Reviews by MathBrush

This game is one of the smaller Hosted Games. It contains a full story and a systematic scoring system, and if someone I knew personally told me they had made it, I'd be proud of them for finishing an interesting story.

As I've been reviewing all hosted games, it inevitably falls into some comparisons, and I'd have to say it is on the weaker end of the scale for my personal tastes.

It riffs on the Wizard of Oz books, and includes characters like Ozma. You are a young person (a wannabe witch or wizard) and its your quest to ask Glinda to make you a real witch or wizard.

You travel through Oz, running into familiar faces and deciding to either do good (for which you get goodness points) or wickedness (for which you get wicked points).

It looks at first like there's a lot of branching, but in most scenarios that aren't good vs wicked, only one option will be 'real' while the others send you back to the choice until you pick the right one.

The author does seem to have a big love for different parts of the Oz series, including a lot of scenes with the powder that makes things come alive.

There were some noticeable typos every few pages. Overall, while this feels like a labor of love, I didn't have quite as much fun as I could have due to the lack of substantial choices or character arcs (except for gaining wizard merch, that part was fun).

This is a huge Choice of Games game with a lot of branching.

To me this feels like pure TTRPG. You are an orc, and there are 4 or more stages of your life. (This game branches a ton, so I'll share what happened in my experience and mention others' later).

I started as a baby, and decided to have pure violence throughout my life. By attacking and assaulting other babies, I became a proud young orc.

As a young orc, I gained a 'hub' and the option to do different things like train to be a warrior or a shaman. My hub gained in options as I became a young adult and then a mature adult.

Hub options include getting tattoos, buying magic items, training, meeting with camp visitors, or, the most expansive, going adventuring, which results in a lot of D&D style quests. And D&D/Pathfinder was the big feel for me here, with halflings, elves, dark elves, humans, orcs, goblins, a lich, zombies, a one-eyed orc god. The only unusual thing was a mind-controlling cyclops or two.

There were also war simulators, where you have cavalry, land units, and skirmishers.

I chose violence and power almost the whole game, helping me win tons of battles and kill a lot of monsters. Then, I became king.

Suddenly I can't kill everything personally! I can kill a lot of things, but now I have to negotiate. Do I regret not being nice to the orc god before I became king? Maybe.

It's kind of like Spore, going from cell stage to individual to tribal to society.

There are a lot of chances to help others, which sometimes gives you amazing benefits and sometimes bites you in the butt (I'm looking at you, goblin entrepreneurs).

The difficulty was tuned well for me. There were many save points, and I felt powerful, but at times I had to make sacrifices.

I was worried I'd not have enough time to try all the activities, but ended up circling around and doing a lot over and over again. I didn't experience everything the game has to offer, though, as others have mentioned becoming a demon, and doing different shaman activities, or a quick ending to the game focused on gluttony.

There was no romance, which I didn't really miss (although a few NPCs you meet would make pretty good ROs.).

The writing went beyond basic or perfunctory to be interesting and fun. My life felt epic, and while there wasn't one huge plot arc, each scene was well written and there were many narrative payoffs. The character art was well done, cohesive and fit with the style of the game.

My final ending was pretty great. All in all, this is a good 'meat and potatoes' game for people who like classic fantasy RPGs, gamebooks, or power fantasies.

This game is one of the more interesting branching sequels I've seen in an IF game.

I played through 2 rounds. In the first, I was married to the queen. It was up to me to participate in a fake tournament, organize the kingdom in the queen's absence, deal with diplomatic treaties, negotiate with barbarians, and engage in wars. I died in good old age surrounded by family.

In the second version, I was a minor lord in a kingdom ruled by evil, mocked and despised and humiliated by the evil king. I was thrown in jail, and took over my daughter, and ran into some familiar companions that gave me a smile. I didn't see the end of this run, as I died after finding my father but giving the reason for the evil king to kill me.

I think there are other possibilities as well, as you can play as a non-king lord and there are also some special quests from the main menu.

Overall, I was pleased by the level of detail and amount of polish. Some of the fights did drag, as other reviewers have noted. There was a lot more storytelling in this game, more descriptiveness, especially in the 'kingdom of evil' version where you rebel (there is one actual story-story that takes up like 8 pages).

One thing I like about this game is that it has clear evil and clear good, not of people (who are generally mixed good and evil, with some noticeable exclusions) but of acts and options. Mercenaries actually kill people; good people can become damaged after imprisonment and torture. Death is real and can happen; women and children can be lost in war, but relief can come and justice can be served.

When playing some of the less popular official Choice of Games, which are designed to have multiple competing interests, one common thing I see is having two or more factions set up that theoretically oppose each other but don't really do anything 'wrong'. Everything is just a misunderstanding, or a mild difference of political opinions (I've done this before myself). What a lot of the best hosted games do (and best choice of games do) is, when they come to the brink of making a character actually unethical or an act truly awful, they don't pull back, but push through it and allow evil to exist. Like Choice of Robots letting you decide to conquer the world with a robot army or develop doctor robots to save your mother's life or a companion robot to marry, you can make decisions that are actually evil or actually good or both.

David and Goliath wouldn't be nearly as interesting if Goliath was just gently bonking guys on the head instead of killing them. Hamlet would be much less interesting if it turns out the uncle accidentally gave the king an overdose and Hamlet forgives him and asks him to talk it out. If Cinderella gets along with the step-mother and sisters, then why would she even want to leave?

