Ratings and Reviews by MathBrush

Mad Warrior

I played this one around 9 or 10 times. I eventually tried editing the json file that Mr Patient mentioned in his ifdb review (when you save), which showed me that all the game code is in your appdata folder, and perusing the code was way more fun than playing the game.

Like Epistemophilia, this game seems written by someone disconnected from the mainstream of IF who simply pursued their passion without knowledge of things that would smooth player experience.

It's a dungeon crawl, breaking barrels and chests for potions and keys while equipping weapons and attack bats. It's kind of like Diablo but with less story and variety. There are 24 floors of the dungeon.

It's held back really hard by its clunky system. What's implemented is fairly smooth, it's just that it's infuriatingly tedious. Almost every room has items. When you pick up the item, you have to open your bag first. To leave the room, you have to close it. Sometimes, your bag is full. Did the author playtest the full game? Did they open and close the bag 256 times and think, "This is what players will love?" I'm sorry that I'm being rude, but playing your own game multiple times is a great test. If it's not fun for you to play, or you find yourself adding ways to skip things, then players won't really enjoy it either.

Editing the JSON let me see more. At lower levels, there are bosses, and defeating them heals you and gives you more inventory space.

Some enemies inflict status effects that can only be healed with specific items. In worst case scenarios you can use an escape rope to get to the top to buy a bandage or antidote or heal. Dying is more likely.

Combat is randomized. Some exits are weird. There's one room you go INTO on the 2nd floor, but going OUT puts you in a room you have to go OUT of again and puts you on the first floor with no way back.

Overall, I found things pretty over-tuned in the difficult direction and tedious. If the bag open/close thing were removed I'd instantly increase my rating for the game. I just can't get what the reasoning is. It can't be realism; it's really easy to have a bag semi open you can slip things in and out of. And realism would mean that to drink potions we'd have to OPEN POTION and DROP BOTTLE and in between we would OPEN MOUTH and SWALLOW. I really doubt it's for code reasons; if that were the case, we could just silently add routines to OPEN BAG before TAKEing anything and CLOSE BAG afterwards.

There are hints of a story, and the characters near the bottom are more interesting.

I always look forward to Arthur DiBianca's games, which tend to be tightly organized around a single concept and to be minimalistic in verb usage and text.

This one was a timed optimization puzzle (turn-based time, not IRL timed), where you wander around looking for 10 objects in a map. Most objects have duplicates. Each room has 0-2 interactable objects or doors that take a fixed amount of time to open. There are shortcut items as well including scissors, wd-40, paint remover, etc.

So it becomes a challenge to find all 10 minutes before the end of the day.

I get 5 easily, and started mapping it out, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of reward for it. There's not much story or surprise. I did like the ambient messages. If this were a first-time author's game, I'd say it was amazingly well-implemented and interesting. I guess that Arthur DiBianca just has so many good games that, compared to his others, I'd probably place it 10th to 12th. (just looking over his past list to verify this, there are so many fun ones on there like Skies Above or Variety Box). Out of parser games I've played this competition though, I'd say it's definitely above average.

Epistemophilia

This game feels like something made by someone who has inherent skill but little contact with the worlds of interactive fiction with which I'm most familiar. It displays creativity and exuberance along with some of the features of newcomers to choice-based IF (tons of options that branch in wildly different ways resulting in very inconsistent experiences, along with a couple bugs and a lack of styling).

You wake up with basically amnesia and wander around. Everywhere you go you find robotic or alien type things. Experimenting with them either kills you or gives you a good ending or unlocks more of the story.

I played to 4 endings, soft-locked myself for a fifth (I chose the same option twice in a room, Remove the Tarp, and it just ended the game accidentally), and then read some of the code for more background.

The world is interesting, kind of reminding me of things like the manga Psyren with strange human-like creatures in a futurish world. There's a lot of fun worldbuilding here like a Badger Boy mascot that helps you get around and some of the 'humanity is special among aliens' trope.

The writing varies from very cool to a little vague. I liked the creature descriptions a lot. Here's an interesting early one:

The cable hums softly as the man stares at you with blank eyes. You identify his face as a human face. Yet, it's also a very alien face in its uncanny blandness. For starters, this face has no lines. It's as smooth as a newborn baby's. Sure, there's a normal mouth, a regular nose and two whole eyes on it. But neither of these give you any hints about their owner. They look real but they "feel" like medical book illustrations.

