Reviews by MathBrush

Logic Land

This is a game played on an Atari emulator. I had a little fussiness with keypresses; sometimes I overshot the action I wanted (you hold arrow keys or press arrow keys and push space).

It's a game like the famous Chinese Room by Joey Jones and Melvin Rangasamy, full of logical paradoxes brought into 'real life'. You try to TAKE in most rooms, gaining random items, then you find the right item to USE in other rooms, like using OCCAM'S RAZOR on a COMPLICATED THING.

It's almost entirely surface-level philosophy, mostly riffing on the names and/or definitions of things without looking deeper, but it's charming and I enjoyed the setup to the very end. With the very limited constraints, there was less room for bugs, and I don't think I encountered any.

Everyone's Invited

This is a downloadable window executable that ends up having some different branching choices selectable by keyboard.

My first impression was, 'Wow, the art's really cool'. It felt like a real dreamcore/weirdcore style of art and music, very weird, glitchy, unsettling.

The story is about going to a party (after a brief surreal opening) where everyone is a kind-of person, a glitch in the universe, not really real. You wander around trying to find any shred of personality or reality. There are several endings, 2 of which are documented in the walkthrough (with a third described more generally).

It reminded me of p-zombies, which Magnus Archives covered in its 'Zombies' episode. The idea is that we can't tell if other people have inward existence or 'qualia' or whatever or if they're just really good imitations of humans. I don't know if that was the idea behind this game, but it fit well.

This game is a short downloadable window executable with music and sound and timed text, many things I typically dislike, but I liked this.

Skeletrom Crew on the Loose

This is a short anthology of skeleton stories, a cast of characters rising from the ground to have adventures. You pick a skeleton then get to see what it does.

Each one is brief, though I only played through two. The game includes goofy things like spelling Skeleton differently every time and it also goes for more serious moments, kind of like Nightvale/reboot Doctor Who type humor.

I thought it was fun. If it was an ectocomp entry it would probably do really well. It was cool to experience in this competition. I'd likely have played all the branches if I wasn't trying to knock out the last IFComp games I haven't reviewed before I go on a trip.

Alana's Dungeon

When my son was much younger, we made some fun interactive fiction games together, including a twine game about a haunted hotel and evil easter bunny that I think is now lost forever. We also started a bunch of simple Inform adventures, including one where you wander around a map and meet pirates. It was all pretty buggy and simple as he was just a little kid, but fun.

This game seems like a similar result of parent-child bonding. As a way for a family to spend time together, it is beautiful and sweet and will likely bring lots of good memories. As a game for people to play for fun, it falls short. Its mostly finding keys an unlocking things, but some of the things you have to unlock aren't mentioned, and some descriptions make no sense (like interacting with the cage after the orc dies).

So, I'll likely rate this as a low score, which doesn't mean that it was bad to make the game or that the authors did a bad job, but because I don't think that the score really matters in a game like this. Winning the competition would be nice but the excitement would just last for a short time, as kids change hobbies so often. But the memories will hopefully last a lifetime.

Escape the Wumpus

The original Hunt the Wumpus game had you chasing a creature across a dodecahedral map, with a complex web of rooms.

This game doesn't feature the wumpus itself until the very end, where it plays a very minor role in one room. It has a complex map, but I don't think it's a dodecahedron.

Instead, you mainly enter one room at a time and get a list of interesting items in the room (some of which have fun effects not necessary for progression) along with a list of rooms you can go to.

Several rooms have 'collectors' that want items which are found in other rooms, making a fetch quest of sorts. I got stuck on the last one (which is okay, it's okay to get stuck in games) because the room I needed to go to was one I had long avoided.

Overall, the game was interesting. It seems to be a custom engine, and if so it worked great. Like others mentioned, I didn't enjoy the frequent timed text but did enjoy that the author sped it up each time. The game had some connections and story about the Wumpus and the ecosystem; I think even more of that story and more characters or more details about the characters would be fun.

