the kind of game it's hard to get testers for, which is kind of a vicious loop. The overall plot felt a bit missing as well; while there was an overall progression, nothing much is explained or even hinted at. That's kind of par for the course for old-school puzzlers, though, so it's not a big complaint.

I always look forward to Daniel Stelzer's games now because they've basically become like Ryan Veeder, in that both have a good track record of consistently putting out well-polished games with interesting mechanics that are easy to finish and have a wide variety of settings.

The setup in this game is a kind of medieval alchemical heist, which made me realize several of the games in this competition have similar themes, which made me look up and discover the theme is 'archaeology'. The mechanic in the game is an object that vanishes things (discovering what that exactly means is the major crux of the game).

The map is compact, with most of it forming a 3x3 square. Elementals guard the different parts of the map, requiring some ingenuity in how to deal with them.

Overall I found the game solid and good for beginners while still being fun for experienced players (one optional puzzle was too hard for me as I hadn't experimented enough, but it was, fortunately, optional). To me the only flaw (if it can be called that) was that in my subjective opinion it stopped just short of greatness in story and mechanics. I feel like if it had just one more puzzle in the main areas and one more paragraph at the end with some kind of new interesting info or twist or hook then it would have been awesome. Even without that je ne sais quoi, it's one of the best games I've played this year.

This game was part of the Text Adventure Literacy Jam.

It's written in the Thinbasic Adventure Builder, and is quite a bit better of an experience than most Basic-written download-only windows-only adventure games I've played: shortcuts like X and I are recognized, for instance, and there's a character that can move around as well as context-dependent hints.

It's still a bit rough, but I only ran into one or two actions I really struggled with (one of the last actions of the game is to (Spoiler - click to show)POUR VIAL ON PEDESTAL but I kept trying (Spoiler - click to show)POUR MERCURY ON PEDESTAL, POUR MERCURY IN PEDESTAL, PUT VIAL IN PEDESTAL, POUR VIAL, PUT VIAL ON PEDESTAL, etc.).

The map is a bit confusing, especially as magical connections open up that lead in circuitous loops.

Story-wise, you're in search of the elixir of life and have to find ingredients in a monastery. Puzzles typically revolve around getting info for passwords or codes in one room and using them in another (like asking a character about 4 items and then combining the ones they tell you to).

The writing and plot felt very standard Catholicism-influenced fantasy, like the Deryni books or parts of David Eddings, but with a lot of elements that were both hyperspecific and generic. Orders and symbols were alluded to and not explained, characters were introduced but not commented on or involved, and there wasn't a clear progression or escalation of story. All in all, it reminded me of AI-generated plotlines and text that had some human editing mixed in, not necessarily because AI was used (it might not have been), but perhaps because AI was trained on a lot of stories similar to this one.