Reviews by MathBrush

While I was playing this game, I thought, “This almost feels like if someone went out of their way to antagonize as many people as possible by doing everything people on the forum hate.” Later on, I started to wonder if that might actually be true, since the game is ‘meta’.

First, this is a windows downloadable executable, which, outside of uncompiled python code, is typically the least-played out of all IF formats. Unlike Steam, where windows executables are king. many IF players and authors use Linux or Macs and can’t run windows exe’s easily. A big attraction of IF is the ability to have it running in the background during other tasks, able to start and stop it at will, but executables are full screen. Also, unlike Steam, there aren’t really any safety guarantees that exe’s won’t give you viruses.

Second, this game uses timed text in perhaps its most devious form: text in a typewriter font that is slightly slower than average reading speed, but very quickly moves on to the next passage once done, with no back button and no history option. There is a pause button. If you look away from the game for a conversation or to check the stove and forget to pause, you’ll have to start over.

Third, the game picks your choices for you. The controls for much of the game do nothing, with the cursor moving itself and picking what it wants. There is no agency in these portions.

But, the game does address these things! Kind of. You see, the game is a scene, like in a play or movie, and you are the ‘player’ in the audience. Eventually, you get the option to protest what is going on and to deride the lack of agency. I eventually consented to an option to ‘erase’ the game, and got one ending.

So, it’s a clear commentary on the nature of agency in games. While I dislike all of the choices listed above, I’m glad the game is self aware and that everything is done intentionally. Sometimes it’s okay to do unpopular things to make a personal statement you care about. Also I liked the art style, it reminded me of the witches in Madoka Magica.

This was a fun game that took a (to me) unexpected turn or two early on.

In the vein of the earlier Galaxy Jones game, I had expected a classic action/secret agent scenario. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised by a mathematical combinations and language translation game.

Cyborgs are going to blow up Mars using its moon, Phobos. You, Galaxy Jones, have infiltrated the base and need to stop them.

This entails two main puzzles and several smaller ones: First, you have to hack doors by discovering the patterns in their codes, and second: you have to find more of the language and translate it.

The language puzzle is, for the most part, not actual translation. Instead, we find text, scan it, and learn more of the language, which lets us automatically understand more and more words. Doing so encourages us to revisit earlier texts to see what new secrets we've unlocked.

The other puzzles are mostly math related. Hacking the doors is an exercise in number theory, a lot of the time. To me the puzzles seemed to be a much higher level of math than is usual in text adventures (outside of things like base 5 arithmetic in Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina).

The game is highly polished, with the signature Galaxy Jones logo every time you score a point and several intentional stylistic choices like no room headings.

The game has a lot of paths, unusual for a parser game, and I can think of at least three possible endings (there might be more). I thought that was pretty neat.

Overall, when I think of this game, I'm going to think of the advanced math in it, which is something I like.

This was great. I like sci fi, languages, trying to understand aliens, etc. It reminded me of works like the movie Arrival or the book The Mote in God's Eye, both of which I like.

You play as an exolinguist, an expert in alien languages, assigned to a new military mission where you discover you have been assigned an impossible task: decode an alien language that has remained untranslated for over a hundred years in order to help the military use a new weapon.

You're assigned a team of individuals with differing talents and have to interface with multiple commanding officers and a robot companion.

One major feature of the game that I didn't pay attention to (I'll have to replay) is that the musical soundtrack changes dynamically as you play, which I thought was really neat. There are some 3d animations as well, but I found myself enjoying my imagination more more often.

I thought the writing was solid, especially dialogue and interactions with other characters. My only real grip is that I felt that the ending came at a time where there was still narrative momentum; it didn't feel like the right time (to me) for the game to end, which might be due to having multiple endings in the game (making it harder to pace it).

But yeah, this is one of the games that reminds me why I like interactive fiction in general, it's just fun to read, interaction felt meaningful, and it intersects with a lot of my niche interests.

This game draws on Agatha Christie’s books, with the main NPC being the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and the PC being his good friend Captain Hastings. This is set later than most of the books, and Captain Hastings is now a widower with four children.

Unlike Christie’s usual fare of murder and intrigue, this is a light and pleasant game, more like a walking simulator or coffee shop AU. At all times your next task listed at the top of the screen, only one of which requires any sort of big difficulty. The rest of the game is just ‘chill vibes’, checking out the world, etc.

