Reviews by MathBrush

This is a ZX spectrum game that I played on an online emulator. It worked great; the only issue I had was that I have the habit of typing L for LOOK whenever I want to see if a room changed, but typing L in this game randomly scrambles your game by putting you in a random room with random objects.

Because of that, I used a walkthrough for everything after the first area.

You play as someone trying to help find some lost children. To your dismay, you soon find evidence that they were kidnapped, and you have to go on a dangerous easter egg hunt to find them.

The game has a helpful vocabulary list to help you get around, and has some classic tricky puzzles (like an object floating in a nearly-empty barrel that you just can't quite reach). Some of the puzzles rely on things like examining objects twice and waiting for events to happen, and quite a few have adventure-game logic where you know you have to do something but couldn't really predict the result (like the use of the ice cream, for instance).

Overall a solid, shorter adventure thoroughly grounded in Spectrum and Spectrum-era gaming nostalgia. For fans of the era, it will be a real treat. For people used to recent parser games, it may be less guided or player-friendly then what they're accustomed to.

This game has a lot of interesting ideas (the phone dialing was especially interesting) but has deeply broken implementation.

It's a one room game but only the first time you look is everything described; after that, if you want to know what's in the room, you have to scroll back up to the first look you gave, at all other times it just gives a terse, unhelpful description. Parts of the room are implemented that aren't mentioned in descriptions. The floor is covered in 5 or 6 groups of things called 'objects' but if you 'x objects' the first thing that it defaults to are objects that aren't supposed to exist until later in the game and are described as missing and not visible even then. The help system asks you to type in keywords, but 90% of the time if you do it asks you to be more specific but doesn't give you a hint on how to do so. At one point you gain an object that let you unlock something, but UNLOCK doesn't work, you just have to OPEN the thing while holding the object. There is dirty underwear whose printed name is dirty socks but in messages its called dirty unmentionables, and if you TAKE it it describes you taking it but it spawns back into the hamper it came from.

So the clear issue here is practice with Inform. These kind of issues can be ironed out over time. I like to spend about equal amounts coding and testing/beta testing, because it takes a long time to figure this stuff out.

A lot of the actual material in the game is pretty good. The setting is creative and the numbers you can dial on the phone have some fun and unexpected responses. So all this needs is some more 'time in the oven'.

Someone in my life dislikes cheese, pickles, and mustard.

If I spent a long time making a beautiful cheese-filled pickle dipped in mustard and presented it to him, what would be the desired reaction?

This game is a kind of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version of a Zork knock-off. On the left side, it has text resembling a parser game. On the right side, it has running commentary by two people playing the game. The only way to control it is through a bar of commands at the bottom.

The game also seems to have taken a wide slew of complaints about interactive fiction games and put them into a game to make it as irritating as possible. And I do mean intentionally; the author is quite aware of the frustration involved, from the name 'moon logic' to in-game comments.

The game uses timed text, a famously hated IF concept, and uses it in a way that doesn't contribute to the game meaningfully. It has a 'fast' text setting which is still fairly slow. The pseudo-parser text is not scrollable and doesn't have a back button. It later on adds shaky text effects, zooming in and out effects and rotating effects. These can be turned off.

The menu is intentionally obfuscated and basically turns the whole game into a giant tower of hanoi problem, reiterating smaller solutions in the same order over and over to recreate even basic tasks. Only 4 or so commands appear at once but disappear as you use them, so to get to important commands you have to repeat a ritual of examining, looking, and inventory. There is no choice on where to go, only a 'go' option, so you have to limit yourself by closing exits and such to move around. You can only take and drop items in a very specific order.

I felt my left eyelid twitching by the time I was done (I was also playing Violent Delights at the same time, a game that asks you to wait for a long time while playing).

So, this is a game where I recognize the craftmanship and creativity but did not experience joy through play, much like Targhairm. It is clear that great talent and work went into it, and the puzzle logic is quite complex and parts of figuring out what to do next was enjoyable, but the apparent goal of frustrating and bedeviling the player was also achieved.

Edit:
I should mention that it looks like I missed some features in Moon Logic like screen reader support which helps ameliorate some of the more frustrating aspects and lets you pick between the 'frustration' version and a version that lets you focus more on the clever puzzles. I did eventually figure out the UI features at one point but I recommend trying the screen reader support both on and off to see what you prefer.

I heard a lot of people praise this game before I played it, and I can see why. It's a nice-looking Twine game with multiple graphics that set a creepy mood, different-colored links to distinguish between 'informative' options, cycling options that affect the branching of the game, and 'next page' type links.

