Reviews by MathBrush

This game was very different than the usual hosted game. It eschews a lot of the conventions; if there was a book on 'don't do this in interactive fiction', it would break a lot of those rules. Actually there is a book like that and it contains Graham Nelson's Player's Bill of Rights (originally for parser games):
1) Not to be killed without warning
2) Not to be given horribly unclear hints
3) To be able to win without experience of past lives
4) To be able to win without knowledge of future events
5) Not to have the game closed off without warning
6) Not to need to do unlikely things
7) Not to need to do boring things for the sake of it
8) Not to have to type exactly the right verb
9) To be allowed reasonable synonyms
10) To have a decent parser
11) To have reasonable freedom of action
12) Not to depend much on luck
13) To be able to understand a problem once it is solved
14) Not to be given too many red herrings
15) To have a good reason why something is impossible
16) Not to need to be American to understand hints
17) To know how the game is getting on

This game breaks about half of them, but maybe some rules are meant to be broken. It unabashedly presents the player with a 'gauntlet' style game, where almost all choices lead to death, and you have to go to a savepoint (which is provided once a chapter) every time you die. Except it's possible to get into 'dead man walking' scenarios where every option from your save point kills you, and there are items that you have to have from a shop at the beginning of the game (which is very easy to miss as you have to guess the correct option out of 5 to get to it) and pick the right items (which you need to gamble a little to get all of) and make sure not to use the item at the several useful parts of the game where it could come up, repeatedly requiring you to play the entire game.

On the one hand, it makes a 100K word game punch above its weightclass as each playthrough takes a lot longer. On the other hand, it's pretty frustrating, and I quit after navigating a maze one death at a time (where the options are like 'left, right middle' and all but one of them kill you and send you to the back of the chapter) and reaching a city with a lot of options, only to realize that every option lead to death since I didn't buy the correct option from the first chapter (yet again).

Story-wise, it's an old-school British exploration game rooted in traditional archaeological action story tropes, like brutish savages who are technophobic cannibals and dashing adventurers that accompany you through the jungle.

I did read some of the code after I died, and I was close to the end. Parts of the game were quite funny; there is a monkey involved with a lot of choices, many of which accidentally or purposefully injure the monkey. After accidentally getting into randomized rpg combat with the monkey, I tried to dance with the beautiful boxing champion lady on my team, only for her to say:

"I'm sorry Jack but watching you beat that monkey senseless in the middle of the dancefloor hasn't really put me in the mood for a dance. I guess it's a lesson for us all really. We think we are better than the animals, but I wonder if we aren't worse?"

You apologise.

Overall, it was a fun and wild ride, but I just didn't enjoy having to start from the beginning so many times (at least 10-12 playthroughs from the start and 20+ restarts from chapter saves). Too many of the choices were just 'go left or go right'. This was all completely intentional, so I think the author has completed their full vision and doesn't need to change anything, but I like not repeating several parts over and over without variation.

This is the fifth game in the Samurai of Hyuga series.

I wrote a lot of this review in my head when I was 90% of the way done with the game, so I'll get that out of the way first and then talk about the ending.

I think I liked this one the best so far. One and two had too much of the suggestive content towards your minor charge, and four was super depressing. Three was my second favorite of the batch.

This one feels like the author has finally settled in and figured out what kind of story he wants to write. The ronin MC is sad but moves forward, is tortured and has lost hope but somehow continues on anyway, which is nice.

You spend a lot of this one lugging around the comatose body of your young shugenja companion. I liked how instead of focusing on gross sexual comments towards a minor it found other ways for the MC to be obnoxious/boundary breaking (like trying to clean out earwax). It made me think that the author should just go back and edit out all the crap in the first two games to make it more like this (and maybe to fix the Japanese; it might make sense to pay a native speaker a few hundred dollars to go through and redo the chapter names of all 6 games).

The game has a lot of adult content between the actual adults. I made choices that led to sexual encounters with Toshie because I felt like it fit my character, but because I don't enjoy fictional depictions of sex I skipped past them (they were very lengthy). Other mature content in the game includes frequent suicidal reasoning, torture and humiliation, descriptions of gore and rape (and the consequences of rape).

The main storyline is split in 2. In the first, you are suffering some kind of psychosis after your experience in hell and are trapped by the Silent Lady. You have to break out and then break into her stronghold to try to save the shugenja.

In the second half, you encounter nuns and christianity and have to deal with them and zombies while also being confronted with the concept of forgiveness and redemption (which you have an extreme adverse reaction to).

