Reviews by MathBrush

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.)

I was playing on not playing this game due to its strong language warning, but I decided to try it, and I found that the language was intense and moving but not offensive.

This game uses stark black and white graphics. I had to resize my window, as at first the text overlapped the 'monitor' that envelops it.

This is a futuristic game, set a thousand years from now when all life besides humanity has died. You play as Harlan, someone who is all alone. Your mother figure is now all but forgotten, and you have to inspect things for the government. In order to feel something, you play an underground blackjack game where the wagers are your body parts. The game deals with the complicated relationship you have with yourself, the world, and the mysterious blackjack dealer. The game also contains very discreetly implied sexual scenes.

The writing is solid, the design is hardcore. The worldbuilding reminds me of a couple of Fujimoto works (though of course Fujimoto borrows from others) and of an X-files episode about an organ-harvesting lottery.

Overall, I think the author set out to make an evocative work of art combining text, graphics and audio and succeeded (though I did have my console open most of the time, because having it open fixed the window size, and a couple audio files did fail to load.) Beyond those minor hiccups, this was great.

Triangle for Two

I was surprised to see this one unreviewed so far, since Naarel tends to have strong prose and games that are easy to finish, which usually means lots of IFComp reviews. I suspect that it comes from not having the game length field filled out (I'd put it in the 15 minutes or less category, though I took longer as I thought through it and reread chunks). Also, it ends without THE END or something similar at the end, so people may think they didn't finish it. I'm not as familiar with the co-author, though I suspect the text itself may elucidate that matter.

This is a short, polished twine game with literary text that deals with a social/personal facet of life. That's a fairly large field, but this reminds me more of Ann Hugo and Glassrat than any other authors (I enjoyed both of their games a lot).

The main topic of this game is that someone who has two people in the same body has to announce their mutual coexistence to a friend. This is complicated by the several differences in the two's personality. One sees the friend as a close friend, possibly even more. The other is hesitant, protective, tense.

There are three kinds of links: progressing links, 'aside' links that go to another passage and return, and replacement links. One page uses a lot of replacement links in a clever way.

It was interesting to read in the literal sense (by that I mean I wanted to know more and went back and forth and read it a few times to gather more information). I have family members with similar situations; my brother's wife has several alters (using her language here rather than the game's) including one that likes group video games when we do voice calls together.

What strikes me about the character in this story is the combination of '>1 people in =1 body' with body dysmorphia. The woman in the pair sees the male body as 'other'. I was also struck by the lack of other people; the few people I've met in life with similar situations typically have several different alters, some steering in groups. Having exactly two, one man and a woman, makes for a really compelling relationship, well, 'triangle', with others, as the name of the game reveals.

The writing was good as always, with multiple references to places and things in Poland.

I beta-tested this game, but I never got very far. I did complete it this time! (Possibly through exploits).

This is a difficult game to play. It combines in one several features at the start that make it extraordinarily hard to get use to.

1. The online version has no way to scroll back. The game now suggests using a transcript which is good. I downloaded it and made 6 transcripts which I'll upload to the hint thread.
2. Compounding the above, the game frequently prints several pages of text at once and clears the screen.
3. You do not control the main character of the game; instead, they perform random inputs while you observe and help.
4. You cannot WAIT for the main character to do things, since the game will yell at you and disable WAIT. So you have to come up with different actions each turn.
5. The game can randomly crash; I had 4 different crashes on Gargoyle, so saving often is useful.
6. The game still progresses if you save, and at the beginning there are several help menus to navigate that are required to progress that also move the game forward, and
7. The game yells at you if you are too slow and calls you stupid.
8. The game is a surreal game-within-a-game with multiple voices and POVs, and the game-within-the-game is intentionally buggy and underdescribed.

So, the average experience of a new player may very well be trying out different commands, missing chunks of text, having the game yell at you, and being booted out to try again.

If they are able to push past that and continue, they can find some amazing concepts.

The idea of the game is that Max Fog is dead and an AI trained on his consciousness has finished a game based on his notes. Years later, you and an in-game AI have to work together to make the game run for a real-life player. So, you move objects around, queue up routines, etc. in order to get the game running. Meanwhile, the in-game AI is annoyed with how buggy the game is.

More happens, but I'd rather not spoil it. It has much in common with the ending of A Mind Forever Voyaging.

I'm in the game! A neat trick is that whenever the game crashes/reboots you read a review by Me, Mike Russo, or JJMcC, with various scores depending on how well you did running it. I laughed at mine because it was extremely similar to what I'd write, down to a typo in the first paragraph.

The game talks a lot about AI, and is set in a future where AI has caused lasting damage to the earth.

I did find the ending hopeful.

The game is very ambitious, with using Inform menus and keystrokes and regular text to progress, random commands, writing to external files (I think; I never triggered the text that I think does that), and text animations which I've rarely if every seen in Gargoyle. It doesn't 100% pull it off, since it crashed a few times, but it 90% pulls it off, which is great. I did decompile it, which is funny as the fake me in the fake review also decompiled the game (good thinking, future fake me).