It’s effective at that. Bolded words draw attention to items of interest. You can talk to each character. I only wished that either the TALK response was more drawn out, or that we could ASK people about each other (of course that would take a lot of writing, so it might not be feasible. A menu conversation could have been fun, too).

The final part of the game involves a mystery, which I found to be a little unfair, but the MC had the exact same issues with it that I did and expressed them, which I found funny.

I’ve read most of the Poirot books (maybe all?) and this was a pleasant place to reminisce about it. I don’t know how someone knew to the characters would react, but I expect they’d find it pleasant as well.

This is my third and final Lamppost Projects game to play during this competition, and it is quite different than the rest in some ways.

All three games are set in a D&D-lite world with orcs, half-orcs, halflings, tieflings, magicians, and a setting a little later in European history than most fantasy I've dealt with (this one seems to be around 1600s or later, maybe even 1700s).

All three games also feature watercolor-looking art and a collection of four or more romanceable characters per game, of varying races and genders.

Where this game differs from the rest is that you have skills and animated dice rolls; the others had no randomness at all. The animated dice rolls look really satisfying and seeing the numbers and the target difficulty (and the way the game encourages you to try and fail and keep trying, just like a good GM) makes this a much more pleasant randomized experience for me than most.

You are a private investigator brought into to protect an opera from a threat of robbery. You have to meet the various performers and backstage people and take careful notes, while making use of the background knowledge you chose beforehand. I focused on observation but made myself clumsy, so I did great in conversations but pretty bad when trying to sneak peeks at things covertly.

One outstanding feature of the game is that you can guess the truth of the game at any time starting near act 1, and the game rolls with it if you get it right, which I did right at the end of act 2. You have to pick the right suspect, motive, means, etc. and what's great is that you only have to be mostly right (I had the wrong motive, but otherwise succeeded). If you succeed most of your rolls for your good skills, the villain is fairly obvious, but the target and motives eluded me at first.

I think I like this game best of the three despite a few rough edges (there is romance but it's all packed at the very end of the game and feels separate from the rest), because I have a personal fondness for detective stories, and deduction is very hard to model but this system is one I'll mention in the future when others ask about mystery game advice in the future.

I've played a lot of Stewart Baker's games, and I usually associate him with lighthearted longform narrative-focused choice-based games.

This is a more serious choice-based game with a complex world map and a lot of navigation and some light tracking of objects. To me, it feels like an experiment in shifting tones, and so I'm framing my review with that mindset. That may be an incorrect interpretation, which may render parts of this review less valid.

In this game, you are on a sea, your memories shattered into several (visible) pieces and you have to visit the important locations of your life to remember and revive that part of your life. You learn about your experiences as a youth and as a powerful wizard, and can visit the islands in any order. The world map is navigated with compass directions, as are the individual islands. In each memory, you wander around completing tasks, often tasked with going to specific parts in the map one at a time. Some memories are much shorter. As you complete memories, you have some leeway in how to end them, which raises your score in one of three attributes.

I think recovering your memories as a powerful but defeated creature is a solid trope and works well here. It reminds me of the game Dreamhold, a parser game where you are similarly navigate a space collecting your past memories of a life involving magic and power.

The most effective parts of the game to me were the heavily unusual parts, like what happened to our childhood schoolfriend and what lies hidden below the caves we explore. The author has a talent for describing the truly unusual in an unsettling way.

I was less enthusiastic about the world model and compass navigation. There were large swathes of maps that were essentially 'Hallway D' (but the outdoors equivalent'. I remember something Adam Cadre wrote in a review of Galatea:

In interviews I've been asked to give potential IF authors out there advice, and one of my usual lines is, "The pieces of text you write are the player's reward for thinking of the command that calls them up. So make them rewarding."

While this is choice-based and you don't need to think up commands, it still holds when it comes to discovering new text through exploration. Some of these descriptions could use some more excitement:

This hut is nothing special. Twenty strides by twenty, it holds whatever the village needs holding.

You can reach the veranda of your home to the south-east, while a dirt path leads south-west towards the main road.