Some of the writing is vague. Here's some of the vagueness:

You have nothing planned but nosing around, poking, tinkering and ruminating in your schedule. Not knowing anything might be bad for the psyche for a few hours, but once you get over the initial shock, it's truly freeing.

You're a nobody here. And here is...nowhere. So, there's nothing but discovery in your mind A pure, whimsical and experimental approach in learning. Sure, you may get hungry, sick or hurt. You may even die. So what? You don't know what you'll be leaving behind. So, all is good. You've got the whole time you need.

So overall, I see the effort, I had fun exploring, ran into a few bugs, liked some of the writing, didn't enjoy 100% of it. The game felt substantial and I do feel like I had fun overall. If I were the author, I would consider this game fun/successful.

Ryan Veeder's Agatha Christie's the Murder on the Orient Express

This is Schroedinger's game to me, an uncollapsed wavefunction of a game that is simultaneously vexatious and amusing.

First the vexatious. I had formed an image in my mind of what this game could be, and this was not it. The game also did some things that I thought games and stories should not do. However, this was a pre-conceived rubric imposed by my own desires that does not respect an author's creative expression; it is as if I had decided what I thought a 'proper adventure' was and yelled at others for not reaching my arbitrary standards.

Let me enumerate my unfounded complaints. The game is a Poirot parody/pastiche, but I've heard it said (and agree) that parodies are most enjoyable when they evince an affection or love for the original material. This game gives me the impression that the author despises Poirot. It focuses on little except his exceptional arrogance and pride, his belittlement of women, his membership in an elite ruling class that he treats with favoritism. His manner of speaking is more Veeder than Christie; it reminds me of a recent X skit I saw where a couple were haunted by the ghost of Michael Jackson, but the ghost wasn't really MJ and didn't know him well so he speaks with a Puerto Rican accent and says "Pingpung" instead of 'hee hee'.

The other main issue is that the game discards traditional elements of mysteries. Instead of finding clues we find 'clues', which, like Fallen London, have no real description and just serve as a virtual currency. Also, there is no true ending to the game, as we can (Spoiler - click to show)simply accuse anyone we want of murder and have it be true, robbing us of real agency and showing the game never had a real plot.

BUT!

What if my norms didn't matter? What if I had never heard of this author, and I had played very few adventure games or read much Christie, and I saw this game. What would I think?

The game is very well polished. At one point I tried talking to myself and it had a great custom response, and I realized how many actions it had covered. The numerous endings are all individually well done. The thought that went into the transportation and movement system is also apparent.

Yes, the game Poirot is very little like the real one, but that makes it like Little Match Girl, which bears essentially no resemblance to the Hans Christian Andersen original. We even have a similar mechanic whereby we teleport to different locations depending on which train car we leave from. This game then becomes more like Agatha Christie La Croix, with the original serving as a vague guiding direction for the story. This makes the ending mechanism a clever twist on the ending of the original game.

The 'clue' system becomes a funny way of implementing a kind of clicker game/metroidvania (okay, it's not like either of those, but still I needed something involving plain numbers and gated doors) where you just make number go up to go through locked gates.

I enjoyed the variety of puzzles and the running gags such as the corpse-related clues. I appreciate how the author was able to make 'high class socialite that is Poirot's dearest friend' into so many distinct and interesting characters. I loved the writing and the map structure.

So I could either stick to my desired ideal form of 'game' and think of this game as flawed, or abandon my preconceptions and enjoy the game. I'm reminded by a quote from the song Giorgio by Daft Punk:

Once you free your mind about a concept of
Harmony and of music being "correct"
You can do whatever you want
So, nobody told me what to do
And there was no preconception of what to do

Edit: I did find one more ending that could be considered true, but it doesn't substantially change my feelings above.

I looked forward to playing this game, as I know Phil Riley tends to make polished, well-written games. I found this game to have all the main ingredients I like in parser games: interesting/systematic puzzles, lots of conversation (including in German (!)), a well-made hint system and lots of descriptions.

You play as an Indiana Jones-type character fighting the Nazis during WWII. Jumping out of a plane, you parachute down to a desert where the ruins of a fascinating civilization jut out of the rocks. Interspersed with your nazi fighting, you have flashbacks to the beautiful woman you left behind.

The game was good, but my brain didn't interface with it properly. I died a lot because I misunderstood what was going on. A couple of times I thought I had locked myself out of victory 50 turns before and reloaded an old save (once I was wrong, but I'm not sure about the other). Even in the opening, I tried a lot of commands that didn't work (X DARK, LOOK FOR SIGNAL, X DESERT), and for some reason I couldn't make a mental map of the opening areas, most of which is empty rooms (though almost all rooms had a purpose in the end). And near the end I used all hints for several things but still didn't understand what I was meant to do due to weird choices I could make.