This is a work made as part of a PhD project. Some college project IF games are real stinkers, while others (like Blue Lacuna) can be impressive. This one is complex and literary, and should, I believe, serve well as a PhD-level material.

I do have some complaining to do to contrast with later praising. When I saw '2 hours' and the term 'detective poem', then tried the opening page and saw the text was being slowly typed out, I was possessed with terror and flashbacks of other poetic games like Succor that used slow text for hours at a time. I even started downloading the code and opening it up to remove the timed text, when I saw it wasn't that much. Reader, I pushed onwards.

The first scene was difficult to parse, I kind of wandering through nature and establishing your physical identity. I thought at first that nothing was being tracked, but quite a bit was, and there were callbacks later on. I genuinely didn't understand much of the intro, except that there was water there.

Then we break into a more story-focused segment that was cool. You are in New Zealand in Dunedin and have to climb up a street with a map and clear out several drains to help a plumber/concrete company owner. Everything is mystical, and at first I wasn't sure if it was realism, ADHD causing us to over-fixate on every detail, or that our character was under the influence of perception-enhancing/changing drugs, but after playing later parts I think it was more magical realism. We do find a talking animal or two.
<img src="upload://jTVR2k4YLZdfyuGpOYcVxUgad9X.jpeg" alt="image|370x500" />

Once I had unclogged everything, in the evening light, I felt very satisfied with the game, which had felt lengthy. To my surprise, I saw 'End of Part 1', and was troubled. Wasn't this a good place to end the game already?

But the next part was interesting in a different way. Like @alyshkalia's Blossom, NY, this part of the twine game features real landmarks from a city (in this case, Dunedin) and gives info on them, but combines it with story. This part of the game has you exploring an underground tunnel in the city with a strange mechanical contraption equipped with periscope and walkie talkie. By rolling up and down the tunnel, you encounter different things (like a urinal that knows your name) and objects that you can acquire and use elsewhere. Meanwhile, you encounter the plumber more and more. Eventually, you can leave the tunnel and explore more of the places you passed. This final segment was bewildering with its number of possible choices but I believe it was actually funneling you all along, as I made it to an ending safely.

The best character in the game is the river Toitū itself, which is extremely prominent in all 3 parts, serving as a linear organizer of locations and as a source of refreshment and even holy water at one point.

Overall, I found the grate-unplugging to be the strongest portion, but the overall effect was good. I tend to be less open to poetic works, and have found that my reaction to such things as the games of B-Minus or furkle/mother or the poetry game Portrait with Wolf tend to be less enthusiastic than those games deserve, and the same is likely true here; others may find the first opening area to be more enlightening than it was to me.

Finally, I loved the hand-drawn maps, very cool.

PS Oh, I forgot to mention! The game also contains a dozen or mor images of pages from the works of Janet Frame, a NZ poet who was saved from lobotomy by winning an award for her works. This game shows an alternate history.

Wait-Our-Way Tower

For those who haven't played Andrew Schultz's games, he typically chooses a mechanic to center the game, often about wordplay but in other circumstances involving chess or complex movement. The wordplay games typically involve you typing words as solutions to the wordplay and navigating NESW. The storyline is generally centered around a series of surreal events, with dialogue often being discussed in general rather than reported directly and with topics like self improvement and confidence.

There are some types of Andrew Schultz games I look forward to and some I don't look forward to, and this game combines three of the positive ones. It is in Adventuron with pixel art, which I think really improves these games a lot by grounding some of the more surreal objects with easily-readable pixel art. It is long and polished. And its central wordplay system is hard enough to be non-trivial but easy enough that gameplay doesn't come to a halt as you run to a pencil and paper or online solver.

It also has people that follow you around that are also illustrated, which I don't recall happening before (I remember people following you and illustrated people but not both).

Overall, I've conditioned myself to enjoy his games by playing so many of them (I've played 31 out of 44 total). And I like this one more than most of the others.

Caribbean Nightmare

I originally tried the German version of this, then gave up and waited for the English release.

I've played several games by this author. They tend to have gigantic maps with a ton of puzzles and allow play by dropdown menu or by parser entry. They also tend to be a little underhinted and a tad undercoded, but with enough hints to help out.

This game was better than usual. I liked its 4 chapter structure. I did end with only 2600 points instead of the full 3130, so I must have missed something, but I found the storyline more engaging and the puzzles more interesting than before. It just felt like things were mostly thought through well. I did find the pseudo-jungle maze a bit annoying, though each part of it eventually gained another exit, making it easier to distinguish them.

There were a few unfair-feeling puzzles, but many of the puzzles were very fair. Maybe using the flashlight is a bit unfair since there are so many places you can check (and using the rag or even knowing it exists), but for the flashlight there is a bit of a hint for part of it. There's a lot of dialogue in the game, which I think significantly improves it.