This isn't universal advice; Wizard Sniffer has shockingly bare room descriptions and a lot of connecting hallways yet is still well-beloved, but that's mostly due to the large and lively cast that provides flavor in those rooms. (Sorry for the long digression!)

I chose to mostly focus on Despair, one of the three stats you start with. I enjoyed the freedom to choose what to focus on. I think there was one very minor bug near the end where, even though I had used despair the most (both getting and giving), the options I had to choose were ones the walkthrough indicated as applying to coldness. (Specifically, [spoiler]the trials I faced were fire and a rickety bridge, though my stats were 3 1 1 (D C R) and I spent 2 1 1 on the four islands.[/spoiler]

The overall plot is something I liked, and it felt like a replay would definitely be meaningful, since most islands have very different endings to the stories depending on you choice, and there's no back button (there are saves though). So I thought that part of the game was particularly well-constructed.

Lady Thalia and the Case of Clephan

This is the latest entry in a longstanding series of Twine games featuring a lady thief protagonist, a series of stealth and theft puzzles, and conversations with different tacts.

In this game, our lady thief Thalia has reformed, and is now helping to run a detective agency with her will-she-won't-she former police officer Mel. With no more thieving, Thalia is a bit down in the dumps. Things take a turn, though, when a new thief appears:

Lady Thalia. Another lady Thalia, that is. This case of stolen identity is resolved through four different chapters.

The main conversation system worked well for me in this entry. You pick between being Friendly, Direct, and Leading On, depending on the personality of your listener. If you pick the wrong one, it will give you verbal cues showing the problem with your approach, and you can adjust. I do admit I reloaded some saves (not necessary, just wanted to) to 'fix' some mistakes I had made, but it always felt fair.

The exploration portions include some code-finding for locks, some searching of rooms, etc. I did get confused a bit in one area because I didn't map it out, but this fits the game itself, where paying close attention earlier and taking notes can give you big advantages later on.

It's probably recency bias but I like this one more than my memory of liking the others in the series, and since I liked those, this must be pretty good!

(I have the feeling that I forgot to comment on some essential part of the game, but what it is has slipped my mind. If someone who's played it feels I omitted something important, let me know!)

Edit: Maybe it was the fact that your persuasion doesn't work on your love interest and that that is commented on in-game, which was a fun way to handle things and a commentary on the usual formula of 'say five things this person likes and then you can make out'. I do like some games where it's not what you say that someone likes but who you are, so as you make choices that adjust your personality, you fall in and out of the range of likability for the ROs. In this game I think your true nature is pretty fixed, and that's what Mel likes.

Editedit: After some reminders, I remember what it was. With Mel on your side, you can now tag-team conversations, deciding who says what and in what order, which was really a huge amount of complexity (it felt like to me) but not punishing, so very nice.

Also, I felt the game was setting up a very obvious twist in the villain reveal, but it subverted it at the end in a way that made all the earlier clues still kind of make sense.

Before I played this game, someone told me that it had significantly improved on the last two games, which I thought was pretty neat. After playing, I do agree that it's the strongest of the three.

This is part of a series of three games involving hard-bitten detectives, drug rings, exotic dancers and organized crime--except, everything is candy or sweets: the people, the blood, the drugs, the river. Each game has a murder that you investigate, then track down the murderer and accuse them. I don't completely recall everything from the other two games, but all the locations and many people this time seemed familiar. There's a lot of new stuff, though.

The main features of this game are Jimmy Pinata, the strung-up, disemboweled victim (very normal for a pinata, but not normal for a sentient being); and blue rock candy, an ultra-pure drug that's flooded the markets. You have to track these both down.

Gameplay is a mix of classic parser take/drop/lock/unlock and ask/tell/show conversation. The topics available are pretty robust, with most labelled in bold but allowing you to learn of a topic in one conversation and use it in another.

In the past, I associated these gumshoe games with having an incredible setting, a solid story, compelling characters, and kind of shaky implementation. The implementation has gotten substantially better over time, but I found myself fighting over synonyms for a lot of the game. I did try playing without the walkthrough (as opposed to my early ifcomp days where I'd use a walkthrough from the beginning to power through as many games as possible), and got really far, but there were a few times where I was foiled by lack of synonyms or alternative solutions not working (or, just being dumb!). I didn't identify any bugs, though, and I'm sending a transcript to the author, so I suspect if you're reading this from the mildly distant future that you may not have as much trouble as me (which, again, wasn't really that bad. This is among my most enjoyed games this comp so far).

