Ratings and Reviews by Jeremy Freese

You are a zombie, out to infect other zombies. If you know how zombies in general infect other zombies, you've got the key verb for this one. Which has the advantage that you know what you are maybe supposed to do with each new person you encounter, with differing results.

If you pick Quest games at random, it's kind of like watching a children's circus in that there is always suspense about whether anything -- no matter how basic -- is actually going to work, and so when simple things actually do work, it's a bit of a happy event. This game profits for that because ordinary stuff went okay and it maintains a nice spirit about it. I was sort of rooting for it, although after getting suddenly killed a couple times that was enough.

The game doesn't aspire to much in terms of the writing, but the one-liners has are not bad.

Highly imaginative horror game that takes place in a girl's school.

I played this game with a friend while driving on a cross-country trip, with her reading the output and then us discussing the commands. For that purpose, this game was *absolutely delightful*, and maybe the highlight of the entire car trip. Would I have enjoyed it as much if I had played it on my own? Probably not. To be honest, I think I would have been turned off by some aspects of the random combat system and the prose at the beginning. Which would have been too bad, as there is a lot to this game and it repays getting into it. So, if you are in the mood to approach a horror game with a bemused and open spirit, this game could be great fun. Otherwise, you might want to wait for that mood to strike before taking this on.

(About 3 minutes to play.) This game is a political satire in which you are an oppressed white male trapped on a college campus with several religious books and a lighter. The title indicates what happens when you burn one of them; the fate of what happens with the others represents the perceived moral inconsistency that is the basic satirical content of the game.

Not consistent with my politics, experience on college campuses, or experience with individuals of Islamic faith, but the author does deserve praise for using the interactive fiction form toward conveying a larger social message, which is surprisingly rare given the possibilities of the medium.

Still, here is what I would have loved to see from this particular author in this game: a "xyzzy" command that, when implemented, changed the setting from a college campus and the title from "Burn the Koran and You Die" to having the setting be a secret cabal convention of the IF Old Ones and the title be "Criticize Inform 7 and You Die." Please, implement this.

The "genre" being games with one implemented, but repeated, action. Imagine Pick Up the Phone Book And Die, only where you don't die, or at least not until the tenth time you've picked up the phone booth. Not my thing--and apparently from the one-star review, also not the author's, which might raise the question of why he posted it--but IF is a world of varied tastes.

The game could have been coded in 20 minutes; the author might have instead spent those 20 minutes learning new capabilities available in the I7 documentation.

I know that ever since the rise of chessboxing there have been those who clamor for work that combines professional wrestling and interactive fiction, but this looks like a fake entry.

No plot, so nothing to recount in that regard. Instead, it's a screen gimmick you reach in about a minute's play. Original and made me chuckle, which made it a minute well spent. It crashed for me in Windows Frotz but played in WinFrotz.

This is a very promising debut game whose competition version was undermined by several problems in implementation. The game however is imaginative, ambitiously plotted, and interestingly written, so it's an already enjoyable experience with especially strong potential if the author does a post-competition release.

I mean, if you go in appreciating this is the first game by somebody who is maybe 15 years old, it is a cute experience. It also made me smile to carry the button around and win in different rooms. I can't give one star to something that only took five minutes and had me amused, even if it was campy amusement.

A joke that's only meaningful if you followed interactive fiction newsgroups a few years ago. I didn't. I will leave the question of its hilarity up to those Who Were There. The game did leave me wanting to know whether TADS or Inform could be used to have the parser replace what the player was typing with other letters.

And, as a result, is not worth looking at. Although I view it as more of a conceptual experiment than the pure troll endeavor others do. I mean, it is an interesting question, what would the worst IF game be like? This game would represent a coherent view of the answer under the constraint that it had to be something one could code in under fifteen minutes.

If you skim Buried in Shoes and cast the author as trying to write interactive fiction's answer to Schindler's List or Night, then, no, you won't like it. If you appreciate elegant, spare writing about loss, memory, and the dilemmas of the unforgivable, then Buried in Shoes provides a unique interactive experience that is brief yet sticks with you afterward.