The idea is that you have amnesia on an island and have to explore it, finding shipwrecks, a parrot and a monkey, zombies, dancing skeletons, and, of course, treasure. There's a giant plot twist in the middle that changes things significantly.

Overall, I found myself enjoying the game. There is still some strangeness; UNDOing at one point instead reloaded the entire game and then ran through all my previous commands, but left me in a completely different place with a completely different score. Tying the string to a tree and then taking the string made things weird (as I didn't use 'UNTIE'). So it wasn't perfect, but it was fun.

This game will, eventually, be a live-time game, like Lifeline once was, where you have to wait in real-time to unlock new events and things.

You play as Bel, a young graduate student who is part of a startup for medicinal drugs. She also is involved with investigations into drugs and dead cats.

The game is played on a map of the world, with events placed at different times of day (in this Beta version, you can click to advance time at any time). All events in-game are in one part of, I believe, New Zealand.

The game is unfinished (which is the main reason I'm giving it a lower score). It is also long. The game ends at the end of Ch. 1. Some plot threads are well-developed by then, but almost all of the climaxes and so on are missing. I have been planning on not playing any of the unfinished games this competition, but I somehow walked past the glaring 'Chapter One' and 'Beta' in the title.

The presentation is professional. The images consistently have a nice-looking black finished image with a blue sketch layer under or over or something; it looks like a talented professional artist worked extensively on the game. The writing is professional, with real-sounding dialogue.

Plot-wise, if this game is meant to be played over an extended period of time, I'd strongly suggest adding a journal or recollection feature. I got confused as it was with all the plots running. Some, like the status of our theater we're working/squatting in, were easy to follow and gripping. Others were less so; I honestly could not remember who the person was that we were trying so hard to stalk with Paige. Looking back, was it the CEO of the company charging her $2000? Or something? I genuinely don't know. A recall feature would help with stuff like that.

I'm not sure if choices have an effect here. You often have the choice of which storylet to play, but most that I skipped came up again later. Is it mostly just picking the order you read it in? The quality of the dialogue and graphics mean that the game can kind of coast on that alone, but it would be good to know if we can adjust the story.

The game has frequent strong profanity, which I personally didn't enjoy but which is very clearly laid out in the intro. Our protagonist has a kind of crappy life. I've seen people go through almost all of these things (mostly relatives); trying to hide a non-certified or otherwise illegal business from others; hiding a drug farm; living in a building not intended to be lived in and keeping it from others; having funding pulled from a company and being muscled out; trying to move biohazards around without it getting flagged; etc. Bel seems to have the opposite of a charmed life. It makes the story more interesting; how boring would it be to have the main character just exit the business, stop committing crimes and focus on grad school? Watching everything fall apart is definitely the right choice for telling this story.

Take the content warning on disturbing animal imagery seriously; this is not a good game for those who dislike text-based animal abuse.

This is another game in the most-played top 20.

It's classic YA fare. You discover a magical world alongside the real one, discover you have powers, make friends with magical people who are impressed by your powers, and go to school to train yourself in magic while simultaneously foiling a dark plot.

It makes sense that it's popular; if someone enjoyed things like Percy Jackson and wanted a hosted game for it, this would be my first recommendation.

It has mostly good points with some rough.

One thing it does great is combining 'hanging out with friends' with progressing the plot. I complained about The Golden Rose that almost nothing happens in a million words and you just hang out with your friends all the time. This game makes the hangout sessions drive the plot, where talking to your friends gives you worldbuilding lore or info on your investigation.

The school stuff is class, even generic YA material. Classes on things like the basics of magic, potions, runes, etc., with students still complaining about the tediousness of it all.

I wonder how much branching their is; it felt like a very long game comparatively but only has 300K words. Is it because it branches less, or was it just due to circumstances in my own life?

The biggest negative to me was a certain lack of descriptiveness, and now I see where the fans of Golden Rose are coming from. I played a couple hundred official Choice of Games games first before switching to hosted, and there having literary prose is much more common (games like Martian Job, Rent-a-Vice, Fool!, or Night Road come to mind), since there's a resume/portfolio submission process and really bad writing usually get screened out (not bad plot, per se; that's harder to test for). But in Hosted Games, there are no barriers, so there is much more variety in the writing quality. This game's writing isn't bad, but it could be more. My biggest complaint was in the powerful artifacts; the whole game centers around them, and once we have them, the game just says 'use the artifacts!' and the NPCs 'use the artifacts'. How? Did lightning come out? A blast of flame? Did angelic messengers descend? It was really anti-climactic.

Some of the writing was great, though; I felt like some of the NPC dialogue felt very authentic.

I'm more of a plot person than a writing person myself, and I like this game's plot and reveals. I had a good time.

The other point I have about writing is that you get better with practice, so I'm definitely looking forward to playing the next game in the series in the future.