I liked the depiction of Christianity in the book, as a Christian. It felt very authentic. The MC hates it and doesn't believe in it and is disturbed by its teachings, but it generally sticks very close to the original source material and its believers seem sincere. So it's like the opposite of a straw man; the game kind of debates Christianity but in its full-fledged real form rather than the superficial or sophomoric takes many fantasy games set up as an evil state religion.

The game at this point has dropped almost all pretense of interactivity. At this point each choice is just for flavor text or for getting achievements, with some occasional consent choices for romance. For this specific story, I think it's a good choice. The author didn't want a branching story, he wanted to tell this story, and it feels engaging on the story alone.

Unfortunately, the last 10% of the game did sour my mood. I thought the author had maybe grown as a person and dropped the sexualizing minors idea in the last decade. And that still may be true! But the last chunk (and one fragment earlier on) has your minor companion create a fantasy world where they're older and in love with a romanticized version of you. Now that's not bad at all (when I was 14 I had a crush on Scully from X-Files, having a crush on an older person isn't weird at that age), but it does make me feel like the author has seen the relationship between you and the kid as a romance all along.

I probably won't play the sixth one for a while, because these books, since they have low interactivity, have a big chapter count (25 per most games) and take a ton of time to play (I've averaged around 10 days per book). So I'll take a break and try some others before coming back to this.

This is the second game in the (bug)folk series, although it is absolutely not necessary to have played the other one (they have common themes but different characters and continuity).

This is an ancient mythological story in the bug world about a musician bug with the prowess to play so beautifully that they can affect the world around them (it reminded me of the Anansi stories, or Navajo stories, or the Panchatantra).

Gameplay is ritualistic; it reminds me of the first Twine game I enjoyed, You Are Standing at a Crossroads, where you start in the center of a cross-shaped map and have to fulfill a quest in each of the four directions.

In this case, you have to string your bugdolin with various strings in order to convince 4 great musicians to follow you. As well, you have to solve a variety of puzzles. These vary from 'learning a system' to 'leap of intuition' but are mild enough to be solvable by most players (especially if using the hints).

Overall, a satisfying experience, good marriage of story and gameplay.

This is a bunch of wordpuzzle games within a thin shopping-based story trenchcoat.

The game has 26 word puzzles of varying types for you to solve, many of them food-related. My grandmother, around the turn of the millenium, always had fun puzzle booklets in her house, like crossword puzzles but with more variety in them. This felt like those books. You have things like anagrams, finding hidden words, arranging syllables, cryptogram (which I just used a solver for, since I don't like the process all that much), etc. There was one that completely stymied me even with both hints and I had to look at what other people used to solve it (the true/false puzzle).

There is an overarching story: you're shopping in the store, and there is an app you can use to get discounts on different objects. Each puzzle you solve gives you 25% off that object (although I think you get a different amount for the very first puzzle).

Every 5 puzzles you solve, you get additional chunks of story. The story segments reminded me a bit of Andrew Schulz's wordplay story segments but I can't lay my finger on why. Maybe one part where there's a know-it-all that you show up, and another where someone kind of takes advantage of you and you let it happen (both things that happen pretty often in Andrew Schultz games).

Now why 5 stars if I thought the story was thin? Because I feel like it wasn't accidentally so or lazily so, I feel like the game had a goal on what it wanted to be (a puzzle game) and succeeded at that goal very well in a way that I personally enjoyed.

I didn't play any of the Spring Thing games until after Spring Thing finished, to get a little more neutrality. This one was one of the winners, so I was interested in playing it.

I had a bit of trepidation going in because I've historically struggled with complex timed murder games in IF; I'm think of Varicella and Make it Good, mostly.

I was pleased that this game had helpful guidance early on and I was able to have some success on my own. The game nudges you on things and places you can go to and do next.

At one point I messed up the online interpreter by undoing many times in a row while messing with the tab (a problem with parchment, not the game itself), so I restarted, and that gave me the confidence to just use the walkthrough and see the rest of the game. I'm glad I did; this game seems like one designed for careful exploration and note-taking, things I'm not too good at.

I do like mystery games and this is the kind that is mostly solved by doing puzzles using information in books and through things found in exploration. It does require looking under things (something I typically don't enjoy in large games with tons of furniture) but it is hinted when you need to do so.

The writing is often workmanlike, which isn't to say that it's bad (the flashback memories of Aelred are wonderful), but that due to the large nature of the game and the ascetic setting, writing is often utilitarian and sparse.

The time aspect isn't as big of a threat as it seems, if anyone else is worried as I was. Essentially it divides the game into segments of 'everyone is available to talk to' and 'everyone is away and you can search around'.

Overall, it's clear why it won.

