Reviews by MathBrush

This was a brief game made in Ink with some dice-rolling mechanics, made in 4 hours or less for the La Petite Mort division.

You're sitting in a cafe, and you have to gather enough bravery to go outside. Your options are drinking coffee and reading a newspaper.

Unfortunately, this game is set one month in the future of when it was released, the day after Spanish elections, and in this game the far-right parties are shown as having successfully formed a coalition. Discovering this can make you not want to go outside, rendering the check more difficult.

And that's it. Interesting to see if the prediction comes to pass or not.

I almost didn't play this game, since it mentions lewd ascii art and strong profanity, but I found it not really objectionable at all (in case anyone was putting it off because of that).

This game starts kind of like Type Help, in that you have an interface available and have to guess the initial commands.

Fortunately, the game gives good hints. In fact, many times during this game it felt like it was setting up complex and difficult puzzles only to bypass them by simply continuing to explore and read more. There were some puzzles, but mostly fairly simple. As an example, there is Scheme code for ascii art generation which you can copy and paste into a compiler (as I did) and edit out the bugs (as I did; the bugs are intentional typos), and get it to run, but it's not plot-relevant. Similarly, you never really have to guess at file names; I thought there'd be a puzzle about finding which profile has printer access or accessing phone lines, but that never happened. This is good; the game was mostly story-based, and if such puzzles had existed, it would have brought the momentum to a halt, so I appreciate how things worked out. I think the most complex puzzle is in the Fryday mini-game, but that one has a good reward.

The overall structure is complex, with email entries, diaries, a mini text-adventure, and real-life events. In some ways, it reminds me of past IFComp-winner And Then You Come To A House Not Unlike The Last One (or something; I didn't google the name), with its computer terminal, ascii art, separated time frame, etc.

The writing is the main focus of the game. It does a lot right, with varied character personalities, realistic period-specific dialogue, and so on.

Some things didn't land as well for me, and I can't really pin down why. Sometimes jokes just went over my head; for instance, there's an email from a Nigerian Prince (a common scam at the time) with the name Mahomboo Sukammer-Ono. I figured out that 'Sukammer' was 'scammer' and maybe 'Ono' was 'oh no', but I still don't understand Mahomboo (many of my students are Nigerian and it's not really formed like a Nigerian name, and googling it, it's not a real name.). Maybe it's "My humble scammer oh no"? But what would that mean?

Other times I got confused because I'm American. I thought Vivian was a girl's name and Wendel a boy's name, so when they talked about 'another woman' or 'that man' I got confused. And sometimes the game veered between being pulpy and over-the-top in writing and being serious and somber in writing, so I occasionally lost my suspension of disbelief before reinserting it.

But the story was interesting, the writing was often fun, the game was complex, and I think this is an impressive piece of work.

This game has a peculiarly interesting structure. It's kind of like the classic 'Verdeterre' gameplay style (popularized by Ryan Veeder's Captain Verdeterre's Plunder, this type of game has you try to collect as many treasures as possible in a limited amount of time, with multiple replays to get it right).

This is kind of a more relaxed version of that. Oh, and instead of getting treasures, you're killing mobsters.

You're a ghost mobster accountant assigned by hell to kill your other mobster buddies in order to get your body back. You're sent out into a sprawling map with a ton of NPCs, locations and items, but the only way to interact with them all is to possess people. You only get a single shot to possess each person, and it comes with a counter. Once you're ejected, it's all over. You have guns of course, but as a ghost possessing someone your aim isn't good enough.

You have to be creative.

There are a lot of deaths. I flailed for a bit before I figured them out, then I got the train and wheelchair deaths, which felt appropriately cinematically dramatic. After that, I went to the walkthrough, as there seemed like so many possibilities, but only some of which were implemented.

Implementation was a tiny bit sketchy here and there. The only really noticeable thing was that "knock" and "knock door" had no response, while "knock on door" had a response (I know 'knock door' doesn't make sense, but works in a lot of games for some reason).

Other than that, the only real drawback I found in the game was that there were descriptions, quite a bit of them, but some of it just felt like it was there because it had to be there. Like the linen closet and dining room, it felt like 'a mansion would have these so I'll put them in," but I feel like they were lost potential, maybe for characterization of the MC's thoughts and experiences or something.

The structure is innovative, I haven't really seen of ton of 'kill people creatively' games with open-world, almost storylet-like mechanics. Really clever.

I used translation and the walkthrough for this.

This is a game in Ukrainian with a custom parser engine.

As I don't know basic commands in Ukrainian, I can't attest to how well the game handles random commands.

But the game itself is fairly simple. You open a cupboard or closet to find some phone numbers, then all other actions are either calling phone numbers or waiting.

The plot is interesting, but I didn't fully grasp it all; a kind of conflict between people where at least one can see dreams.

Overall, it feels like this is some cool progress with making a new system, but that's all I could find out.

This is the second toki pona game I've played. Toki pona is a conlang (constructed language) based on the idea of using as few words as possible, with around 100 or so canonical words and some extra ones people use (at least two of which make their way into this game, 'monsuta' for scary and a word for medicine I don't recall). There is a hieroglyph version of the language, which this game uses.