When I say it's good for games to allow true evil, I don't mean this in a grimdark way, like a game having a lot of murder or sexual assault with an awful protagonist is good; I don't really enjoy games like that. I like it when the bad contrasts with the good; people can die, but they can also be saved. We can let people down, but we can raise them up, too. Depicting real evil acts allows real good acts, and vice versa. A completely grimdark game is just as boring as a completely harm-free game. And like I said, it's the acts that are good and evil, not the people. This game does a good job with that, like a neighboring country that can be an ally but also can be overbearing, or a barbarian tribe that loves violence but respects you if you are a noble warrior.

Anyway, my main complaint of Swamp Castle was that it was too short, and this is the opposite of that, so I enjoyed this a lot.

This is the first and smallest of the Magincia games by Philip Kempton. From the other games I've played by him, I associated this author with stats-heavy, highly mechanics-driven gameplay in a relatively low-fantasy medieval world where you manage combat and troops.

This game was more of the same, or, rather, less of the same. I kind of spoiled myself by playing the big classics first and then playing the smaller, earlier prototype.

In this one, you're placed in charge of Swamp Castle, one of the worst castles around. You have to manage finances, troops, and scheming neighbors, as well as barbarian attacks and what may or may not be a dragon.

The game does punch above its 100K wordcount, as this author uses terse descriptions but a lot of actions, but it's still over pretty quickly. More importantly, I think it was less well-tuned than the author's other games. It's very easy to die if you don't know what's coming, requiring you to replay several times to make it to the end (unless you have a good strategy from the get-go). I even tried easy mode, which gave me tons of money, but still failed a few times. It's short enough that replay isn't that bad, though, so I didn't mind trying a few extra times.

But, I felt like the sequels were much stronger and didn't really depend on this one. I don't think anyone would be missing anything if they skipped out on this.

(After writing this, I looked around online and found quite a few fans of this game, so take everything I'm saying with a grain of salt! The main features that I didn't like as much, like easy deaths, short length, high replayability, etc. may be exactly the features someone is looking for in a game).

This is the third game in the series.

The first game, Evertree, was a fairly short but very branched mystery fantasy game set in an inn.

The second was both long and vary varied, with a ton of different options.

This game was so big, so complex, that the author had to split it in two. So we have the first half of a great game. The combinatorial explosion does seem to have given the author some burnout, who took time off to make a separate game (Kitsune, for Choice of Games) and had a full-time job that took up time. Fortunately, he's recently come back to writing in the last few months.

In a way, the game branches almost too much, which is something I also experienced with Jolly Good:Cakes and Ale. Both games give you a ton of important tasks and not enough time to complete nearly any of them. In both games, I felt overwhelmed, but once I started I realized I had more time than I thought. I guess for me, there's a sweet spot between freedom and forward impetus; in Sordwin, there were competing goals, but I felt like no matter what I picked the main story progressed and I moved forward. Once Lux City of Lies (the projected sequel) is finished, I wouldn't mind if the next book in the series (if the author wants to continue) went back to the branching level of Sordwin.

Anyway, that's my only major complaint. This game itself is a lot of fun. I played a brownie druid and focused on going to work and meeting a fellow druid. I also focused on the main mystery of the mayor's death, and ignored all other side mysteries. I did attend events with Daisy, who carried over from the main game.

Story-wise (sorry it took me so long to get to this), you arrive at Lux, the big metropolis city, like Rome/Paris/London/NYC, and you get to have a job, find an apartment, and answer a summon from the mayor. You soon discover that the mayor has been murdered, and you are a top suspect!

In addition to this mystery, you find a big cast of new characters and reocurring old ones. Each day you choose what to do and who to spend time with, dealing with mysteries at night. Everything culminates in a great festival.

I can totally get why the author got burnt out, there are so many options and people online have really strong opinions and are asking for so much, but I just think that's a sign of how good the series is. If this were the first game in the series (and a complete game) people would be astounded and only have good things to say. It's only because it's compared to the past games in the series that people get critical. It's the way people will take a game like BTD6 or Terraria and say it's the worst game they've ever played, but only because 1)they've never actually played really bad games, or forgot about them, 2)heard a ton of people praising the game and tried it because of that, and 3)it didn't live up to their expectations. Now no one's said this game is awful, but it's in the 'famous + good series' tier which attracts more negative comments. I support the author in whatever he decides to do, even if it means cutting things I like to make a complete game.

No arcs are resolved here; each of the subplots hits an important note right near the end but there is no resolution.

This was a great game to play, definitely top 10 among Choicescript games I've enjoyed. It's a mystery (one of my favorite genres) and lets you be a mage, which is cool.

This is the second game in the Evertree Saga. The first game was also a fantasy mystery, but felt very short. This game, while each chapter can be completed relatively quickly, feels very substantial and has a ton of branches.

You come to an island which has been quarantined due to some kind of malady. Your employer has tasked you with recovering a package that was due and which is delayed on the island.

The mystery turns out to involve mysterious attacks, and everyone's on edge. You have to investigate not only the missing package and the attacks, but also your mysterious companion and the drama going on in town.

The game does great in at least 3 things that popped into my mind:

1-Lots of options. I maxed out my magic stat and used it for almost everything. The game felt like a breeze since I could read minds, teleport, fly, etc. This worked perfectly until one very crucial moment, but that tradeoff felt worth it. You can equally play as a buff or deceptive character. You can also bring in a completely different companion depending on your first game choices, which is very hard to code.
2-Good dialogue. Dialogue dominates this game, and the author manages to make each character feel distinct and fresh.
3-Real stakes. There are multiple competing goals, and it felt like I could make real progress on some if I invested time, but it meant leaving other parts of the game unexplored. However, the game manages to make you not feel like a loser for missing out on the other stuff, and all failure is accompanied by cool ways of getting out of it, often at the cost of others. This kind of thing is really hard to do, so I was impressed.

Overall, a great game.

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.