But, I suspect others will not encounter this. I tend to play by the seat of my pants, not making a map and not taking notes or planning carefully. Those who do such things will likely avoid the pitfalls I found.

Ruined Temple

This game is exactly what I'd expect from an Alex Crossley game based on the last two. A straightforward fantasy game that promises complex and interesting mechanics but mostly has one main path worked out and is generally underimplemented and under-hinted.

I enjoy DnD quite a bit, and spent years as a kid collecting books for 2nd and 3rd edition and even earlier reading 1st edition in bed late at night. I remember getting the Epic levels book for 3rd edition the same day I rode in a convertible for the first time, and the epic book was the coolest thing that had happened to me for a long time.

This game has all the outward signs of the things I love in DnD, but few of the inward things. I enjoy characters with compelling stories. I love ambient storytelling. There is some of that in this game but it is all kind of generic. There's no personaltiy, no big boss, no spell list. As a parser game, there are many special interactions but none are documented.

I do appreciate having the walkthrough, and the 4 characters having their own rules and roles. The game does have several in-game hints that are quite useful, and the mechanic of 'here is an obstacle, figure out which of these four characters is most likely able to solve it' is fun. I would have enjoyed more plot and more story, more character conversation and expression.

This is the last game on the IFComp review spreadsheet without a review.

It's a short game, written in texture. It mentions violence, brief nudity and profanity but there's very little of each (so the author is being conscientious).

The concept reminds me a lot of the AI-generated fruit people videos I see popping up on my social media (I don't think this game is AI-generated, just the themes are common). A lot of them begin with things like this game begins with, a hospital room with two women fighting over one man, later kicking to a wedding scene (I don't know why hospitals show up so much in the ai-slop videos). Here, it makes sense, as I think it's drawing on the same tropes, mostly those of soap-operas, telenovelas and some of recent sci-fi.

There are multiple paths, all of which lead to the same general reveals but substantially different results. I thought the twist was interesting.

The game itself has a typo; it's listed as El Ruido (the noise, referring to the noise in the MC's head), but the search bar and title screen calls it El Rudio.

9 Days in a Van with your 3 Best Friends

Like at least 2 other people on the forums, I decided to play this game next because it was the longer of the last 2 unreviewed games.

This game has great design and UI and an authentic-feeling storyline, mixed in with some tedious but quickly-played grinding. You play as Dante, a fill-in as drummer for a band in 1991 driving cross country and living off the money they make during the 9 days of Spring Break. The grinding part is that you have to model driving cross country, choosing one exit at a time whether to keep driving or to pull over and get gas, and how much gas, and snacks.

The other reviews mentioned the game ending abruptly when the band broke up after money management didn't work out. I figured I'd try to end the game as early as possible by just playing poorly. I never talked to the band, just read books (loved the quotes) and listened to tapes, and kept going. At every point I drove as long as I could without spending money, driving on fumes and barely eating (the lentils were good).

I ended up making to Seattle, our goal, and played the last day, and then the game ended with me in the future reminiscing. The cut to the future part was abrupt since we had had dream sequences quite a bit, and I thought this was another one (maybe a giant banner called 'epilogue' would have helped). But I felt satisfied with my plot arc. I looked at the endings. I got the most boring one where I didn't keep in contact with anyone from the band (also, this game isn't twine, I think it's custom).

This brought back a lot of memories. I was in a jazz band in high school (an official school one) but was sheltered and never went out with friends. After a performance the drummer asked if I wanted to 'drag state' with him and his friends late at night (Utah's most populated areas are basically aligned vertically along I-15 and State street, and State was the big, populated road in SLC, which was the 'big city' to my suburb-raised eyes. 'Dragging state' meant slowly driving up and down the road.') The drummer was a blond kid with emotional control issues but seemed really cool. The game he and his friends played was taking off your shirt and hanging out the car window as long as you could in the frigid Utah winter air, then once you chickened out and pulled back in you got slapped as hard as you could by everyone. It was a glimpse into a world that I had never known. The lights did look beautiful and the air smelled so good late at night in the Utah winter.