This gimmick is almost infinitely exploitable; you can put any hardboiled old story in here and make it work. You could branch out and do a candy version of the movie Vertigo, or modernize it and do a candy Bourne Ultimatum. This is essentially the IF version of the muppets, where you can do a take on any story and make it funnier, so I hope it continues.

Ben Jackson has had several smooth, polished twine games released in recent years, so I had high expectations for this game, and I feel it delivered. At one point I thought to myself, "I wonder if I would ever be able to make something like this."

It leans hard on classic sci-fi tropes, including the classic 'wake up from a pod on a destroyed spaceship while you have amnesia' and the evergreen 'work with a ship's AI that you can't be sure is working for or against you'. They're classics for a reason, because they can work great in an interactive fiction setting. And here, the author has expanded on them to give them a distinct and unique touch.

You play as a crew member on a ship that has been 'reprinted' as a backup after all crew have, presumably, died. Most of the ship is lacking oxygen, and you have to get out to explore.

The author has used escape-room puzzles in past games like codes and minigames, and this is no exception. We have a lot of doors to open and a few other code-style or 'which item will help here?' puzzles.

But the major change here is recycling and fabricating. Throughout the ship, we can find floating clouds of debris that include things like fabrication recipes and junk. Throwing the junk into the recycling bin, we can get materials in 5 or 6 different categories which are used to make new items.

I enjoyed the progression of the game, especially when I reached a point where I could build equipment that completely solved several long-term problems. It reminded me in a good way of Trigaea, one of my favorite twine games where you gather resources, come back to base, fabricate new stuff and get new recipes.

I hit a wall with two different puzzles. The first turned out to be optional and was hard on purpose, although I feel like completionists would have found it more easily due to trying out everything else in the game. The second was the final puzzle, where I thought I had locked myself out of victory (but turned out not to have).

I felt like both crafting and storytelling had 'real' decisions. My decision on how to handle the AI early on radically changed parts of the game, and the order in which you get upgrades can make a big difference in your play experience.

Like others, I enjoyed the final plot twists, which seemed well-hinted at but still surprising in the exact way it plays out.

Overall, a lot of fun.

This game is written in Dialog and can be played entirely using hyperlinks. It has a minimap at the top that can be used for navigation, persistent links at the bottom, context-sensitive links for the current object being utilized, and green links for trivia and definitions.

You play as a dog in the Hittite empire. Magic is real, and as a dog, you can absorb it and transmit it to other things (Not people though! That's actually against the law. Straight to jail, believe it or not).

You work for a wise-woman, but she has been afflicted by a curse! You need to help her, but you can't even get out of your own home. Once free, your world expands more and more. You can help friends and gain new curses and blessings in your large village, visit the capital and make money, and gain greater power than you thought possible.

Like Daniel Stelzer's other hyperlinked Dialog game about a dog interacting with the supernatural and their afflicted older woman master (Miss Gosling's Last Case), this game has context-sensitive tips and tutorial messages at the beginning, but they've been tuned to be less intrusive, which is nice. There is also a 'think' function that tells you what puzzles you can solve, and the minimap also does that automatically. That's helpful in this sprawling game with many options.

Puzzle difficulty was hit or miss with me. Several times I felt like there were several reasonable options that the author ruled out for what felt like arbitrary reasons to me. A common source of frustration for me was intuiting when a movable object could be affected by fragility or by wind (or the opposites). Rather than making puzzles simpler, the author has instead added a lot of hints (as mentioned above) and made most puzzles optional; for the two largest areas, you only need to reach a certain minimum number of puzzles solved before you can move on or win the game. This reminds me of math tests: is it better to have a test most people can get a high score on, or to make it very hard and then just 'curve' it significantly? This is a 'curved' game.

The background material on the Hittites was fascinating. One common theme was that words had one pronunciation but are written with symbols that have another pronunciation, which reminded me of kanji with Chinese and Japanese readings.

Overall, I found the game substantial and fun. I got stuck several times and used the hints about 4-5 times. This is also the first shady ancient copper merchant I've found in a game that wasn't Ea-Nasir.