I found that easier to understand than the alphabet version, since the pictures give a kind of meaning and you can say things mentally like 'I see at inside cloth hole' and translate like that.

The last IFComp had a game by Daniel Stelzer that tries to teach you Sumerian through games, and carefully guides you through it, helping you learn as you go. Similarly, the game Suveh Nux teaches you a magical language, carefully, one word at a time.

Both toki pona games I've played (including this one) don't do that, they just dump it at you. Why? Is it just something they wanted to make, not caring what others experience? Is it due to a kind of overconfidence in how easy the language is? Or maybe it actually is easy. I got more comfortable with it by the end. Some parts of it were quite moving/emotional, like 'sound mouth him (is) broken little'.

I have thoughts on Toki Pona in general (that to use it for general purposes would require standardizing word combinations which would just make it a regular language without anything special) but I thought this game worked well. I don't know what the light line was. I generally had a page full of hieroglyphs and translations open on one side and the game on the other, and opened a google Gemini tab and said 'translate this' on each page after I did my best. That helped me with some connections like 'air' and 'spirit' being the same (which must be based on things like Greek 'pneuma').

In this visual novel, you play as a son of a cult leader who just assassinated him after he and his followers summoned a blood rain onto a city. You are planning on leaving, but encounter a variety of people in the meantime including police officers and a mysterious woman.

The game is set in Russia with several characters from France (and is written in Spanish), but the characters are decidedly non-human, with many characters having horns and one having a chest the size of a slightly smaller person.

There are no choices whatsoever in this story. The writing is loose, feeling natural and having a few typos here and there. The dialogue had a lot of common themes in writing for young adults, like feeling disaffected, wanting to distance oneself from parents, difficulty in being emotionally vulnerable, etc.

I thought it was a good story and the art was cool, especially the MC. I do enjoy more interactivity, but if I have to read a linear story, I'm glad that it was interesting.

As a non-native speaker, the text in this game felt descriptive and compelling, though I don't know how it would feel to a native reader.

You are called at 3:17 am to the scene of a murder. You have four or so different rooms you can walk through to examine things, but everything you examine gives you strange visions. Or are they memories?

There are a lot of options, but I ended up mainly 'lawnmowering' them (i.e. trying each one in order). I liked the surreal feel and the way the story ended, this surreal horror genre is definitely one of my favorites.

This Ink Spanish game has you as a character in a dark nightmare world with strange people and things. You mostly move backwards and forwards on a branching path, with different paths giving you different items or having you meet characters who ask for different things.

The dreamlike characters are interesting, like a fisherman with spiderwebs between his eyelids.

Many of the people represent facets of yourself in the nightmare world, and you have to confront things like insecurities about your appearance.

There's a lot of different branching. For instance, I was able to complete the game without finding food for a starving giant.

The game is polished, with slow text that's just fast enough not to be super annoying, and some flashing lights and sound effects.

Death at the Rectory

Felicity Banks and I got into interactive fiction at roughly the same time in 2015, when we both entered IFComp (though we had both done a little IF earlier in the year). I associate her with Australia, Steampunk or 'magic in modern setting', and including muslim and queer characters.

This is a short game with some significant branches, so a playthrough was pretty quick for me. It's a classic murder mystery with a group of people who meet up together at a kind of bed and breakfast for a writer's retreat.

While there, a murder happens (of course!) but also, all participants gain powers based on the genre of story they are writing. I was a crime writer, so I had the power to tell if people were writing.

The mystery was interesting, and my initial guess was wrong, but I pulled through in the end and had a successful ending.

The stats were a bit opaque for my tastes, though, not being easily telegraphed. I felt like I was mostly making roleplay choices, and then suddenly I'd get things like 'try to have an insight' but I'd fail because I hadn't raised a stat for that. I'm sure it would go much smoother on a replay now that I know what to look out for.

Overall, a fine addition to the Banks cannon, and a very quick play.

I liked this better than the first game, though it did something I see a lot in sequels and which sometimes I love and sometimes I don't:

It presents the gameworld as a real living place and lets you inhabit it with the people.

The plot arc isn't as dramatic as the first game since we aren't being introduced to new things and concepts. There are challenges, but they largely mirror the first game. Instead, I felt the focus was more on just existing, on piling up consequences from earlier decisions, on digging deeper into mysteries, on finding resolution.

I feel like Wayhaven and Soulstone War have both done this in some episodes. Samurai of Hyuga doesn't do it quite as much, since that usually introduces some really compelling plot point each chapter that you are anxious to have resolved.

In any case, on to other parts. I was romancing Astrid, and I had tons of time to spend with her, lots of opportunities to interact, and she was important in a lot of scenes. I don't know how much other ROs are included, but this one had a lot of depth.

I also saw just how big replayability was in the series, as I used a premade character instead of importing one from the first game (I swear I didn't see an option to import, but I probably didn't look hard enough). In my first game I was an ice elemental with two human parents. In the second game I was a human magician with one human mother and one estranged supernatural father. It felt very different, including in combat and classes.

There were some twists and turns in this story, and while I predicted most it didn't feel cheap or bad in the reveals. The writing felt substantially stronger, or perhaps I had grown accustomed to it after the first game.

I would definitely purchase/play the third one, I think the series is fun and I'd like to see how it wraps up.