The game also reminded of that exact same drive they describe (well, almost). I, too, have driven along I-80 from the Bos-Wash area (for me, Philly), through the rural and church-focused plains and hills of pennsylvania, across Indiana (always the worst part of the trip due to the change in what can be sold across state borders), across the Mississippi (which was much larger than I expected, opposite of the MC in the game), some other route I don't remember (I've been through Wyoming, maybe there?) and eventually to the west coast and Washington (I always remember a very specific place on the way to Washington or in Eastern Washington where the road is in a flatter area past some hills/mountains and there's a field of sunflowers, and for some reason the road takes a sharp 90 degree turn left in the middle of nowhere. I always wondered why).

That's why I didn't mind the grinding as much. It's real. The first day or two you might have music planned or fun things but near the end it's just a hypnotic state where hours fly by and all you care about is the next exit.

Fun game, good memories. That kind of music wasn't my scene (I was terrified of hearing damage and avoided loud music and concerts at all costs), but the nostalgia feels right.

The Two Seasons: Encounter With A Vampire

This game is a very well polished parser game. It's rare to see a game with this level of smoothness, with custom responses to most things, multicolor text, two protagonists, NPCs that respond actively, etc. Very well done.

Storywise, you play as Matty and Maddy, two friends in a band who discover that their teacher is a vampire. The name of the game somewhat implies more adventures in the future, and that would make sense. Together, they have to solve vaguely educational puzzles to collect the items they need to kill a vampire.

This author's last game, All That Shimmers..., had been described as a straightforward old-fashioned adventure. This one also has a lot of that in common. It lacks much of the irony and self-reflection of IFComp games of the past.

Instead, it feels very firmly like a game created in the culture of the 80s, specifically 80s children's work. Nerds are mocked, bullies are big and tough, the janitor gets drunk, teachers have romances, the boy's bathroom is gross and the girl's bathroom is clean, kissing is yucky, schools have computer labs (though, running Minecraft), history is boring, no cell phones in sight, teens are allowed to wander around without supervision, all of it feels like my childhood in terms of storytelling. The setting is definitely intended to be modern, though.

The game does involve a chapel and raiding it with Christ mentioned in a completely neutral fashion, which is something I've rarely seen (usually games involving Christianity tend to portray it negatively or, rarely, positively).

If you're looking for a parser game that provides traditional puzzles and which is not buggy, this is a good one. The hint system is excellent as well.

This game by improvmonster is a good game but suffers a bit by competition. Slappy the Squirrel by the same author is genuinely one of the funniest games I've played (not just recently, but ever) for my sense of humor. This game doesn't reach that level, but it's not bad; in fact, I think the overall trend line is still pointing up, with games getting more fun over time.

I think it just needed a bit more time to cook. With a postcomp update (or during-Comp update) adding a few more synonyms and tweaking a couple puzzles, I think it would be a very good game.

You play as a classic dumb but noble barbarian on a quest to defeat a wizard and rescue a princess. Along the way, you'll encounter ogres, trolls, pirates, and more.

The game is humourously crude, like Shrek, with fart- and belch-based puzzles and slapstick combat. I liked a lot of the jokes, such as the different penny interactions (getting it in the first place, giving it to people before they offer anything, etc).

The puzzles as intended are a combination of classics (find a shovel, dig a suspiciously shovel-ready spot) and slapstick (like the singing puzzles or the grate puzzle). I enjoy the participatory comedy.

Three things stuck out to me as things I struggled with.

First, the help system is a clever new feature, but can be difficult to use. It requires you to type HELP WITH followed by something in scope. However, several puzzles have timers that kill you in the presence of the thing you need help with, so it's easy to die while fumbling around trying to find the right thing to ask for help with.

Second, there was a bit of an issue with scope and synonyms. For instance, when ASKing people about things, if I ASK ABOUT the sorceror, it asks if I mean 'sorceror' or 'the sorceror'. Same with the castle, I think (I put my transcript in the hints thread). This made asking a bit hard. Other times I struggled to find the correct words, for instance, when solving the puzzle of the barber's chair.

Finally, some of the puzzles allow you to lock yourself out of victory with them without clear warning, such as the beans. Once you know the game has consumable resources that cannot be renewed, it's easy to know when to UNDO (just undo whenever you use up something without advancing the game). But that's not very common gameplay structure these days, so it may be worth giving a heads up about it.

That's a lot of space dedicated to criticism, but it's precisely because the game has great potential that I put it. If there's ever enough time to work on those things, I think this is a funny game that many would enjoy. Even without them, I suspect people will like this (especially if someone puts together a walkthrough.)