Dreamteller

This is a relatively short mostly-linear Twine game all on one screen (for the most part) with two types of links, those that provide more info and those that move the game along.

Before the ending, there were no choices I saw outside of one text box, where the answer had been printed immediately beforehand. The ending has some branches and a great feature to let you go back and try again.

The story is about a detective investigating a series of ritualistic deaths. The best part of the game is the vividness of the imagery regarding the murders, with red blankets in white, empty houses.

The game is interspersed with dreams, which I interpreted as lucid daydreams.

Overall, there is a lot of symbolism and an overarching answer to why this is all happening, with a couple of different branches for you to decide how you want to deal with the answers you find.

I think it could have been interesting to have a little bit more options in playing, a little more freedom. Storywise, sometimes in my foolish brain I had difficulty following along, and there seemed like there were a couple of plot threads that went nowhere or were discarded. Other than that, it was a worthwhile read and interesting.

This game reminded me of I Am Prey, a bit, since you have to avoid a monster (in this case, a boss) that is hunting you do systemetically.

But, this game is unique. You play as an office worker who would rather attend a pretty boring work party than finish a spreadsheet, but is forced to go into the office and find a work laptop to log into to finish it.

Gameplay involves a looping space of 16 rooms, some with a computer. You have to log in to a computer and work on the spreadsheet until it is done. Obstacles increase, though, including the creepy boss, power outage, computer malfunctions and annoying screensavers.

At first I felt like it didn't have a lot of coherence, but over time I began to enjoy its goofy humor.

Then I checked the walkthrough. It's amazing! Detailed pen and pencil drawings, handwritten notes, extra info, full code. It was so cool.

I finished the game, though I ran into trouble at one point trying to deal with a goat. Overall, implementation was smooth. I did have one little bug (I used UNDO and made a transcript of it to give the author).

Ultraviolent Unicorn Deathmatch of Destiny 4

This was a great compact easy-playing game with fun consequences.

It's a parser game but each keystroke automatically takes action. Many of those actions cause immediate destruction and death. You're a deathmatch violent unicorn at an office job, so its very easy to chainsaw a janitor in half or trample your boss to death.

You have a list of tasks that you can see with Q. Most are reasonable; I had to get help with 1 or 2. I think there might be a bug with the help system, as I asked for help in the cans room at one point and it said there was nothing to help with, but decompiling I saw some can hints.

The writing is funny. The office space isn't super well-described but that's part of the joke, that you're an intense violent mythical creature causing havoc while existing in a very spartan and mundane office environment (outside of a lone chupacabra).

Everything was coded well, there was a time period of learning a system and implementing it. I don't think I'll revisit it (felt like a complete one-time experience) but I'd definitely recommend it if I had friends who asked 'what's ifcomp?' and I wanted to show them something amusing.

The 9:00 AM Train

This is the third tzbits game I've played, and it's more fleshed out and well-implemented than the others.

This is a Dialog game with a nice grey background styling in the online version. It's a fairly serious game, but the story doesn't get unveiled until later on. It includes some branching dialogue and some timed scenes.

The idea is that you need to get onto the 9:00 am train out of the area, and you haven't picked up your ticket yet. Trying to grab it, you find the service counters empty.

As another reviewer pointed out, the game is very constrained. While most actions you can try are implemented, they are implemented to express helplessness or frustration. Some games have tried that before and only ended up frustrating the player as well. This game keeps things moving though, making it fairly easy to keep going.

There's an option to add German or Italian into the game. I added German for practice, since I'm teaching it for the first time this semester. It was added in some key moments, but the game also used rot13 to express some soldier dialogue that is meant to be unintelligible.

I think the story here is much more effective than tzbits' earlier games, with some understated moments and some overt explanations. I wonder if it could be pushed even further; while I can't put my finger on it, some parts felt like there could have been more story or emotion or description, especially early on, more individual characterization. But I only say that because I like what is already there.

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.