This is one of the latest games by Lamp Post Projects (another has come out by the time I review this), a relatively recent entrant to the world of IF who has put out numerous well-received games in a short time frame.

Like many of their other games, this features a fantasy world with multiple fantasy races and characters (complete with watercolor portraits) in non-combative settings (in this case: a symphony orchestra with singers).

You pick from a variety of strengths and talents and then investigate the mysterious case of dreams popping up among the symphony players.

I like mysteries, and the deduction system worked better for me here than for other recent mystery games (it was relatively easy but just enough not to be trivial, and there were some randomized results with other means of making up for the mistakes).

The writing worked well here, too.

Two things stuck with me as mild flaws. First was that I chose the +0 magic trait (so I could do magic checks but with no bonus). Twice I tried magic rolls and got a perfect score of 4, but the check difficulty was set at 5. I don't recall other magic checks in the game. This makes the +0 magic trait essentially useless.

The second thing is, and this has been true for several games in this setting, that the different races feel largely cosmetic. I've been thinking about it because I recently was brought on to help another author with a project and it largely has the same issue (in that world, there are fairies and sirens and centaurs but they all have mundane jobs and essentially no differences between each other). I can completely understand the desire to divorce oneself from the biological determinism and racism in human history and the ideas that different real-life ethnicities have associated stereotypes. On the other hand, one of the greatest parts of real-life ethnicities are the distinct cultures and vibrant diversity available. How could this be shown more in-game? The Gnomish Treasury game by this author did well, I think, showing the cultural background and differences in art and architecture, which is a great way of showing things (as opposed to heavy-handed or stereotyped techniques some past authors have used like heavy dialects or exotic/fetishized clothing). I guess it would be nice to see more of what makes each group unique (and could include things like an orc raised by dwarves who values his family but also wants to connect with his birth culture, although I swear the author did have something like that in one game).

This game reminded me a lot of the non-fighting parts in Chuk and the Arena by the same author (in a good way).

This game feels like a metaphor for over-implementation of AI in workforces. You are a lowly maintenance worker on a space station when your boss, the new Mr Green (who at the Old Mr Green) delivers a new robot that can literally do anything once its started up and trained (of course, after a few missing parts are implemented).

The map has a lot of things in it but is overall compact, with only 2 or 3 main locations each with a couple of side locations.

The game has quadratic complexity, with an inventory that can be used on any object present in the game world.

The main part of the game felt big at first and then fairly constrained and linear, which made it hard for me to see how 12 different endings could be achieved. After I found a few, though, I searched on the forums for some tips and saw that there were several creative things you could do hidden in the game, which I thought was awesome.

Overall, I liked the game and the sentiments in it.

This is a visual novel with many different images.

This game is a gross game (intentionally so, and advertised as so). It features a Mad Prophet character who has beef with the feudal leader and wants him to die.

Simultaneously, the game is a kind of dark phantasmagoria where all of the elements of humanity are broken down and characters are all boundary-breaking in some way while finding place in hierarchical power structures. Algae are living computers, people are slime or poop, bodies can be modified, orifices used, things can be alive, creatures can be things.

It's kind of Alice in Wonderland meats Ruby Gloom meets Hellraiser meets Conker's Bad Fur Day meets Porpentine.

It's the kind of writing that defies expectations and veers into the absurd but fortunately avoids the common pitfall of 'oh I'm so random'. The intense focus on the inevitable class uprising (which is my interpretation of ambiguous themes) gives it focus.

I played to one death and one freedom.

Me starting to play this game: Ah, this is cute.
Me after playing this game: This is definitely not cute.

This is one of the deadliest games I've played in recent times. You play as a small mouse in a field in the evening (it made me think of the 'wee, slicket, cowering beastie' poem).

You can try to find food, water and shelter in multiple directions. Unfortunately, predators lurk in sky and air and the mindless machines of mankind can murder you, too.

This gives the game a gauntlet-like structure where most choices kill you and you need to replay to find the right path. I think there may be multiple paths to survival.

Overall, I found the conflict interesting. Replaying without much way to strategize was a bit frustrating, but it was short enough that it wasn't too bad.

This is a fun replayable game written by a team of authors. Its fairly short and simple, but hard enough for me that I only go 1/3 my first try.

You are a cryptid hunter. Each playthrough you are given 3 cryptids to look for each with 3 distinct characteristics.

You're then given a large set of locations with backstory and the opportunity to visit all of them. Each one has its own cryptid encounters where you can examine them to see if they fit the traits in question.

What keeps it from getting boring or tedious is that you can't just lawnmower through the options. Several of them have unique interactions that you have to decide split-second that may have unintended consequences. And if you dally with too many options, the creature can go after you. Pretty neat!