The story is unsettling and branches a lot. You play as a girl who, together with her friend, visits some local 'witch girls' to try to get boyfriends. When you're rejected, you have to cook up a boyfriend on your own.

The different branches play out very dissimilarly, so it's worth replaying at least a few endings. There is a flowchart after playing through once (around 20-30 minutes for me) that lets you see exactly where branch points happen and let you hop to them, which is a nice feature. In all, this is probably one of the most player-friendly games I've seen, and makes me feel like the author put a lot of care into this.

I liked the ending line of all the endings, and the way it tied it all together.

This game had extensive strong profanity, so I ran it on a backup browser I have with a filter rather than skip it altogether.

This game is choice-based and has a recurring inventory mechanic where you can put different objects into your backpack. Your backpack has a grid with a fixed number of spaces and you can try to fit different objects into those spaces. Some are huge, others are tiny.

In the story, you are a rage-filled fast food worker who gets fired. Everyone hates you and makes you feel like a loser, which you might be, depending on your choices. You get taken through a portal to a new world, though, with a new chance to start over. You have a couple of chances to bring things back and forth.

The characterizations in the game are clear and strong, and the writing does a good job of conveying a constant sense of your life being on the verge of collapse. There is a married character that hits on you (as a (Spoiler - click to show)proxy) which was appropriately disturbing and weird, fitting the setting.

Then, it kind of ends mid-story beat, promising possible future sequels right when we are about to get answers.

So, it would be fun to see what happens next. I liked the backpack system.

Just as a heads up to readers, I have a personal bias in favor of mystery games.

This is the third thesleuthacademy I've played. I've come to expect a long exploration section where everything needs to be checked out more or less in order, followed by a quiz on whether you solved the mystery correctly or not.

This game mixes it up a bit from the last two, with some non-linearity in both exploration and interviews (so you can follow up on hints from one person to another). I did peek at the hints where I thought of multiple solutions to one puzzle and didn't want to waste valuable ifcomp time on the wrong one.

The characters here are also more developed than in the past two games. They were mostly distinct and interesting, outside of a couple of background characters. It's fun to see the author improve in both writing and programming in such a short time.

This is a classic murder mystery set in a 1937 manor house where a body is found with a dagger in its back. You have to investigate the cast of characters, including servants and family, to discover the murderer.

I got the mystery mostly right but completely botched the motive. I thought [spoiler]The L in the letter was the brother, and that the zoologist was in love with him and wanted to off the victim to get the brother some money, not knowing what the will contained.[/spoiler]

Overall, I enjoyed this, and if I had any advice for the future, it'd be to continue the development in characters and interactions. I loved the unusual bits in this, like the [spoiler]pufferfish and snake meat[/spoiler]. While the interaction was more engaging this time, there is still a lot of buildup with examining a ton of things in a row that could be a little more fun, I'm just not sure how. Good game overall.

I want to preface this by saying ahead of time that I have a very specific framing of this game in mind:

I don't think the author thinks this game is realistic, or something that should happen. I read once a theory that our dreams are a place for our brain to try out ideas that are forbidden in real life, things that couldn't happen (like flying or all teeth falling out in class) or shouldn't happen (like kissing someone we really shouldn't). It's not that we subconsciously want those things, it's just a way to see 'what if'.

This feels like a 'what if' scenario to me, a chance to explore an alternate reality where we (or characters we control) do something we could never do in reality. The game itself even explicitly states that at one point, that the characters are expressing feelings the author has in reality to see how it would feel.

So, with that in mind, this is a game about taking your dead abusive mother, cremating her, baking her ashes into marijuana brownies, and eating her one piece at a time while calling friends.

It's clear this is a fantasy or wish-fulfillment scenario--real cremations are around 5 lbs, which is a ton of food (there is a recipe for pound cake which is 1 lb eggs, 1 lb flour, 1 lb butter, and 1 lb sugar, and it makes two 9x5 loaves. So 5 lbs of ashes mixed into enough ingredients to dilute it would be some really big brownies). Similarly, having 9 close friends you can call about and share your biggest traumas with is something also unrealistic for most people.

So what is the point of this scenario? To see what it would be like if you really let loose. What if the person who's hurt you the most passed away, and you literally destroyed their entire earthly existence while deconstructing every painful memory of them?

It's fruitless to say 'you shouldn't do that' or to explain why this philosophy is wrong or how it goes against my personal beliefs. It's clear the author thinks it's wrong! Very clear that one should not eat their mother. Mother-cannibalism goes against his beliefs as well. But that's not what this game is really about.

I wonder if writing this out was therapeutic. There are a few scenarios in my life that I know both can't and should never happen, but I have to wonder what it would be like, to explore those possibilities in the written word.

I found that mobile (in landscape mode) worked best for audio, with most lines in the game being voice acted.

I thought the hub and spoke style of this game was cool, particularly how you reached the end credits and had to rewind each time but the game still kept track and commented on how many paths you had taken and crossed out used ones.

This looks like it was made for a school project, as it mentions a Portland State University interactive fiction course. It seems more polished than most games I've seen made as part of a course, so I feel like the author put some real heart into it.

The structure is innovative, if somewhat clunky at times. You take a personality test at first by giving a list of options and then have to type CHOOSE [option name], rather than hyperlinks or typing a number. The game then lets you view one of four different characters with quests. They are all pretty different; one is about assembling a machine by fetching a list of parts, one is combat where the more you practice a skill the more you improve, one is about fate and destiny and is a word maze, and the fourth involves breaking into a vault. Dying in interesting ways unlocks achievements. Each quest can be completed relatively quickly (maybe 10-15 minutes). Once all are completed, you can view a final scenario with many branching endings.

The setting is sketched out in a diverse pieces, each piece interesting but somewhat hard to connect together. There's advanced technology, strong magic, classic fantasy races like goblins and demons, a magical tower with a fractured timeline visible to the naked eye (or something similar). To me, the setting was a well-done but unexciting play on familiar tropes, with the Fateweaver being the coolest character to me. The mechanics, though, seemed novel and fun. I enjoyed how varied the game was, and the unusual opening and the branching endings. I think that's very creative.

Okay, let's get one thing out of the way. Getting a math PhD has rarely proven to be a useful choice in my life, so I wanted to try it here. But the integral is wrong! The two curves intersect at whole numbers (-1 and 3). Integrating 7-2x gives 7x-2x^2, so plugging in the bounds gives whole numbers. Integratings (x-2)^2 gives 1/3(x-2)^3, and neither bound gives a multiple of 3 when plugged in, so the answer should have 3 in the denominator. I thought there were supposed to be some impossible questions, like Baldi's Basics, but all the others were possible.

Anyway, this game made me think of 5 other pieces of media as I played: Deltarune, for the character creation screen; Ezekiel 16, for being a baby cast out into the wide world; an evil version of Phantom Tollbooth, with all of its unusual and allegorical characters; No End House, the creepypasta, for its succession of rooms that take an increasing toll on our protagonist; and Duke Bluebeard's Castle, my favorite opera and one where Bluebeard unlocks seven doors to show his wife that become increasingly disturbing.

In this game, you have to obtain seven keys from various challenges in order to restore a lighthouse. This world is weird; at one point you're a baby that walks around and grows bigger in seconds, and at another you have a mom you grew up with who raised you. So a lot of things are allegorical.

Each key that you get requires something different. One has a quiz; another requires you to get closer to someone. Many involve self-reflection of some kind. The pattern breaks down a bit at the end when things get more hectic.

Overall, I loved the visuals and the feel of the story. Much of the story was impactful; slowing down the text at the end kind of lessened the impact for me, as if the author wasn't sure that the text alone would be weighty enough. I think it was! It was also a lesson for me because I'm working on a short twine game and had imagined slowing down the most dramatic moments.

The game uses multimedia in an effective way, and overall gives off a highly polished feel. The writing is the kind I would think of if someone said 'What's an example of good writing in a recent IFComp?'

I enjoyed the setting of this game, as I've recently been rewatching Zhen Huan Zhuan/Empresses in the Palace and some of the elements of here are reminiscent of it for me (as the only palace c-drama I've watched): the political maneuvering, having parents in court who have lost favor, upstart generals, etc.

You play as, well, an ancient chinese poet. You are visited at home by the Emperor's most trusted servant, his head eunuch (who I picture as Su Peisheng from the show). Your poems have accidentally spread from your home to the court, and the emperor would like you to come and deliver a poem at a banquet.

Once there, you are encouraged to view the palace around you, with several options on where to look and what to do. Each option can inspire your poetry later on.

You then have the opportunity to deliver your poem, drawing on your sources but still having freedom to alter lines as you will. What you say will lead to multiple endings.

I liked my poem I could make. I focused on nature-based meditative thoughts, although the fourth line I couldn't get to fit into my self-imposed aesthetic. Either it or my fifth line were interpreted in a way that I couldn't quite follow. I thought I had opposed someone earlier, yet my poem was interpreted otherwise due to a subtle nuance. I think on replaying I could likely figure out a pattern to the responses, but I feel happy with my own journey. I think I got ending 18/23, which shows this is highly replayable.

I finished it faster than the listed hour, but that's because I was drawn into and fully engaged with the game.